KineticLensman

10 ms·

91.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
Yes. Asimov’s three laws of robotics also look credible but still allow a mass of loopholes and footguns from which he got dozens of stories.
92.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
But if you are working on enablers (comms, logistics, sensors, trainers, etc, etc) you are still supporting the overall kill chain.
93.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
The True Names I remember was by Vernor Vinge [0]. Cory Doctorow riffed on it in 2008. But not Rudy R, as far as I know. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
94.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
> If Bilbo could jump over Gollum with a three-foot leap, Gollum cannot be a giant. Agree (although Gollum was crouched down) > I strongly suspect was largely as written, however, and even without the explicit numbers, if Bilbo jumps
95.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
> the author actually reworded future editions of the book to make it clear that Gollum is a small creature The primary retconning occurred in 1951, when the encounter in The Hobbit between Bilbo and Gollum was rewritten to be confront
96.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
There are very few descriptions of trolls in TLOTR. The troll that the Fellowship encounter in Moria has "a huge arm ... with a dark skin of greenish scales [and] a great, flat toeless foot". The mountain trolls who are intended t
97.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
That’s essentially the difference between education and training
98.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
Rainfall in the UK isn't evenly distributed. The North and West gets much more rain, partly because they are closer to the Atlantic, and also because central hills (e.g. the Pennines) create rain shadows to their east. We also don&#x27
99.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
One of my favourites was 'rouge elephant'.
100.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
I don't remember any particular negative reaction to spell-checkers like the 'calculator panic'. Perhaps partly because most schoolkids then wouldn't have been using word processors as their main writing tool at school a
101.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
> ...they skipped my funeral ... I would seriously question ... This isn't how death works
102.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
Yes, exactly. Why not mine a few asteroids, deploy comms and mapping sats, etc. Building a ground civ from scratch would be hard enough for anyone, let alone a space-adapted population who have spent generations being coddled by AI, and who
103.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
Looking at view #28 in the winning presentation, the system carries 200 shuttles that can each do a one-way trip to the target planet carrying 10 people and delivering 5 tons of cargo. So the overall system can deliver up to 2000 people and
104.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
Can confirm. Installed uBlock onto an 18.5 device, got the 'not supported' message. Upgraded to 18.6 and now it works.
105.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
The Open University in the UK (which has been running for decades) doesn’t have any entry requirements for the first year of its undergrad courses and the early modules definitely include a focus on getting people up to speed on academic wr
106.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
"All shall love me and despair"
107.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
Tolkien himself never really approved of the ‘cinematograph’ as a way of telling stories so I imagine he would really not like this
108.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
Elements of the UK media fulfil this role, continually advancing a corrosive narrative that the country is broken. E.g. frequently using the words ‘lawless’ or ‘tinderbox’ in any headline or op-ed title that also contains the word ‘Britain’
109.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
> Doing so worked for Henry VIII Apart from his painful, smelly leg ulcers that he had to tolerate for years
110.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
> Interesting that he didn't feel gradual increase of pull force while he was approaching the MRI machine. There isn't a gradual increase in pull when magnets are involved. My wife used to work for a company whose product invol
111.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
And if you live on a UK housing estate or business park whose road names include 'Comet', 'Lysander', 'Mosquito', etc, etc, it was probably a WW2 airfield that was re-developed. E.g. Where I had my first job h
112.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
Can confirm that 'cromulent' is in the Oxford English Dictionary [0] ... >> Acceptable, adequate, satisfactory. >> Frequently used humorously or ironically in recognition of its origin as an invented word in the televi
113.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
> I think this comment mistakes “understanding the plot” as the main goal of reading Exactly. Understanding the plot is a level-1 read through. Identifying the effects achieved by the author is a subsequent level, and then exploring how
114.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
arguably it makes what would otherwise be a very little letter stand out more in text
115.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
Clarke's original prediction, in a 1945 letter to Wireless World, is as follows: >> An "artificial satellite" at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain statio
116.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
Another definition that almost works is the distinction between Not-Yet-Possible and Never-Possible - although this may fail when things like Faster-Than-Light drives are considered.
117.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
> Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LoTR for about a decade This actually understates the effort Tolkien put in. He'd started the world-building that led to LoTR approx 35 years before the publication of the first vol
118.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
> In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were basically what your family member could "get you in" (UK here). My first job in 1987 was in computing for an engineering company and my father had exactly zero inf
119.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
Totally agree. "Stand on Zanzibar" has a modern-world feel to it although some parts have been visited by the Suck Fairy. "Shockwave Rider" is also interesting - IIRC characters use their landline phones to access large
120.
by KineticLensman 1y ago
> The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC Punk music was not in fact banned by the BBC. They sometimes refused to play the more outrageous tracks that had charted but a massive number got through. The son

More ›