cstross

40 ms·

361.
by cstross 9y ago
Trickle-down theory is accurate! It's just not necessarily money that's raining down on our heads. Less snarkily: Piketty observes that reinvested capital accumulates at a faster rate than labour. Also, we have no global taxation
362.
by cstross 9y ago
However, an interesting aspect of floating habitats in the Venusian stratosphere is that a terrestrial breathable gas mix (80% N2 / 18% O2 / 2% trace others) is a lifting gas that's about as effective as Helium here on Earth.
363.
by cstross 9y ago
In the UK, the police and prosecutors tend to take a common-sense approach: the "rebel tech savvy teen" would be the one who ended up prosecuted for possession. (Similarly: possession of an unlicensed gun carries a stiff prison se
364.
by cstross 9y ago
In the UK (and, I believe, the USA) child pornography is a "strict liability" issue — intent is irrelevant, mere possession is itself illegal. This is how teens get nailed for receiving unasked-for sexts from their under-age-of-co
365.
by cstross 9y ago
I'd like to see a long-term outcomes-based comparison between NHS England and the Scottish NHS, frankly. The Scottish NHS is a fully devolved issue and has been diverging from the English system for most of a decade now, with a greater
366.
by cstross 9y ago
A chunk of the poor cancer survival is down to cultural issues — British men in particular being socialized to not complain, so they don't go to their primary point of care until it's too late to do anything beyond palliative care
367.
by cstross 9y ago
> If the new approaches work, phage therapy could eventually become a mainstream option for treating bacterial infections. Phages were the mainstream option for treating serious antibiotic infections in the USSR prior to 1990, but this
368.
by cstross 9y ago
I'm pretty sure we are now just a couple of marketing cycles away from a version of this being re-packaged and sold to police departments around the world as a tool for identifying suspects in a cloud database of DNA sequences belongin
369.
by cstross 9y ago
This is a discussion of backup/restore using APFS snapshots on macOS (Sierra and High Sierra). You appear to be talking about iOS. Not. The. Same. OS.
370.
by cstross 9y ago
To underline this, here's what happens when something goes wrong with an ejector seat: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-37475298 We probably won't ever know how many people died as a direct r
371.
Dude, you broke the future(antipope.org)
267 points by cstross 9y ago|63 comments
372.
by cstross 9y ago
The GPD Pocket is, indeed, very nice. However, it's much larger and heavier than the Gemini. The Gemini has two obvious advantages over the GPD Pocket. One is LTE; the other is its small size. Size restrictions were imposed on electron
373.
by cstross 9y ago
I paid $369 for a wifi/LTE early bird special on the Indiegogo campaign site. It's still available for $400 plus shipping; I don't know where you're seeing $600, but that sounds like a scalper price from a retailer claim
374.
by cstross 9y ago
One thought: Back in 1997-2000, the Psion 5 was anything but niche; it was the leading paradigm for PDAs aside from the Newton/Palm tablet. (It died out due to a bad coincidence: Microsoft pre-announced the Windows CE 3 "Jupiter&q
375.
Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5(jmcomms.com)
188 points by cstross 9y ago|69 comments
376.
by cstross 9y ago
Hark back to 1973 when Concorde production began and they had around 120 advance orders/options. Most of which evaporated because of not only the oil shock but, significantly, the discovery that the Boeing 747 (and other wide-bodies) c
377.
by cstross 9y ago
I went in exactly the opposite direction back in 1989, aged 24: had initially studied for a degree in, then qualified as, a pharmacist, and practiced for a couple of years. Found it really wasn't for me, so went back to university and
378.
by cstross 9y ago
My server (where this guest article is hosted) is fielding some 20 HTTP GET requests/second and is holding up fine (load avg. is still under 1.0). I'm guessing there may be some routing problems — antipope.org is hosted in the UK.
379.
by cstross 9y ago
Just guessing here, but watch for a significant date: July 16th, 2019. That's the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. It's also 6-12 months on from the projected date of Musk's translunar tourist trip on a Falcon Hea
380.
by cstross 9y ago
I'd have two big reservations about this. 1. The Virginia class was first commissioned in 2004, with a 33 year design life. The XBox 360 was first shown in public in 2005, with a design life of ...? Yup, it's consumer electronics,
381.
by cstross 9y ago
Ahem: the V-bombers were all subsonic (at least in service — the prototype Handley-Page Victor went supersonic on at least one occasion and was controllable in transsonic flight; the production Victors had various external extras bolted on
382.
by cstross 9y ago
Wow, the old-time KGB would have loved this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) (A passive resonant bug presented in a gift to the US Embassy in Moscow in 1945, designed by Léon Theremin, ance
383.
by cstross 9y ago
This is regional slang rather than dialect, but in the UK — specifically England, mostly northern England — "the filth" means "the police" (collective noun — you wouldn't refer to an individual cop as a filth). I&
384.
by cstross 9y ago
> I hope the iMac pro is just that, a pro version of the iMac, and that a new Mac Pro comes out as well. That's exactly the roadmap that was announced at the last Apple WWDC: Pro version of the iMac around the end of this year, to b
385.
by cstross 9y ago
If you're drinking hot coffee, then by definition the water has been heated to at least 85 degrees celsius, if not boiled.
386.
by cstross 9y ago
His mention of Scrivener in the intro was so brief that I have difficulty believing he even read the interactive tutorial, much less wrote one or more books using it. (I've written and published about a dozen novels using Scrivener, vi
387.
by cstross 9y ago
(Wearing my jobbing-novelist hat here ...) He kinda lost me at the idea of navigating a WIP using page thumbnails on the left. (a) That's so 1988 (Clive Sinclair, I'm thinking of you and your Pipedream here), and (b) the page is
388.
by cstross 9y ago
If you want an effective means to disinfect a sponge, it's not unreasonable to turn to the standard for sterilizing intravenous infusion fluids (pharmaceutical grade sterilization) back in the 1980s. That was designed to reduce a bac
389.
by cstross 9y ago
That's not exactly correct; the real issue with Baumol's Cost Disease isn't that it leads to wages in "traditionally lower-wage industries" — it's that wage competition leads to wage increases in sectors that d
390.
by cstross 9y ago
The real problem isn't whether filename normalization is a good/bad thing, the problem is Apple used to do it one way and is now switching without warning to doing it the other way . It's the logical end product of the odyss

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