cstross

63 ms·

571.
What will robocars actually be like?(singularityhub.com)
3 points by cstross 11y ago|1 comments
572.
by cstross 11y ago
INTERCAL finally weeps for joy at being able to claim Perl 6 as a spiritual descendant.
573.
by cstross 11y ago
Oh boy, this is going to kneecap CIA HUMINT ops overseas for many years to come. Consider: you can't repudiate your fingerprints. So all the Chinese or Russian authorities need to do is to look for these fingerprints on folks entering
574.
by cstross 11y ago
Supersonic commercial passenger travel is almost certainly dead for the foreseeable future. (Small supersonic bizjets are another issue entirely.) Here's why: To start with, Concorde was a high-maintenance airframe, more like a militar
575.
by cstross 11y ago
BTDT (I wrote a monthly magazine column for more than half a decade; I write for a living). There are other ways to earn a crust with the pen than through advertising. The real headache with paywalls is that buying access is a pain in the a
576.
by cstross 11y ago
Alternatively: I am seeing a lot of angry articles by journalists who see adblockers as an existential threat to them, and Marco also developed Instapaper. He's almost certainly already getting hate mail from content sites who don&#x
577.
by cstross 11y ago
Concorde had to stop for ground refuelling something like 4 times on the London-Sydney trip. Each time it took about an hour and a half to come down from cruising altitude and land, slurp up a hundred tons of jet fuel, and take off again. S
578.
by cstross 11y ago
Last time I flew trans-Atlantic -- last month -- in-flight wifi with mid-ocean coverage was available for $30. And we've got Facebook, SpaceX, et al promising us all clusters of satellites delivering broadband everywhere on the plane
579.
by cstross 11y ago
Please explain how you would design a thorium reactor to produce 238Pu suitable for use in RTGs. Please explain how you would build a shiny new thorium reactor with 238Pu production capability on a budget competitive with the existing DoE 2
580.
by cstross 11y ago
Hard call: I'd have to say it all depends on the author's intent. Let's see ... at the time he wrote "Neuromancer" William Gibson had never used a computer -- he wrote it on a manual typewriter (and used the royalti
581.
by cstross 11y ago
Planet Earth calling: science fiction is not a predictive medium . It's a literary form -- a subcategory of fiction. Yes, some works of SF are set in a plausibly-imagined future. Yes, some of these works may make projections/extr
582.
by cstross 11y ago
Ah yes: the Monroe Doctrine which was, in effect, the unilateral declaration of a USAn hemispheric imperial hegemony -- that is, that the USA would respond as an imperial power to attempts by rival imperial powers to encroach on "its&q
583.
by cstross 11y ago
* Looks at royalty statements * Nope, not seeing it. (Seriously. You're telling my the sky in my work is green with pink polka-dots. Hint: I do this for a living. Yes, some self-pub authors make out like bandits. But you might want to
584.
by cstross 11y ago
Do you know what happens to the money that would be spent on printing when an ebook is sold? The cost of printing is a very small component of the cover price of a book; for paperbacks you're talking around $0.5, and for hardbacks ar
585.
by cstross 11y ago
Back at the point in time when Apple and the big six were talking about agency model pricing -- which the DoJ brought the price-fixing case over -- Amazon's penetration was around 90%. (I'm of the opinion that the DoJ case is ther
586.
by cstross 11y ago
Several such craft exist at the bigger end of the regional jet market. There's the Sukhoi Superjet 100, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Superjet_100 or the Embraer 190/195. These are both po
587.
by cstross 11y ago
It sure looks that way.
588.
by cstross 11y ago
On the contrary, I’m on my early forties and my physical condition is way better than it was twenty years ago. It's a crap shoot. I got hit by metabolic syndrome -- extreme hypertension and type II diabetes. I exercise, I weigh less
589.
by cstross 11y ago
I hit 51 next month, and that's ... well. These decadal anniversaries seem to get more onerous each time. 20? No problem, it just means you're not a teenager any more! 30? Okay, you're officially a grownup, but you can still
590.
by cstross 11y ago
A key command is missing: textutil. textutil is a general purpose front end to the core text engine and is one of the cleanest docx-to-html converters I've run across, with a bunch of file formats supported and charset encoding transla
591.
by cstross 11y ago
Hey, I just remembered, I've got two of the original Cybikos, bought new (while being sold off at a ridiculously low price -- about £10 each), sitting in my junk room! Never opened, still in the original packaging. Hmm, decisions. Do I
592.
Y2K was not a hoax(danielbowen.com)
2 points by cstross 11y ago|0 comments
593.
by cstross 11y ago
On a similar note, see also Doggerland (the large, submerged peninsula off the north-west coast of Europe, of which the British Isles are the only surviving above-surface relics today): http://education.nationalgeographic.com&#x2
594.
by cstross 11y ago
Does DropShop handle VAT accounting under the new EU tax regimen for cross-border sales? Because if not, this isn't really going to play well with small-scale producers in the EU: http://euvataction.org/tag/vatmess
595.
by cstross 11y ago
A secondary effect: ad blockers not only improve the web experience for users (making everything load faster, by blocking unwanted spurious crap), ad blockers are good for the cellcos as long as net neutrality holds true . Absent net-neut
596.
by cstross 11y ago
What you're describing isn't a typewriter, it's a daisywheel printer with a computer keyboard bolted on front. I learned to type on a manual typewriter in the 1970s. Unless you had somewhere north of $1000 for an IBM Selectri
597.
by cstross 11y ago
I think the modern centralization tendency is a bad thing. If I was going to redesign usenet today ...? 1. You want non-repudiability in transactions: a given user owns their posts or cancel messages and can be linked to them. So, use a blo
598.
by cstross 11y ago
Old usenet-head here (on it regularly from 1991, first met it 1986) ... First problem: there's no identity authentication mechanism in NNTP. So spam is a problem, forged moderation headers are a problem, general abuse is a problem. (A
599.
by cstross 11y ago
Niven and Egan would be classic examples from different decades (Niven's post-1977 work, and his collaborations, not so much). I'd also point to Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief trilogy, Peter Watts (for world-building -- se
600.
by cstross 11y ago
Someone has stumbled over strict plot-driven hard SF in the classical mold and decided it's something new. Not to belittle Eliezer (who I think did something new and interesting) but you can find a large chunk of these elements out the

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