cstross

76 ms·

601.
by cstross 11y ago
There's a translation into Polari: http://www.josephrichardson.tv/polari-bible.html (Implications guaranteed to set a few Church-men's heads exploding.)
602.
by cstross 11y ago
Nope. The real answer is, the NSA is all about communications -- which isn't just electronics: it includes a huge element of linguistics. The Bible angle: when a new tribe or culture is contacted, the very first thing that happens is
603.
by cstross 11y ago
(a) It's from their museum facility (if you ever get the chance to visit the National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland TAKE IT TAKE IT TAKE IT )[1], not the NSA itself. (b) It's a scan of a 30-year-old report on a completed project
604.
by cstross 11y ago
You didn't read the specs on the Sage Tea Maker; it has a motorized infusion basket and can be programmed for different infusion times, whether to immerse once or repeatedly dip, and different brew temperatures. Not just a "fancy
605.
by cstross 11y ago
Or you could just buy a Sage Tea Maker and keep it on your desk/in your kitchen (hint: I did, it works great): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sage-Heston-Blumenthal-Maker-Litre/d... (They're available in the USA but
606.
by cstross 11y ago
You're attributing a statement of causality to me that I never made; I merely said that plate tectonics would make an earth-like exoplanet more interesting -- for exactly the reason you note: it appears to be a prerequisite for an oxyg
607.
by cstross 11y ago
Google on "great oxygen catastrophe" and prepare for an eye-opening experience. (Note that neither Mars nor Venus have active plate tectonics. The surface of Venus melts every couple of hundred million years due to trapped heat, w
608.
by cstross 11y ago
I want answers to three questions before I get excited: 1. Does it have active plate tectonics? 2. Does it have a working deep carbon cycle? 3. Has its atmosphere hung on to its hydrogen (that is, has it managed not to lose it all to high-a
609.
by cstross 11y ago
The hackers' behaviour was utterly reckless. Demoing it on a test track with no other vehicles and a volunteer driver with helmet and roll cage -- that'd be acceptable, maybe, with suitable safeguards. But doing it on the open hig
610.
by cstross 11y ago
Shades of the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, the predecessor to the B-52. "Six turning, four burning" because it had six piston-powered pusher propellers and four jet engines in underwing pods for take-off boost and high speed bombing r
611.
by cstross 11y ago
And for a different but convergent take on the same approach to this problem space, here's the Pick Operating System, which evolved for business applications on minicomputers in the 1960s, along similar lines (global hash table databa
612.
IMF calls for total moratorium on Greek debt repayments(telegraph.co.uk)
2 points by cstross 11y ago|0 comments
613.
by cstross 11y ago
I'm a firm believer that the whole "Terrorism" illusion has been foisted in order to maintain control of increasingly uncontrollable populations (as information is a powerful weapon). Note the way voting patterns are trendi
614.
by cstross 11y ago
That excuse is marvellously surreal, in a "Yes, Minister" way. "We are going to spend an extra $25M on each fighter, in order to save on training costs." $3.5Bn (we're buying on the order of 138 of these turkeys: th
615.
by cstross 11y ago
The one EU nation that has to buy the F-35B is the UK. Because we're building a couple of supercarriers without catapults, so they've got to field STOVL planes, and the government scrapped the Harrier fleet (the USMC bought the
616.
by cstross 11y ago
Ahem: you can't falsify banknotes with regular printers and commodity paper well enough to fool an alert human being , but the scanners in some vending machines are another matter. With 7 colour 1200+ dpi inkjets readily available for
617.
by cstross 11y ago
For real lulz: print this pattern of small yellow dots on all your business correspondence with big companies, just to screw with their document management systems. Hours of endless fun for all the bureaucrats! (There's got to be a PDF
618.
by cstross 11y ago
The safety of airliners comes at a cost -- operating expenses (a lot of which is for maintenance) running so high that they're uneconomical except for bulk/public transport or the hyper-rich. Private flying cars they aren't.
619.
by cstross 11y ago
Actually, the carnage caused by primate-driven cars exceeds that of the machine gun; we lose around 2 million dead or seriously injured every year, a death rate rivalling that of the first world war, on an ongoing basis . (Self-driving car
620.
by cstross 11y ago
The whole "drones will be used to deliver everything" shtick that's coming out of the USA really does not resonate in the UK or Europe, where most folks live in extremely dense (by American standards) cities -- US suburbia
621.
From the hemline index to the vampire/zombie ratio: SF/F trends by the numbers(antipope.org)
4 points by cstross 11y ago|0 comments
622.
How to lose a customer: a worked example(np.reddit.com)
3 points by cstross 11y ago|1 comments
623.
by cstross 11y ago
> The only things they have in common are that their main products are websites with tertiary features that let you buy things. Yet both of them ended up scrambling to write their own payment platforms from scratch. What the fuck is goin
624.
Life with the new Macbook, and some musing about security(antipope.org)
2 points by cstross 11y ago|0 comments
625.
The Evil Business Plan of Evil (and Misery for All)(antipope.org)
2 points by cstross 11y ago|0 comments
626.
The Scottish Political Singularity, Act Two(antipope.org)
11 points by cstross 12y ago|1 comments
627.
by cstross 12y ago
The point is, the penalties weren't effective -- if effectiveness of a criminal justice system is evaluated in terms of crime prevention. We're talking about an age where there were no police organizations as we currently unders
628.
by cstross 12y ago
Actually, the TGV record was set by a specially-rebuilt train set that was heavily customized -- and the test crew reportedly couldn't stand/walk around the instrument car at speeds over 500km/h due to vibration. (The track
629.
by cstross 12y ago
There are places where solar is less than helpful -- up here in Scotland, we're north of Moscow: in midwinter we get as little as 4.5 hours of daylight every 24 hours (6 hours here in Edinburgh, in the south). Also, we tend to live in
630.
by cstross 12y ago
Business reality, alas. The book biz isn't as bad as movies, which are made or broken by their first 48 hours of box office receipts, but 80% of sales still occur within 3 months of publication (in hardcover, with a similar bounce when

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