cstross

80 ms·

661.
by cstross 12y ago
This is really screwing with the independent publishing sector in the UK right now: go on twitter and look for #VATMOSS. The TL:DR version is that ebooks are VATable and if you sell direct to customers the VAT regs mean that just one eb
662.
New EU VAT rules threaten to destroy e-commerce micro-firms(telegraph.co.uk)
5 points by cstross 12y ago|0 comments
663.
by cstross 12y ago
The worst threats aren't deliberate attacks: when you get thousands of people living somewhere, there will be screw-ups, misunderstandings, and just plain reckless behaviour. We're used to living in a (relatively) fault-tolerant e
664.
by cstross 12y ago
Also: older and more cynical this decade. (Although I have a soft spot for Elon Musk's projects: both Tesla and SpaceX seem poised to go the distance, and they're both potentially huge game-changers in their respective fields.)
665.
Let's put the future behind us(antipope.org)
214 points by cstross 12y ago|63 comments
666.
by cstross 12y ago
I never lived more than ten miles away from a strategic target (in the UK -- which was going to be toast in that "limited tactical exchange") until the end of the cold war, in my mid-twenties. Memories of that existential state ma
667.
by cstross 12y ago
Or you might be doing it for religious reasons: https://www.lds.org/topics/food-storage?lang=eng (Devout Mormons are supposed to maintain a stockpile of food. I suspect Costco get much of their custom for this prepared
668.
by cstross 12y ago
Young folks today just don't believe how downright surreal (and scary) the cold war was to live through. Look, just read this wikipedia entry about the British Blue Peacock nuclear device, and boggle: http://en.wikipedia.org
669.
by cstross 12y ago
"A social structure outside of the free-market" describes, by some estimates, over 75% of all human interactions. Non-market interactions are invisible to conventional economics because they're not priced, but they're by
670.
by cstross 12y ago
The show-stoppers are "... promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones". Suppose I use Google Drive to store my current project, a big-ass novel that's going to see simultaneous publication by major publishe
671.
by cstross 12y ago
Last time I looked at the Google Drive terms of service -- which was admittedly years ago (I ought to check again) -- they were basically unacceptable for me because Google were demanding a perpetual non-exclusive copyright license to eve
672.
by cstross 12y ago
I completely agree with you on the spamming point. But disagree on the intelligence side ... Bacterial colonization is a useful argument for interrogating the "we must colonize spaaaace!" folks' intentions. I mean, why exac
673.
by cstross 12y ago
Actually, it could happen with chemical rockets -- if we abandon the idea of sending canned monkeys beyond the atmosphere. We can afford to send up a couple of hundred tons of prokaryotic spores every year until the cows come home, with s
674.
by cstross 12y ago
... Also, there was Neil Armstrong's ejection from the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle in 1966: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle (And I see another test pilot, Joe Algranti, also had a ve
675.
by cstross 12y ago
Because positive reinforcement does work on cats -- the problem is, finding the positive behavioural pattern to reinforce! Positive and negative reinforcement patterns are not opposites, they're entirely separate processes. (Cat owne
676.
by cstross 12y ago
In the UK this looks like a clear criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act -- currently carries a maximum 10 year prison sentence.
677.
by cstross 12y ago
The problem is, there doesn't seem to be much elasticity in the size of the market. Books are rivalrous goods: an hour spent reading book A is an hour you can't spend reading book B, or watching a movie. And a lot of people prefer
678.
by cstross 12y ago
Point of information: back before I got the opportunity to write novels for a living, it took me 3-4 years to write one on a part-time/hobbyist/learning-the-art basis. That's because I had a day job, which came first. As some
679.
by cstross 12y ago
You might (or might not) be surprised to learn that I agree. Reason: Accelerando is really a fix-up of nine novelettes, previously published separately in Asimov's SF Magazine. So it is, to say the least, episodic ...
680.
by cstross 12y ago
The Anglophone trade fiction industry has serious structural issues when it comes to publishing translated works from other languages. Firstly, a lot of readers (and store book buyers) have a "not invented here" problem with forei
681.
by cstross 12y ago
No, some chemical reactions fail early and loudly. For absolutely no explosive lulz at all you could try for an exciting career in organic mercury compounds. (But first, I'd recommend checking out the wikipedia entry for Karen Wett
682.
by cstross 12y ago
Winnipeg has central Canadian weather, going down to -40 celsius wind chill. Brr. Skyways and subway walks are about the only way to go for pedestrian access in a city where the climate for half the year threatens hypothermia within ten min
683.
Douglas Model 671/684: The X-15’s Shadow (2012)(falsesteps.wordpress.com)
12 points by cstross 12y ago|2 comments
684.
by cstross 12y ago
It's not that Perl would be more popular and used if only the version number changed -- it's that the not-obviously-iterating version number fools people who don't look closely at it into thinking the language is moribund. (T
685.
by cstross 12y ago
I believe there is just one obstacle to doing that: Larry. (Perl isn't the product of a corporate culture: it's a labour of love. Unfortunately this can result in some quirky ego-related side effects.)
686.
by cstross 12y ago
A point for non-Perl folks looking at this on HN: While the use of a minor version number might suggest to you that Perl 5.20 is just a bugfix/update from Perl 5.6, that's very much not the case -- in most other language cultures
687.
by cstross 12y ago
moaning about Facebook's attitude to privacy for years and it's not stopped their growth Has it? I rather thought their growth curve had peaked and in some countries FB usage is falling. In particular, at least here in the UK, k
688.
by cstross 12y ago
Their best recruiting sergeant right now is Facebook. (And, to a much lesser extent, G+.) FB's use of social engineering to induce personal disclosure, and their abuse of personal content for marketing, has sensitized a proportion of t
689.
by cstross 12y ago
Somewhere in my apartment there is the user manual for an Apple LaserWriter NT from 1992. The preamble to the printer manual (yes, printers came with 300 page printed paperback manuals in those days!) included instructions such as "do
690.
by cstross 12y ago
It has been pre-announced but not yet released. Ditto SwiftKey (although they announced a hard release date: tomorrow). EDIT: I spoke too soon: Swype for iOS 8 is out now: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/swype-keyb

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