cstross

74 ms·

691.
by cstross 12y ago
Insufficient time to post a length comment, but: While the Stratfor analyst has a point, I think they're failing to see the wood for the trees: speaking as a resident in Scotland, the force driving the pro-independence side in the refe
692.
by cstross 12y ago
There are allegations (admittedly partisan) that the British government's Foreign Office (which answers to the governing coalition, who are strongly opposed to Scottish independence) have been campaigning for the past year to get forei
693.
by cstross 12y ago
Y2K wasn't hype: if we hadn't done the work, the outcome would have been moderately gruesome. (Not world-ending-apocalyptic gruesome, but not-getting-paid-for-a-month-and-the-stock-market-crashed gruesome.) Indeed, it was largely
694.
by cstross 12y ago
There's no way to sort out misdeeds, eg, fake cures from real attempts if we lift the normal trial and liability procedures. No one would use untrialed drugs if they had to take the full liability. I'm ready to assume that medic
695.
by cstross 12y ago
There are pros and cons for both sides of this argument. The question is whether to suspend normal precautionary procedures during an extraordinary situation, not whether to ditch normal precautionary procedures which exist for very good
696.
by cstross 12y ago
The Germans were really keen on aerodynamics for surface vehicles in the 30s; trains too! Here's some video footage of the Schienenzeppelin (propeller-driven diesel train) during it's preliminary 1930 test runs: https:/&#x
697.
by cstross 12y ago
If it's from Afghanistan, there's no ocean there to drop it in. And they don't want to leave it for bad actors (as witness ISIS allegedly using captured ex-US artillery pieces).
698.
by cstross 12y ago
For possibly a better overview than Wikipedia, here's the Encyclopedia Astronautica entry on the Polyus program: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htm
699.
by cstross 12y ago
Apple's Newton OS used object-oriented data stores called "soups" rather than a file-oriented storage paradigm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_%28platform%29#Operating...
700.
by cstross 12y ago
We've already got that something (the EU). It's relatively benign. (Meanwhile, we've got an extra tier of government that insists on spending tax revenue raised in Scotland on stuff the Scottish people really don't want.
701.
On the Scottish independence referendum and the post-Westphalian settlement(antipope.org)
56 points by cstross 12y ago|95 comments
702.
by cstross 12y ago
See also the Junkers Jumo 2014: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Jumo_204 And its descendant, the Napier Deltic engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Deltic And in particular, the animat
703.
by cstross 12y ago
Please note that the Concorde requirement was set circa 1958-60, and the plane first flew in 1969; airlines were placing orders in the early 1970s. Back in those days, airline security was a lot more relaxed: despite numerous hijackings nob
704.
by cstross 12y ago
I will note that reducing the voting age to 16 in general elections is probably on the cards for the UK as a whole after the next general election: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21178379
705.
by cstross 12y ago
Other things about Three: * The monthly contracts (and higher value pay-as-you-go top-ups) come with "Feel at Home" roaming -- in about 12 countries worldwide you can use your inclusive minutes, texts and data with no internationa
706.
by cstross 12y ago
Mobile phones as we know them today didn't exist when Gibson was writing Neuromancer. Pub date in 1984 means the MS was handed in in mid-1983 and he was writing it 1981-82 (on a manual typewriter: the royalties from Neuromancer bough
707.
by cstross 12y ago
I'm not convinced that they are still the same species; can one assert that we have, through artificial selection, induced speciation? One word: "dogs". (Are you skeptical that chihuahuas and huskies are the same species? S
708.
by cstross 12y ago
If you fire the thing up an the satellite's orbit changes, that's kind of a hard measurement to screw up. Caution: a re-reading of the Pioneer Anomaly is in order before you start assuming things in microgravity move because of
709.
by cstross 12y ago
Ebooks, once created, are a sunk cost...not an ongoing one so maximizing gross revenue works in everyone's favor. What you're missing is that, from the author's point of view, ebooks are not interchangeable. A unit of my sa
710.
by cstross 12y ago
My take: the zero-sum game is not solely about people having a fixed entertainment budget in purely financial terms -- incomes go up and down and it depends in the aggregate on the economic cycle. Rather, people have a fixed entertainment
711.
by cstross 12y ago
John Scalzi's response to this piece of self-serving agitprop is worth reading in full: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/07/30/amazons-latest-volley/ (Shorter Scalzi: Amazon are presenting as "g
712.
by cstross 12y ago
It's utterly insane ! A 30cm sphere has a volume of around 1.1 x 10^5 cm^3. Cobalt's density is about 8.9g/cm^3, so we're looking at roughly 10^6 grams of 60Co, or about a ton of the stuff. 60Co puts out 1100 Curies o
713.
by cstross 12y ago
A point that bears repeating is that this level of overkill was actually counterproductive . One way of disabling a high efficiency nuclear device is to blast the thing with neutrons (causing a premature and incomplete fission reaction in
714.
by cstross 12y ago
Entry level price for an e-ink device in the UK is now down to £35, i.e. US $55-60, of which 20% is VAT (tax); in the USA it's down to under $50 (in some cases $35 with a mail-in rebate). Furthermore, this is the retail price for the r
715.
by cstross 12y ago
A disadvantage I can see is that there must be a MASS production of e-ink displays... Cost of goods will cripple this scheme, because you seem to have implicitly assumed that the price you pay for a book in a shop is on the same order a
716.
by cstross 12y ago
I believe they can be just as productive in a different capacity. 1. [Cynically] the unemployed are productive, as a discipline/threat to the employed -- "do as we tell you or you will end up unemployed" [with long list o
717.
by cstross 12y ago
Same goes for vernacular Scots, where the F-word isn't far off being verbal punctuation, roughly equivalent to "eh" in Canadian English.
718.
by cstross 12y ago
One thing the article doesn't mention is that the Savannah was designed for an earlier age -- like the Bristol Brabazon, a large piston-powered airliner that arrived just in time for the jet age, the Savannah was a traditional break
719.
by cstross 12y ago
Or The granularity of the simulation of our reality is the Planck length. This constraint does not apply to the real, underlying, reality within which our simulation is embedded.
720.
by cstross 12y ago
Viral pandemics do not respect your personal boundaries: your "right to be an idiot" over vaccination may not be intended to result in deaths, but that's what will happen if we indulge such beliefs until herd immunity is lo

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