cstross

88 ms·

781.
by cstross 13y ago
Minor nit wrt. the first paragraph: the UK's mandatory "family-friendly filters" only apply to consumer internet accounts. It's possible to get a BT Infinity business account without any company letterhead or ID -- it ju
782.
by cstross 13y ago
The 90s deal, per Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/03/01/steve-job... "I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Appl
783.
by cstross 13y ago
Optimum != Maximum NB: 36,000 feet in 3 minutes is 12,000 feet/min. Max climb rate for the Lightning was 50,000 feet/min, but it got there by basically pumping fuel into the afterburners with a fire hose. (The Lightning had tw
784.
by cstross 13y ago
Besides the MiG-31 and the JAS-37 Viggen, there are persistent stories about the gun camera footage from a Royal Air Force English Electric Lightning that bounced the SR-71 that set the trans-Atlantic speed record on its way into the Farnbo
785.
by cstross 13y ago
Would it have hurt too much to have linked to a real civil aviation news site like the Aviation Herald for your running realtime summary of developments, rather than a generic mass media news site run by non-specialists? (It's about
786.
by cstross 13y ago
A secondary issue for the UK is that we're densely populated and our housing stock is, on average, 75 years old. Lots of dwellings predate the automobile and/or lack a garage or a garden (US: yard) on which to build one. Consequen
787.
Dear Google, am I pregnant?(antipope.org)
131 points by cstross 13y ago|56 comments
788.
Rule 34, Meet Kafka: GCHQ's video snooping and its implications(antipope.org)
7 points by cstross 13y ago|1 comments
789.
by cstross 13y ago
Out of curiosity, what's your opinion on crypto-currencies that aren't deflationary, or that rely on proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work? Now, that sounds like a good idea. But at that point, we're talking about a cr
790.
Schadenfreude(antipope.org)
102 points by cstross 13y ago|144 comments
791.
by cstross 13y ago
+1. (Me too.) I suspect De La Soul hit some sort of quota limit and Dropbox will either (a) hit them up for a bandwidth bill, or (b) decide to raise the limit as a goodwill/marketing gesture, later in the day. Edit : Downloads working
792.
by cstross 13y ago
Viola! Screen Sharing should launch automatically and connect. Syntax nit: A viola is a stringed instrument. "voilà" is French for "see" or "there!"
793.
by cstross 13y ago
Sadly the word processing game has been won by Word. 99% of non-techie authors will use Word (or maybe Scrivener) to write their novel That's because publishers rely on Word for workflow because everyone uses Word and they require
794.
by cstross 13y ago
Two words: "fewer lawsuits". RPG companies, with a couple of exceptions (ahem: Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Games Workshop), are tiny. Which means there's a single desk labelled "the buck stops here". Whereas at a
795.
by cstross 13y ago
I believe those of the Big Five publishers who are committed to DRM -- other than Macmillan, where DRM is already very optional indeed (the decision is made on a per-book basis, with some imprints being entirely DRM-free) -- are already rev
796.
by cstross 13y ago
Well, that's deeply sucky. I'm spending three weeks on the road in the next month, so I've got three hand-picked guest bloggers taking over the mike on my site, for the duration. Emphasis on hand-picked, i.e. invited because
797.
by cstross 13y ago
I met Douglas just once, in the summer of 1996. I was in London and I was visiting a friend and former co-worker who, after the startup we'd been in together in Edinburgh collapsed, had moved on to become one of the syadmins at The Dig
798.
by cstross 13y ago
In your country, are the Fire service, Ambulance service, or Coast Guard, necessarily military? Because they were uniforms, have rank structures, operate heavy equipment, and are government employees. (Yes, this is a trick question. In some
799.
by cstross 13y ago
Criminality is not an identity but a consequence of circumstances. Put it another way, it could be you ...
800.
by cstross 13y ago
The real question is how we design robust institutional cultures that don't deteriorate over time, and adhere to the original mission goals. (And also how we free ourselves from the tyranny of low expectations, so that we can set good
801.
by cstross 13y ago
Shotguns and bolt-action rifles are licensed in the UK. So are black-powder weapons (mostly muzzle-loaders for re-enactment). Air guns are also allowed, in some categories without a license. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org&#x2
802.
by cstross 13y ago
So kindly explain what's wrong, in principle, with defining book ideals and then using these as criteria to evaluate the success of organizations? The Peelian principles have been largely obscured or ignored in recent decades, and argu
803.
Peelian Principles(en.wikipedia.org)
83 points by cstross 13y ago|47 comments
804.
by cstross 13y ago
Yes, this. It's the equivalent of red state/blue state culture war politics in the USA, turned up to 8 or 9 (if not 11). It's also destroying research libraries that provide exhaustive raw data going back decades or centuri
805.
by cstross 13y ago
Here, let me jog your memory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik (Apologies, but Godwin's Law seems unavoidable in this context. Yes, here's a historic example of a no-shit Fascist party who fired l
806.
Over-Extended Metaphor for the day(antipope.org)
40 points by cstross 13y ago|19 comments
807.
by cstross 13y ago
Website is broken in my Firefox 26 config. (Not due to NoScript. Might be one of the anti-tracking-cookie utils I use ...) NB: My complaint isn't that it's not working, but that it doesn't degrade gracefully to (at least) a b
808.
by cstross 13y ago
These are all features of a system described by political philosopher Sheldon Wolin as Inverted Totalitarianism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism -- that is, while it's a totalitarian system,
809.
by cstross 13y ago
Misleading title: the article is really about why spies never discover anything useful about other nations . They're really, really good at infiltrating internal dissident groups and spy (or terrorist) hunts serve as a great pretext f
810.
by cstross 13y ago
Of course, I had to read this a month after being diagnosed with Type II diabetes :-( (You may downvote at will ... just noting that this is essentially carbs sandwiched between more carbs, dammit.)

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