cstross

16 ms·

121.
by cstross 5y ago
Nope, this is good news. JET is a 1980s research project into how to contain a plasma and squish it enough to achieve fusion at all, not a practical generator. It doesn't have superconducting magnets, it runs on big lumps of copper,
122.
by cstross 5y ago
Of note, for a while a Chinese OEM was selling a copy of the Palm Portable Keyboard with bluetooth. (Main irritant: they used USB charging but put a very non-standard socket on the keyboard end -- it resembles a 4-pin firewire cable, only n
123.
by cstross 5y ago
IAB's business model is broken at this point. The EU's point is that you can't rules-lawyer your way around GDPR violations by outsourcing the lawbreaking to a paid scapegoat company: having ruled the practices to be essentia
124.
by cstross 5y ago
Some crazy figures here: The maximum fine for such a breach is 4% of the company's global revenue. Microsoft, in 2021, turned over $168Bn. Google turned over $181.69Bn. Amazon turned over a staggering $457.96. Between them they had a c
125.
by cstross 5y ago
There's also survivorship bias at work here -- the SF we remember from the 1960s tends to be stuff that was initially popular and has stood the test of time. (There was a lot of terrible SF in the 1960s, and it was still cluttering u
126.
by cstross 5y ago
SF author here: I was invited to participate in Project Hieroglyph and declined to do so, because the explicit remit was essentially to write panglossian techno-optimism rather than downbeat realist-mode depictions of our more likely future
127.
by cstross 5y ago
Your assumption is that the medical industry is profitable. This is not universally shared. I am in the UK; we have socialized healthcare here. Lab work is an overhead, not a profit centre. (Antibiotics can be prescribed instantly on demand
128.
by cstross 5y ago
1. "Not invented here" (western medical practice largely ignored the USSR, where phage treatments were a big thing: journals didn't get translated, treatments didn't get picked up). 2. Not profitable. They were developed
129.
by cstross 5y ago
I did a pharmacy degree circa 1983-87 in the UK. Antibiotic resistance was already a pressing problem. Penicillin-V was little more use than a placebo as of 1984; Amoxicillin was in danger, MRSA was already out there. The big short-term hop
130.
by cstross 5y ago
Sounds like they've noticed both macOS and Windows getting integrated cloud-based password management capabilities and feel the need to branch out in order to stay one jump ahead of irrelevance. (Disclaimer: I'm a satisfied 1Passw
131.
by cstross 5y ago
Good grief, they are SO going to get sued if they try to do any of their proposed uses! (They no more own the rights to "Dune" than you would if you bought a DVD in a second hand shop and decided to start selling copies of it.)
132.
by cstross 5y ago
It's a pharmacognosy journal: not crank/fringe at all. (Pharmacognosy is the study of drugs of natural origin -- about half our small molecule pharmaceuticals are either extracted from or synthetic but based on modifications of dr
133.
by cstross 5y ago
My opinion? I began writing the stories that turned into Accelerando in 1998, largely to keep myself from having a work-induced nervous breakdown during the dot-com bubble. I finished it in 2003/04. It's journeyman work, and I l
134.
by cstross 5y ago
It is really not my own favourite of the books I've written, though. (If you want to understand why, you might enjoy The Rapture of the Nerds -- my two-fer with Cory Doctorow, revisiting the same themes a decade later from a rather
135.
by cstross 5y ago
If you follow the links through to the original paper -- https://gabryant.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/site... -- you'll see that a variety of felines (including domestic cats) are among the species
136.
by cstross 5y ago
I wrote Accelerando from 1998-2004. That's a third of a lifetime ago. It's normal to slow down as you grow older!
137.
by cstross 5y ago
Stupid question: I assume that some of those employees -- if only some of the software/UI devs -- must be disabled or mobility-challenged. How are they going to square this policy with disabilities legislation when it runs into a whe
138.
by cstross 5y ago
What makes you think $MANAGER was male?
139.
by cstross 5y ago
This takes me back to roughly 1993. I was in a department running on a mix of Wyse green-screen terminals and, later, X terminals, when we got a budget upgrade that would roll out actual individual PCs -- 486s running SCO Open Desktop -- to
140.
by cstross 5y ago
Looks like the LOC folks are also unaware of the existence of HyperCard clones such as SuperCard (a compiler) and subsequently Runtime Revolution (now discontinued): before the company stopped selling its end-product cross-platform HyperCar
141.
by cstross 5y ago
That's just plain crazy. The software only knows what the (human) user tells it. What assurance does it have that the patient isn't being pressurized into giving the correct answers? Or that the suicide capsule is going to be used
142.
by cstross 5y ago
The Skylab reboost mission was originally targeted for 1981, IIRC; but it was going to fly as a Shuttle payload, and in the meantime, Skylab de-orbited a couple of years early (just as the Shuttle flew a couple of years later than planned
143.
by cstross 5y ago
Alternatively, we had a near-miss: given there was a solar maximum around 1972, the Venus flyby would probably have killed the crew (who would have died of radiation sickness weeks from Earth, live on TV). The Viking landers got to Mars an
144.
by cstross 5y ago
Saturn V was cancelled in 1968. Back then, there were no commercial entities designing and launching satellites. The first two Telstar comsats were basically international collaborative experiments between national-level telcos; Telstar did
145.
by cstross 5y ago
They're not the best keyboard-phones, though: for that, you probably need to look at Planet Computers' Cosmo Communicator, and the forthcoming-end-of-the-year Astro Slide: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/as
146.
by cstross 5y ago
ARM1 shipped in 1985, and it wasn't immediately obvious at the time that it was the way forward. Meanwhile, this LSI-11 clone dates to 1982. Cloning ARM three years in advance would have been a neat trick!
147.
by cstross 5y ago
This immediately sprang out at me: > Investment banks have a one-way approach to open source software: (some of) it can come in, but none of it can go out. I wonder how well this plays with the various open source software licenses?
148.
by cstross 5y ago
Only covers England and Wales -- not Scotland and Northern Ireland. So not actually UK wide.
149.
by cstross 5y ago
The world wide web is only 28 years old. We've had computers for 76 years at this point. We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of
150.
by cstross 5y ago
What you're missing is that since the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty came into effect it's illegal to test-detonate nuclear weapons. Which are narrowly defined in terms of fission devices, with or without a fusion booster. Fission

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