chris.borthwick

chris.borthwick

  • Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
    The ultimate region restriction would be that I remember reading about some years ago in the biog of somebody reminiscing about being Lillian Hellman's handbag. Hellman's newest contract included a clause saying that the publishers had all rights "in the...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    If "the open secret in Washington is that the NSA's primary job is economic espionage", then you have to say that that job's not going much better than the cover story. Are America's companies really leaping to the cutting edge...
  • Commented on I'm back
    Just to add a few disruptors, I can't imagine that google glasses will have any difficulty reading cards and remembering them, thus giving any oik the ability to win at blackjack in casinos. Plainly casinos won't let them in while...
  • Commented on The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears
    How would one distinguish "Has a sense of self" from "Says it has a sense of self"? Given that any being sophisticated enough for this to be a question would presumably be sophisticated enough to be able to lie....
  • Commented on The cult of justice
    As to whether innocent people have died unnecessarily through the death penalty, Kai Lung: "In cases of absolute wrongdoing, it is impossible for even the least experienced official to deviate from the iron rule of conduct. Cause and effect; effect...
  • Commented on What scared H. P. Lovecraft
    I'd have to go with fare's impure thoughts, because (1) I think all fantasists have something in common, and (2) that's what scared Chesterton into the church. He refers in his autobiography to the depths of evil he found in...
  • Commented on CMAP: "Why do you use Microsoft Word?"
    What I can't understand is why the different formats aren't compatible. Isn't this where computers came in? Why is it so hard to get a computer to 1) read a text in Program A 2) note all editing codes 3)...
  • Commented on The revolution will not be hand-stitched
    A lot of people discussing shoes, nobody talking about the last industry that actually rested on felt: hats. Measure your head size - don't even need millimetre scanners - and then tick bowler, slouch, trilby, or your own design based...
  • Commented on Catching a Blighty
    And I should record, in this context, a line I heard at a dinner party in California last year - "At the start of the second world war in 1941....."...
  • Commented on Catching a Blighty
    My grandfather was in the battle of the Nek at Gallipoli, which was the one where the commanders (who were Australians, by the way) sent a line of men along a narrow ridge into machineguns, and having noted that the...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    I think I set off this thread with a comment in the last thread but one: I feel quietly proud. Back in the days of the Mac Classic and the dot matrix printer we had, to a first approximation, all...
  • Commented on Another deceptively simple question
    Before we jump ahead twenty years and see what's changed, let's jump back twenty and see what hasn't, just as a demonstration of path dependence. Microsoft Word. It's virtually identical to its 1993 incarnation, with every annoying glitch and tendency...
  • Commented on The latest news
    So all the information in the entire electronic communications system of the world is now being bugged and searched. We have what is by orders of magnitude the largest data bank ever conceived, giving us Laplacian knowledge about our society...
  • Commented on Dragged kicking and screaming into the 19th century
    The claimed antiquity of the Japanese royal house is inflated by about 900 years of myths and propaganda. The real start date isn't Ameru in 660 BCE but somewhere round about 400 AD, making them well short of the RCC...
  • Commented on CREATe: a trade fiction author's perspective
    It's already happened. The APA had an online journal, Psycoloquy - "a refereed international, interdisciplinary electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA)" and it's now let it die. The old material is currently kept online by what used...
  • Commented on Status update
    Testing 1 2 3...
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