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• Commented on Gods and genre
  And... the future has just run over your fake video narrative. Your protagonists wouldn't have had nearly as hard a time tweaking the video with this kind of software: http://reframe.gizmodo.com/free-photo-editing-software-lets-you-manipulate-almost-1616879310/+barrett That proves it's hard SF!...
• Commented on Gods and genre
  I've always thought of "Slow River" as about as hard SF as you can get. The attention to technical detail is consistently high throughout the novel... and not just the biology, the trick they pull to scam donations struck me...
• Commented on A footnote about the publishing industry
  "I don't want one story line that goes on and on and on and on - as Brian Sandersen said this past weekend at Balticon, you have to keep giving them bigger and newer powers and challangers. "I'll be voting...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  Speaking of superheroes, have you read Worm? http://parahumans.wordpress.com/...
• Commented on Lighting up again
  I was thinking more like a cave or D&D style "dungeon", full of wandering monsters novels, like a '60s horror movie version of the Truth Mines in Greg Egan's Diaspora....
• Commented on Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?
  60 years ago is 1954. The Jetsons were on TV in 1963, and flying cars were a routine part of the future in the '70s (Larry Niven's "Known Space" is full of them). Neuromancer is only 30 years old today,...
• Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
  Linux doesn't have the original kernel either, and OSX has got the standard UNIX API and shell and file system model deep in its core, and does a better job of integrating them with the GUI through osascript than any...
• Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
  Don't forget the gnostic gospels like Idris and OS/9 and QNX, and the adopted pagan cults like AmigaDOS and BeOS and blatant grafts like Eunice and Interix....
• Commented on The regular holy war ...
  Middle click on the icon to open another windows of the same application. WTF? What's wrong with making that a context-menu option, or is that application-dependent? Most of the apps I run have "open a new window" in the context...
• Commented on The regular holy war ...
  "I recently became aware that Mac OS X will cripple a MacBook Pro's CPU if the battery of the machine is in an "unhealthy" state" Probably a good thing. Macbooks tend to overheat anyway if the CPU runs over 50%...
• Commented on The regular holy war ...
  I'm interested to see a Mac aficionado hating Unity. For me, it was the superficial mac-likeness that drove me up the wall; Superficial is the keyword. It's like, a platypus is superficially like an otter or a manatee is superficially...
• Commented on The regular holy war ...
  I was gearing up to use Ubuntu for my exit strategy from OS X a couple years back, and Lucid Lynx was pretty solid. Then Natty broke my nVidia card, so I went back to Lynx until I could get...
• Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
  I kind of think Word 5.1 for the Mac must have sucked, unless it was a completely unrelated program. Word's suck doesn't come from its size or bloat or bugs or even really from the file formats... all of that...
• Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
  The big problem with Word is that its markup is horribly non-orthogonal and in general not nestable. There's just a few basic objects: text, paragraphs, and table cells... and the only nestable objects are table cells and tables. Paragraphs don't...
• Commented on Do Zimboes dream of Electric Sheep?
  I suspect any introductory English teacher could cite many students who can't pass your Zimboe Test. There are other people who seem unable to demonstrate that they model the minds of others in all but the most robotic way. Members...
• Commented on Upcoming appearance: Frankfurt Book Fair
  "Intel's developing a revolutionary new digital publishing platform" Run away as fast as you can. Putting your book into a proprietary format readable by a "revolutionary new platform" is like publishing your book as a hypercard stack....
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  (by local intelligence, I mean local intelligent drones - humans - boots on the ground - not spies)...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  Self-driving cars and trucks would seem to be, strategically, just a special case of drones. Ground level drones have a much longer linger time... measured in days, weeks, or months... and can carry heavier payloads for a given power budget....
• Commented on Time tourism
  There are other subgenres of time travel stories. There's the future to the present where we are the distant past... John Varley's "Millennium" for example stars a female time traveller. And there's the past to the future/present like Rebecca Ore's...
• Commented on The latest news
  And I just post that, and see this... http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/11/securitymatters_1115 Belgium, Belgium, Belgium......
• Commented on The latest news
  Speaking of the NSA and open source: https://code.google.com/p/owasp-esapi-java/issues/detail?id=81 I think someone with crypto chops needs to review those commits....
• Commented on Marking time, more thoughts
  Mack Reynolds was asking this in the '70s, in the same stories where he invented the smartphone....
• Commented on Neptune's Brood: an excerpt
  Every time I read that opening sentence I think it's a quote from the first book, Freya trying to line up her trip to Jupiter....
• Commented on Crib sheet: Accelerando
  the OpenWorm project thinks they have "a full simulation of the nervous system of C. Elegans", anyway. How could they know they have the neurons simulated to sufficient detail?...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Iron Sunrise
  The other alternative is to ignore the parts of the continuity that are inconvenient, for example Niven threw out the original FTL drive from World of Ptavvs in later Known Space novels. If you do it after there's already some...
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  There are two lessons I predict won't be learned: Fighting the last war is a fool's game. The TSA security regime is the Maginot line. Instead of trying to deal with this by finding and prosecuting the people actually responsible,...
• Commented on New Guest Blogger: Linda Nagata
  Greetings, and I must say I vastly enjoyed reading your books. I don't suppose you're going to be filling in the blanks between the fall of the Commonwealth and the arrival of the Bursters? No?...
• Commented on How I feel this morning
  I gave up on reader a couple of years ago, because all I was using it for was to post to Buzz. I kind of hoped they'd clone the Reader bookmarklet to let me post to Google Plus, but instead...
• Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  "software agents designed to anticipate their needs and interact with other objects in their environment to get them what they need. E.g. plants that can summon a watering can when they get dessicated, footballs that can warn self-driving cars not...
• Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  I gotta agree on Brunner. I've been pretty much able to read all the credible near-future SF that I've been aware of since Shockwave Rider and Stand on Zanzibar made me aware of them in the '70s. I do occasionally...