Ian Campbell

Ian Campbell

  • Commented on Paging Agent 007
    RED CARD — commenter now banned. (Comment deleted for egregious political trolling and being full of shit.)...
  • Commented on Paging Agent 007
    Regarding the different reaction when a cop shooting victim is a blonde, white female - this doesn't appear to be the case in Minneapolis. Of course, the cop in question in this case is simultaneously a member of two groups...
  • Commented on Report on Seat 14C
    How about this one? Flight BA171 mysteriously disappears in 2017, on approach into Glasgow Airport; it's a media sensation for a few weeks, periodically reported on for a few months, then gets chalked up as an unsolvable mystery. Not long...
  • Commented on Crying fire in a crowded theatre for pleasure and profit
    Regarding the fielding of candidates disqualified by age: Is it legal, in the USA, for someone to put himself up as a candidate for an age-limited office (president and VP for sure, and I think senators) if he is going...
  • Commented on Crying fire in a crowded theatre for pleasure and profit
    I would like to make a comment about the 20th century body count. And that is that (IMHO) the count ought to be expressed as a proportion of the world (or regional) population at the time of the events in...
  • Commented on Crying fire in a crowded theatre for pleasure and profit
    Stalin wasn't a socialist or a communist, eh? Well, maybe so. But the Soviet Union is hardly the only example of the wisdom of the philosophy explained in Animal Farm, is it? Let's see now. Communist China; Great Leap Forward...
  • Commented on Report on Seat 14C
    You might consider using a building society. Most of them have services much like any bank - with the difference that they are owned by their members. Nationwide in particular has better coverage than some banks....
  • Commented on Report on Seat 14C
    Cash has another use, but it's rather rare. As a protest. I am a victim of the banking crash, being a business ex-customer of Natwest Bank - yes, the bank that was bailed out by UK Government and was one...
  • Commented on Catching Up
    Regarding the issue of artillery trajectories. The trajectory of a projectile in vacuum is of course an ellipse. However, given that the semi-major axis is 6400km or thereabouts and the width of the ellipse at the relevant point is at...
  • Commented on Crying fire in a crowded theatre for pleasure and profit
    Incidentally, it's quite probably true that smoking cannabis (specifically smoking it, not consuming it in space cakes and probably not vaporised by some non-fire-related method) is very dangerous in the long term. Not because of the psychoactive substances in it,...
  • Commented on Crying fire in a crowded theatre for pleasure and profit
    You may be surprised to hear that I agree with you. I said "War on Some Drugs" because quite a lot of drugs with far worse side effects and more dubious usefulness than the currently illegal ones are not only...
  • Commented on Crying fire in a crowded theatre for pleasure and profit
    The question of which group is hit hardest by the War on Some Drugs is rather easy to answer. It's actually two groups, which admittedly have rather a lot of members in common. Drug dealers and drug addicts. Oh, you...
  • Commented on The World of Tomorrow
    Regarding power use by data centres: I think it's worth noting that the siting of these centres is beginning to be influenced by thoughts of power efficiency and environmental effect. Specifically, one place that is beginning to have a fair...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: The Nightmare Stacks
    With technology like this (noting Clarke's Third and its reverse) one could probably also use heavy transuranics that already have a very small critical mass, with the bullets being kept in stasis; the "californium slug". For that matter, the stasis...
  • Commented on Rejection Letter
    Let's not forget that on average, for half the day the price of solar power is infinite. Which wouldn't be the case if cheap, reliable storage was available for massive amounts of electrical energy - but nobody's cracked that one...
  • Commented on Rejection Letter
    There is an inbuilt problem with the existence of more than one country with nuclear weapons which are run by a collection of lunatics. I'll illustrate the problem with a hypothetical. Imagine that one fine day, a large part of...
  • Commented on Traveller RPG, Firefly, Dumarest, Vatta's War... are they all "Star Punk"?
    Clearly, we need to do both. A detection programme would cost next to nothing, would probably yield other scientifically useful data in the process and would also encourage the training of various sorts of scientists and engineers - rather than...
  • Commented on Traveller RPG, Firefly, Dumarest, Vatta's War... are they all "Star Punk"?
    Regarding civilisation as a retrograde step: Well, maybe. However, one thing about civilisation (at least potentially; we have wasted at least 50 years on Cold War posturing instead of real progress) is that it offers the possibility of protection against...
  • Commented on Traveller RPG, Firefly, Dumarest, Vatta's War... are they all "Star Punk"?
    That varies from game to game. Some games use the concept of personal power (mana in some cases) which slowly replenishes over a day or so, and is drained by casting spells - although there are usually power batteries available....
  • Commented on Traveller RPG, Firefly, Dumarest, Vatta's War... are they all "Star Punk"?
    I think it's worth mentioning that in fictional settings containing magic (depending on the power level of the magic, of course) similar effects might be achievable using dimension-twisting magic; the sort of effects used in various D&D transport spells, for...
  • Commented on We get mail (contd.)
    [ DELETED BY MODERATOR because blog owner doesn't have time for idiocy like this. Shorter version: lots of things wrong with Iran, lots of things wrong with Russia, China, and USA too — or had you forgotten the quarter-to-half-a-million civilian...
  • Commented on We get mail (contd.)
    Regarding your 3) I admit you may be right; I haven't checked. However, I suggest that you repeat that statement in public in either Saudi Arabia or Iran to reference the cultural element. You might even survive the experience. Incidentally,...
  • Commented on We get mail (contd.)
    I can think of other religions/cultures that treat women a great deal more like dirt than the RC Church does. Can't you? But we aren't supposed to mention that, because it's raciss......
  • Commented on We get mail (contd.)
    Regarding abortion laws: I think there is an oversimplification lurking here. Considering the views of zealots on either side; it appears that on one side they consider a single-cell zygote to be fully human with all the rights thereof, and...
  • Commented on The Evil Business Plan of Evil (and misery for all)
    Cash is traceable in any event, at least if it hasn't been out of a bank for too long. (All notes have serial numbers, right? If that isn't enough, most banknotes these days are rather complicated; adding passive RFID chips...
  • Commented on The Evil Business Plan of Evil (and misery for all)
    Regarding nuclear weapons and asteroid deflection again: There is a possible scenario in which we get very little warning of an incoming continent-buster, without spending enormous amounts of resources on detection systems - needing space capability that might well make...
  • Commented on The Evil Business Plan of Evil (and misery for all)
    Regarding the subject of nuclear weapons I have a point which I hope others find interesting. Nuclear weapons are an existential threat to human civilisation and possibly to the human species. But it's also true that nuclear weapons, and the...
  • Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
    Berserkers don't have to be large, obvious or resource-intensive, at least if some people's belief in replicating AI nanoassemblers is correct. One possible scenario would be to drop a few grams of such devices into some remote part of an...
  • Commented on Leading question
    Barry, re your #136: All that works fine, until you go just that bit too far - and you end up with your fancy corporate HQ in flames and, not too long afterwards, find yourself being introduced to a length...
  • Commented on Leading question
    There are many possibilities, but here are two, pretty well opposite in degree of optimism: Optimistic future: The twin destabilising technologies of self-driving electric vehicles and DPF fusion neighbourhood power plants have combined with continuing improvements in communications tech to...
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