Stephen Harris

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• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  "Man was not meant to meddle"; an obvious one (probably too obvious given recenty history) might be an escaped disease, but we might also have trans-humanism, body modification, cyborg enhancements, what it means to be human....
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  My morning list: The Farside ( https://www.thefarside.com/ ). Mostly old stuff, but sometimes new things Sluggy Freelance ( http://www.sluggy.com/ ). This has massively changed since the early days. It's still the same characters, but a lot darker. Questionable Content you...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  old age home care, which is as horrifically expensive and inhumanely rationed as anything else in New Management Britain Or modern Tory Britain......
• Commented on Outage report
  Meanwhile I have a 300/60 Mb/s fibre connection with unmetered/unlimited bandwidth and static IP, at home. And 60Mb/s is plenty for the blog, if I combine it with CloudFlare's free entry-tier package of DNS and web cacheing and DDoS protection....
• Commented on Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?
  If you want see this language in action, "Existence", by David Brin, is full of it; "aintelligence", "aissistant", "aivatar" and so (and Our Gracious Host gets a quote reference in it :-))...
• Commented on Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?
  There's a couple of other "fun" problems with training set data. The first is deliberate poisoning of data. If an adversary can taint the training data then it's possible they can mis-train your AI to their benefit. The second is...
• Commented on Publishing: A Slice of Life
  Maybe a form of blackmail... "Pay us $$$ or we'll spread your book all over the warez sites and no one will buy it". Not recognising that books appear on warez sites within a day of publishing, anyway!...
• Commented on Publishing: A Slice of Life
  Umm, that's not how networking works. If you had bad cables then TCP can result in worse results than UDP because it has timeouts and retry periods that you don't get to control. With UDP the application can decide, for...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Delirium Brief
  This seems like a good time to remind people of Charlie's 2006 novel Glasshouse. About two-thirds of the way through the book, the first person narrator died. The first person narration continued without a hitch.... You might also want to...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Delirium Brief
  Ah... a nice email from that large river... We have good news! One of your pre-ordered items is now eligible for release date delivery and has been upgraded at no additional charge. Your new delivery estimate is: Stross, Charles "The...
• Commented on On hold
  I wonder why that story is making the rounds again, given that it's something like 9 months old by now....
• Commented on Book day!
  Hello Stephen Harris, "The Delirium Brief: A..." has shipped. Arriving: Tuesday, July 11...
• Commented on Some notes on the worst-case scenario
  My worst case scenario evaluation is a more immediate thing; I expect a so-called "terrorist attack" on US soil within the next 6 months, and this will be used as an excuse to tighten controls, restrict rights, and basically fuck...
• Commented on Policy change: future US visits
  @Greg - has the whole BrExit stuff passed you by? That's the May crap I'm referring to. There's more than one pile of shit in the world, and I'm not happy to have to chose between them....
• Commented on Policy change: future US visits
  I'm an Englishman living in New York. And between Trump and May I really don't know where I want to live. If it wasn't for my girlfriend then I'd have moved back to England years ago, but now with May...
• Commented on Ever Young?
  As well as the above (I'm 48 as of this week; I have a good job; I'm respected by my peers; I own a house with zero mortgage; no debt of any kind; but not married, child free by choice)...
• Commented on Writer, Interrupted
  Open plan offices were directly responsible for me leaving my last job (where I had been for 16+ years). Over time in that company I'd worked in high-walled cubicles, medium height cubicles, in an office with 1 co-worker, and on...
• Commented on Reality is broken
  Not so much Case Nightmare Green, as Case Nightmare Write? And CASE NIGHTMARE WHITE would be Trump winning?...
• Commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
  Planets rotate east-to-west When you come to a new planet how do you define the compass points? Magnetic? Rotation? Habitation? Related to orbit around Sun? Related to galactic north? I read a long time back that "spin north" was common....
• Commented on A world-building puzzler
  It would be fascinating to consider further impacts this religious prohibition would have on society. Given that pictographs are a form of writing, it seems reasonable to assume the prohibition extends to pictures of any form. It may be based...
• Commented on Nom de Teleport
  "Running out of space" and using parallel universes to solve it is pretty common. Richard C Meredith ("Timeliner Tilogy") used a variation of "Problems arise when these universes start rubbing against/entwining with each other" as a motivator... at least I...
• Commented on Nom de Teleport
  People from England of a certain age may prefer "jaunt" because of The Tomorrow People. http://thetomorrowpeople.wikia.com/wiki/Jaunting (It wasn't until years later that I learned of the pedigree of the word)...
• Commented on The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of pulls on the jackboots
  (Re: Jim Butcher) "But I don't think he fully grasps the long term consequences of allowing a nomination backed by the sad puppies to go ahead." Do you really think there's gonna be much fallout from this? His books sell...
• Commented on Terry Pratchett
  I remember that I'd seen Terry at JerseyDevilCon 2002 where he was GoH. But I didn't meet him. I was in the audience for one of his talks, but afterwards, when the crowd closed in for the kill, I walked...
• Commented on Ask the Author
  If you earned ( inherited / won ...) enough money to retire, would you? Or do you have a compulsion to tell lies^Wstories? Basically, I'm wondering if you enjoy your work, or if it's just a means to an end...
• Commented on An age-old question
  I noticed suffering the "every day event" problem in my early 30s (15 years ago). It was a 10 minute walk to the train station; more than once (at around the 5 minute mark) I found myself wondering "did I...