silburnl

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• Commented on Service update
  Also I second dr_demento's suggestion to try and corral the defence/nukes attractor into a specific thread....
• Commented on Service update
  To be fair, going by 'currently resident in Scotland' is pretty much the only practical way to do it. Any kind of 'Scottish connections' test would be a nightmare to construct and lead to all sorts of bizarre corner cases....
• Commented on Spoiler Thread
  Ditto here. UK eBook got from the Big River....
• Commented on The Rhesus Chart: Chapter One
  "...we'd all agree that "moral" and "morale" are entirely different concepts." They are. Although I have seen older texts (C19th or thereabouts) which use the non-frenchified form to refer to the psychological state of soldiers. Further to Greg's question at...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  "...optimising and improving the software side of things." Isn't that the 'incremental improvement' part of the sigmoid though? Regards Luke...
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  "Perhaps some of the others who use a single pseudoneum would try the same exercise and make a similar report?" I have a fairly stable 'nym and ego-surfing it gets pointers to various aspects of my online existence for the...
• Commented on Interstitial note
  Thanks for the tip off regarding the Storium kickstarter, it hadn't pinged my radar before. As of 1200h BST it's 500 bucks beyond the 185k pledge level that unlocks the Merchant Princes world, so Charlie's got another entry for his...
• Commented on I'm back
  I suspect that the casinos would prefer not to reduce the throughput on their roulette wheels by doing that. Cameras and staff who know what to look for are probably good enough to deal with most people trying it on...
• Commented on Miscellanea
  William IV "the Sailor" had to have been The King in Yellow. Well he was promoted to Admiral in the 1790s, but he had blotted his copybook with the Admiralty by speaking out of turn in the House of Lords...
• Commented on Sitrep
  "Trams are an OK idea if the local public transport system is poor" I was in Munich at Christmas. The city has an excellent integrated metro/regional rail system (courtesy of the '72 olympics) and also has lots of trams (which...
• Commented on Sitrep
  Well speaking anec-data-ly, the subject I wanted to study at university was only offered by a handful of institutions (three of whom were in London) so the odds were pretty good that I'd end up inside the M25 at some...
• Commented on Sitrep
  The mismatch between London (+ the home counties hinterland) and the other regions of the UK is too large to be solved within the context of the UK I think. There might be a chance of effecting a rebalancing within...
• Commented on Sitrep
  I came to London despite the public transport not because of it. It was a mess in the 80s and we're only just climbing out of the hole it was in back then nearly three decades later. You have no...
• Commented on Sitrep
  Current plans I've seen envisage a link between HS2 and HS1 just to the north of the Euston road termini, so it would be entirely possible to have a Birmingham-Paris routing that skipped a London stop entirely. The train would...
• Commented on Making history personal
  Tricky. I think the oldest building I've slept in is the Dean of Canterbury's residence. I'm not sure when that dates to exactly and google isn't helping, but it has proper battlements, so it almost certainly beats Gwydir castle in...
• Commented on On Syria
  We can't know it wasn't a false-flag op. It's another reason not to go there and OGH alludes to the attribution problem in the OP. Personally I think the balance of probabilities comes down on 'some piece of shit with...
• Commented on On Syria
  Greg @154 What's a type 52? RN these days has two main groups of non-carrier surface warships, Type 23 (frigates) and Type 45 (missile destroyers) - were you referring to the Type 42s (which the 45s have replaced)? Back on...
• Commented on We interrupt this broadcast ...
  Kobo couldn't offer me any alternative to the Adobe DRM epub, but they did refund me without any quibbles. So Amazon ended up with my custom after all. Regards Luke...
• Commented on We interrupt this broadcast ...
  Just bought this from Kobo in an effort to route around the incipient Bezos monopsony, but wasn't paying attention to the file format before I clicked the link (in my defence I was under-caffeinated and previous books I've sourced from...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
  "I'd certainly settle for an account of the censorship wars." In my personal fanon I have recruited Walter Jon Williams' "Implied Spaces" as an account of how the Edit Wars got started. Regards Luke...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Merchant Princes
  Speaking to the topic at hand BTW, I had somehow got the release of 'The Revolution Trade' mentally pencilled in for next week and was mildly peeved at myself for getting to within sight of the finishing line of "The...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Merchant Princes
  "If you read on a Kindle, DRM forces you to Amazon. Can you spell lock-in?" That's a key reason why I (and I suspect many of the other commenters) use Calibre. The current e-Reader bunfight is going to leave a...
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  I've been using The Old Reader (theoldreader.com) as my GReader substitute. No complaints so far and they put kittie-pix on the 'site down' page when doing maintenance, which is nice. Returning to the topic, 'if it's in the news then...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  "Yeah, if you have enough energy there's no need to have a shortage of liquid fuels for automobiles. But, why not store energy by pumping water uphill?" Yup. Do that as well. Let a thousand flowers bloom. It is my...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  'This is one of the reasons why it's been suggested that the renewables sector should be built for local over-supply, and surpluses "wasted".' Yeah this sort of thing has been suggested for 'stranded wind' (use it to power ammonia synthesis)...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  "how many stories do you know where the hero uses superior technology to suppress the people and stop revolutionaries from achieving liberté, égalité and fraternité?" Apologies for picking up on a rhetorical point, but this is an SF-authors blog and...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  "4: Solar is never going to be dirt cheap. Not ever. Economically, it is going to look a heck of a lot like nukes. - high capital, low running costs." Which factors makes solar (and wind and, to a lesser...
• Commented on Big Guns[1]
  Heh - my dad was given the dubious privilege of toting the platoon Lewis gun whilst on Putney Common during CCF manoevers in the early-50s and only realised he had left it behind on the common as they were marching...
• Commented on Big Guns[1]
  "We've had our spree killers in the UK using firearms too; Dunblane and Hungerford and more recently Cumbria in 2010 (12 dead, 11 wounded)." Some context for non-UK folk - the Hungerford spree killing got longarms banned for everything except...
• Commented on The Algebraic Properties of Equality in SF
  Walter Jon Williams writes pretty good female protagonists: Aiah in the Metropolitan books Sula in the Praxis books Dagmar Shaw in 'This Is Not A Game' et seq. Fiona in 'Ambassador of Progress' There's also the romantic interest for one...