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• Commented on The language of alienation
  (Hope this doesn't crash the server again...) Anonymous. Most sentences involving Anonymous would be pretty incomprehensible in 2003 (unless they involve acts of petty vandalism only)....
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  That's why going to the library involves going back in time to the root of the tree then forward to the library. As for simultaneous changes, the time-travel mechanism specifically excludes them — only one incoming wormhole can be open...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Any computer, no matter how nifty the processor, is limited by its programming and by its available output devices. OGH already responded to the programming part, but as far as available output devices are concerned, (a) a lot of computers...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Speaking of failures of imagination, in Heinlein's Time Enough For Love, time-travel is in the hands of any starship captain, and many of them fly alone on ships they own outright, with not even a ship's mate to stay their...
• Commented on Mitochondrial Singularity
  "anything that isn't impossible will eventually happen, and even the seemingly impossible has a way of happening sometimes" So, basically, Kolmogorov's zero-one law? The problem is that a mathematician's "eventually" bears no connection with human time-scales......
• Commented on Why I don't self-publish
  For example, you could get the editing done as you write. This will dramatically lower the cost of managing the editing (not the cost of editing). Actually, this will most likely increase the cost of managing the editing, because the...
• Commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
  Fiction writing doesn't work that way. You don't reliably end up with exactly the book you contracted for. I suspect that wouldn't nearly be a show-stopper. On the one hand, "Charles Stross novel, whatever comes out next time he writes"...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  we have had a 68 year stretch in which no invading army has crossed the Rhine Except for that time five years ago when Switzerland invaded Lichtenstein? (OK, probably not crossing the Rhine, but still a country predominantly on one...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  It's revealing that India tends to be left out of any membership list for an Anglophone Grand Alliance. [...] This where the racism OGH mentioned comes in. Well, more charitably, perhaps people are going by the native / first speaker...
• Commented on Me, talking
  Self driving vehicles — Initially it will be like cruise control, something you can turn on or off at will. Actually, I would expect the opposite — in the initial applications, turning it off will be rare or not done...
• Commented on Wow
  So, when are we getting our act together and seriously doing Spaceguard? Nature keeps giving us these warning shots......
• Commented on Boskone 50
  To meet each other....
• Commented on It's a Wonderful Life
  As treatment becomes more and more expensive every society will come to a cutoff point where it cant afford to pay every treatment for everyone. Even here in Sweden that will happen, [...] Hmm, you realise that Sweden (as a...
• Commented on Tapeworm Logic
  I'd agree; any failure to detect "intelligent signals" on our part repesents an actual failure to detect that subset of possible signals that we can detect, and identify what we think is an "intelligent signal" in that spectral range. Further,...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  Just running free clinics would probably be cheaper than the medicare system. As it happens, a UK-style NHS costs the government pretty much exactly the same per capita as US-style medicare/medicaid. Of course, NHS is free at point of use...
• Commented on Snowflakes, or Oh, No! Not Again!
  When all was ignorance, all that mattered was the design--belief was an art form. Doctrine was bent to match desired effect. That won't continue to fly. Hmm, well, science is a tool; it can be bent to all sorts of...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  Well, at the least you'd seem to get the faster natural healing of youth, which would probably help a lot even if the drug itself did little — both in its own right, by healing damage in months and years...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  Where, pray, do the profits to pay the dividends come from? Ah, well, that would be a whole another discussion, really, on the macro scale, about who gets the benefits of increased labour productivity. Three scenarios off the top of...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  Hmm, well, from a planning perspective everything beyond a certain point is pretty marginal; there's not a big difference between a 30-year mortgage and a 300-year one — either way, you need to pay the first year's interest in the...
• Commented on 2512
  "Only if the people involved are very stupid." Ah, well, then we have nothing to worry about....
• Commented on Context is everything
  Birth-rates in Pakistan & Iran are dropping very sharply – or were you not paying attention, there? Indeed, over the last week or so, there's been a story in the news about a Pakistani schoolgirl who got shot in the...