Sean M

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• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  Gwynne Dyer's latest column, on the principle that bad news will be inflated to fill the media space available, is timely. I suspect that we won't hear much about a possible Israeli-Iranian war or a hypothetical Second Korean War or...
• Commented on Why I Do Self-Publish
  And of course a good bookstore will order in a book for you if it is in print or accessibly out of print. The Warrior Woman of the Internet just speeds up the process and removes the excuse to get...
• Commented on The permanent revolution
  The other thing up for debate is =how= to change. There are a lot of conflicting visions and plans for the future in any society, and they cannot all be fulfilled. The rhetoric of inevitable, technologically determined change is often...
• Commented on Why I don't self-publish
  @32: In theory, technical publishers have specialist editors, copyeditors, book designers, etc. (although cost-cutting and the assimilation of academic by for-profit publishing are threatening this). I know Mr. Stephenson and his books slightly, and I think that like late Heinlein...
• Commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
  Of course, one reason that game programmers are less risk averse could be that they are younger, better paid, and self-selected for making a very risky career choice (by all accounts, it is hard to get into that industry, and...
• Commented on Dragged kicking and screaming into the 19th century
  The people who actually study animal behaviour as a model for human disagree. For example, humans function in much larger groups than chimps, and our most common mating system is serial monogamy. Chimpss, bonobos, and various bird species all have...
• Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  The trouble there seems that the probability of being in the universe where the gamble paid off (or where -enough- people's gambles paid off) is so low. And since the marginal utility of a dollar declines with income, so that...
• Commented on The World Shrinks Under The Weight of Madness
  Remember that Randi and co revealed Project Alpha circa 1979. In the 1960s and 1970s psi was a piece of trendy fringe science which authors could use as a respectable excuse for impossible things. And aside from Campbell, a lot...
• Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
  Our generous host tends to be realistically conservative about future software, because thanks to his prior career he knows how hard software projects are. The idea of speeding up input is cute, but it requires even more lavish software and...
• Commented on Happy Christmas! Here is a flame war in a can
  The number of Americans who write with a straight face that someone with the money should be able to buy a 155mm howitzer or a nuclear bomb is one measure of the peculiar political situation there. As I understand it,...
• Commented on Happy Christmas! Here is a flame war in a can
  The other possibilities are that the Bible describes a completely synthetic figure, or that it describes a celestial god whose stories were moved from the celestial to the terrestrial worlds some time between the letters of Peter and the canonical...
• Commented on Big Guns[1]
  Oh yes . It might also be possible to skip hiring a crooked gunsmith and just print the parts required to turn a legal semi-automatic into an automatic weapon. 3D printers also seem like they will reduce the local contacts...
• Commented on Big Guns[1]
  I am not so sure. Having to download the plans, buy the springs and any other metal parts, print off some magazines, and risk them jamming all make it harder to carry out a mass shooting than in a hypothetical...
• Commented on Big Guns[1]
  The interaction between the war on drugs and gun violence is an interesting one. In Canada, gangsters will have steady access to compact semiautomatics with large magazines as long as such guns are easy to obtain and marijuana illegal in...
• Commented on Big Guns[1]
  Bombs and incendiaries have been used fairly often (and large aircraft rarely) but it looks to me as if building a large bomb without blowing yourself up or getting caught is harder than it looks. The same goes for the...
• Commented on Haunted
  One of the older Stainless Steel Rat stories- the one where he meets Angelique and defeats the man who built himself a dreadnaught- addresses the implication of having a drug which turns one into a psychopath. It goes fine at...
• Commented on E Ticket*
  Stina, I think what a lot of people have a problem with is "If [you meant to say that Heinlein wrote a well-written female character] ... um... unless you've been a teen girl you really aren't going to know whether...
• Commented on E Ticket*
  Are you sure you really want to know the answer to that one? Whether it was a family tragedy, a personal kink, or an attempt to make his readers question their own values, the answer is likely to be ugly....
• Commented on E Ticket*
  Yes, Heinlein's treatment of rape, incest, and pedophilia is disturbing. I wish I could believe it was all the aftereffects of his stroke, but there are hints in his earlier works once you know to look. I don't agree...
• Commented on E Ticket*
  I must say that I have mixed feelings about Heinlein and women. Some people say that he didn't understand them and that his portrayal of marriage is bizarre, but I have also heard that many of his female characters were...
• Commented on 2512
  Be careful with "the victors write the history books." Just as often, its the defeated musing obsessively about what went wrong who impose their views, while the victors move on to other things. Consider how much impact the losing sides...
• Commented on 2512
  Is that a very good definition of “employment” though? After all, it implies that adults should have only one way of making a good living. I suspect it would include you, on the grounds that you are neither a pharmacist...