slothman

Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
  Greg Egan is famous for being reclusive; I have only once, ever, received an email from him, and we've never met or spoken....
• Charlie Stross commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
  B, the Earth masses approximately 6 x 1024 kilograms. Let me write that out for you: 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms. Or: 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons. Or: 1,000,000,000,000 times Mount Everest (approx). The Earth is in orbit around the Sun. The Earth's orbital velocity is a whisker under 30 km/sec, or around 107,000 kilometres per hour. That's just over 66,000 miles per hour. Nothing we can achieve with our current technologies stands a snowball's chance in hell of significantly altering these figures at a significant digit....
• Moderator Alan commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
  Indeed not - it's been thoroughly discredited, or at least, the common interpretation has been, by the very fact that history is still proceeding full pelt. Even at the end of the 80s, with the Cold War coming to an end, the thesis (that Western-style democracy would overcome all - not realising the future would contain Putin's Russia) was dubious....
• brucecohenpdx commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
  We're so far from there we couldn't see it with a telescope. As I've pointed out here before, something like 60% of all software projects are never completed, and of the rest, I estimate exactly 0.00% of them are bug-free. And the software industry seems to have to re-invent the wheel afresh every couple of decades, so we never do get to the top of the learning curve before starting over again....
• Charlie Stross commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
  I'm afraid I agree with you about the PG&E project probably being doomed to failure -- more to the point, it's the sort of failure that will damn the entire concept of commercial exploitation of off-earth solar power for a generation, if we aren't very lucky indeed. The best thing might well be if PG&E cancelled their pilot project or put it back 5-10 years. We need something on the scale of Falcon Heavy flying reliably and relatively cheaply, and we also need cheaper high efficiency solar cells, before we can expect a viable pilot program. And the whole manufacturing...