mikecotton

mikecotton

  • Commented on Random excuses
    You're right, of course, that suing IBM has been a great way to go bankrupt for well over half a century. I remember talking to a high-level IBMer at the time, and he told me that the thing that really...
  • Commented on Facts of Life and Death
    Using something like the Billion Prices Project -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project...
  • Commented on Evolver
    Thank you for finding this. I've always thought that octopi not surviving reproduction was one of the evolution's cruelest pranks, and it makes me very happy to learn that it doesn't happen to all of them....
  • Commented on What are you reading this summer?
    Set in the Venusian atmosphere, where 80/20 N2/O2 is a lifting gas?...
  • Commented on What are you reading this summer?
    Absolutely. In a heartbeat. I'd pre-order it right now if I could....
  • Commented on The Rules of Magic
    Not all of the carbon atoms, just 1% or so. https://books.google.com/books?id=m4fG4aVdvAMC&pg=PT138&dq=basilisk+gun&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjI8e6yyoTLAhXIRCYKHbsfAu4Q6AEILzAD#v=onepage&q=basilisk%20gun&f=false...
  • Commented on The Scottish Political Singularity, Act Two
    The film is a whitewash, but the book is both very good and very nuanced. It also, without directly calling attention to it, points out how little the Intelligence Services of the world get right, and how little comes of...
  • Commented on Not a Manifesto
    We have a very good existence proof that weather over 95F and 95 percent humidity isn't uninhabitable. It's called coastal Texas, and it's been inhabited for time out of mind. I grew up there, and my ancestors survived quite well...
  • Commented on A likely tale
    I see that you're shivering with anticipation, so... 'go down (come up) to the lab and see what's on the slab.'...
  • Commented on A likely tale
    I like the pitch-perfect way you worked in the Rocky Horror reference. Well played....
  • Commented on Catching a Blighty
    By no means. I say we put the boot in every chance we get. I was just noting that Churchill was a professional author all the years he was a politician; indeed, for many of them he was the highest-paid...
  • Commented on Catching a Blighty
    To be fair to Mr. Cameron, the Prime Minister of 70 years ago was a better speech writer drunk than pretty much anyone who has ever lived, drunk or sober....
  • Commented on Commercial interlude
    Charlie, I think you're missing a 'neither' in this sentence - "East Grinstead is buried deep in the heart of the Sussex commuter belt: this is Ruralshire, nor are we out of it." Hopefully, the final proofs haven't gone to...
  • Commented on The next moves in the Spooks v. News cold war
    Sure, because we were discussing how Anarchism became the boogeyman-du-jour in the U.S. A U.S. perspective seems entirely appropriate to that discussion....
  • Commented on The next moves in the Spooks v. News cold war
    The founding crime for anarchism was the assassination of President McKinley....
  • Commented on The next moves in the Spooks v. News cold war
    I can tell you why nobody early on thought about number 5, it's because the internet made communication and connectedness much, much easier for it's early users. Many of them didn't have the greatest social skills and/or weren't located near...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
    Doh! I never caught that The Operation was SCO in disguised. I was momentarily perplexed at the choice of Santa Cruz as their nominal headquarters, then kept reading. Well played, sir....
  • Commented on A Bad Dream
    Charlie, Part of the breakdown in U.S. legislative politics is that the parties -- particularly the Republicans -- have become much more like whipped parliamentary parties, in a system designed to function by horse-trading. The prohibition on earmarks in the...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
    So you've said, and I wasn't trying to imply otherwise. I just really like the irony/synchronicity/whathaveyou of the way that, just as Glasshouse has multiple layers of misdirection, so too do some of the very minor footnotes in the crib...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
    It is a nod to Jeff Noon, only at one remove. Brandon named his hypothetical DHT worm after the feather in Vurt. Glasshouse, at every turn, is a riddle wrapped in an enigma. It's tied with Accelerando for my favorite...
  • Commented on Neptune's Brood: an excerpt
    I always figured Case was seeing tracers against a bank of low-level maritime clouds....
  • Commented on Crib sheet: Accelerando
    I think Accelerando might age better than you think, because while the specific future you describe might not come to pass, you managed to capture the frenetic essence of startup life perfectly. I read it for the first time during...
  • Commented on Books I've written
    I'd second Pixel Juice, a number of them have really stuck with me. Though to Charlie's point, it was often because they'd made me pretty uncomfortable, especially in that 'I Can't. Stop. Thinking about it.' way....
  • Commented on The last refuge of scoundrels
    Well, to be fair, Churchill was a Liberal in the middle there for a while. Which begs the question: being Tory at both ends with some semi-principled opportunistic Lloyd George Liberal in the middle, does that make Sir Winston the...
  • Commented on The World Shrinks Under The Weight of Madness
    My memory of Hunt for Zero-Point was that Cook came to the conclusion that a number of anti-gravity/possibly-ZPE-powered research programs went dark in a way very similar to what he'd seen happen with Shiva Star, a program which, as far...
  • Commented on Where's Charlie?
    I discovered Mary Robinette Kowal when I saw her read at Writers with Drinks a few years ago. She read a haunting short that has stuck with me, and then took off one of her black knee-boots, put it on...
  • Commented on Understanding Reader Reviews
    In real life, Curious Yellow was a hypothetical distributed hash table (DHT) poisoning attack postulated by Brandon Wiley. It was named after the Jeff Noon feather. I always thought infecting he A-gates with it was a cool application of the...
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