richard.ad.melvin

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• Commented on Service update
  Am I the only one who suspects that both Ken and Charlie's opinion ultimately come down to them both having SF novels that will retroactively become alternate history if the Scottish political singularity doesn't work out the way they respectively...
• Commented on A hypothesis
  Guess it was someone else's turn to have one of their cyperpunk books come true....
• Commented on "The next big thing"
  @22ish Animation is even slower than novel writing. And of course, for anything that can be done fast, you can also do it any amount slower. If only by adding 'win lawsuit' as the first step... But I think the...
• Commented on "The next big thing"
  It certainly does in film Film and TV is at least an order of magnitude faster to make it to the market than the written word. Can you imagine a holywood screenwriter telling a producuer 'first complete draft will...
• Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
  If you grow up with strong government, you may see them as the problem and want the free market to come in and save you. And if you grow up in your parent's basement, then you are shaped by an...
• Commented on The cult of justice
  'It's often said that a cult is a small, unpopular religion and a religion is a large, popular cult. ' I prefer the definition that a cult is a tight community with associated belief system joined in adulthood, whereas a...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  Your $20k jeep with auto drive and sensors obviously doesn't include the launcher price (thermal imagers are expensive, as is decent quality night vision equipment), let alone the missile.<\i> Sure, it would cost a lot if you procure it from...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  Right now the US is having trouble funding the recapitalization Anyone want to wargame an MBT versus an equal dollar value of autojeeps with a missile launcher strapped to the roof? If that goes the way I would suspect (the...
• Commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
  Another thing publishers can't currently seem to do is make available for sale a full-length novel in less time than a TV program takes to go from commission to broadcast....
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  First the Conservative Party has to win the general election and I think it has to win with a majority. Which changes from challenging to somewhere between trivial and inevitable if Scotland, let alone Wales, removes itself from the picture......
• Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  @5 Don't want to disrail the discussion, but Blindsight was published 2006, best part of a decade ago. Established authors (including our host) continuing series aside, I can't offhand point at anything published since that doesn't feature vampires, wizards, humans...
• Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  The especially interesting thing about that particular bunch of whacko Californian cultists is that, given the demise of non-retro science fiction as a commercially-viable genre, they seem to have a near-monopoly on any kind of publically-available vision of a future...
• Commented on Project Stargate
  Did the producers of the Stargate TV show about a secret military project know about the secret military project called Stargate? How about when they did the show-within-a-show (Wormhole Extreme) based on making a TV show about a secret military...
• Commented on Unbreakable (part2)
  @96: not sure the statistics you reference are solid enough to judge your statement as meaningfully true or false. For example, in a lot of the apparently very low-rape countries, like Egypt, marital rape isn't a crime, so isn't counted....
• Commented on Unbreakable (part2)
  I suspect violence may be just too big of a topic to dicuss in one bite, even if you stick to a narrow definition and leave out things like 'violent words' or 'the violence inherent in the system'. Of the...