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Commented on Thought experiment
What about the orphans? There will emerge one demographically small crowd of people who will be the oldest to a top couple of percentage points (but only by a few tens of years) and orphans. Most other people could have...
Commented on Utopia
On the Culture: Not really sure how a society where any individual or group can freely choose to leave to go & do their own thing can be called a dystopia. Unless you posit the Minds are manipulating things to...
Commented on Utopia
And it suggests something unpleasant about the world view of the reader, rather than the world being read. Probably, but perhaps that unpleasantness is simply that I can not accept the notion that a perfect utopia is really possible. Sure...
Commented on Utopia
Bank's culture is surely a dystopia? The humans are the pets of the god-like MIs played with in the way that we use laser pointers to play with cats. But it's probably the best of all possible solutions to the...
Commented on Did somebody just try to buy the British government?
It was twenty to eleven at night. He may just have been a bit pissed, awoke from a wee dwam and recounted the dream he had just had. But Lord Sassoon doesn't appear to think it a joke: Lord Sassoon:...
Commented on Did somebody just try to buy the British government?
Presumably we merely have to give them the account details for the Bank of England and transfer them one billion pounds by wire transfer to cover their administrative costs and we'll have the money arrive in our accounts in no...
Commented on Mediocrity
The reasons we may not have heard from ET are many, starting with the difficulties for physical travel not to mention separation from local bandwidth (as someone hereabouts speculated on before, I recall). Another recent proposition from the AstroBioSETI arm...
Commented on Geopolitics in the raw
Don't forget the gas! While he was still only the acting president, installed by Washington before his first (and more or less legitimate) election win, Hamid Karzai signed a deal to let a gas pipe cross Afghanistan [BBC News -...
Commented on Better news, I hope.
I was supposed to leave Tokyo for a holiday in Scotland on Saturday, needless to say I am similarly stuck here! So I'll see you in the pub......
Commented on Beer, Tokyo
I think I can make it along to that, count me in!...

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brucecohenpdx commented on Thought experiment
Also, let's be clear, the mechanisms of aging and senescence are common to a very large clade of animals (most of the Vertebrata at least, I would think; I'm not sure how much of an urban myth that story that some fish don't age is). It's got to be a relatively well-conserved genetic constellation, certainly one that will be functionally if not base-for-base identical in all humans....
Charlie Stross commented on Thought experiment
My prediction is that population control would fail, in a generation or two we would see massive numbers of people migrating out of high-birth-rate poor countries and a resulting series of wars. This didn't happen in China under the one-child-per-family laws. (Now largely rescinded, incidentally, because it turns out they've undergone a demographic transition and are now facing a Japanese-style ageing population.)...
vivtek commented on Thought experiment
I guess I'm way late to the party, but this is what finally induced me to start a comment. Charlie @ 91: It's possible that surviving 200-year-olds will have learned to take the long view. But I wouldn't bet serious money on it. Yeah - but you're, what, 40 years old? On the topic of memory: I've lived 44 and a half years so far, so I'm starting to see some changes in memory as time goes on. My wife and I have been married for 22 years - and there are things she remembers that I completely, and I...
Charlie Stross commented on Thought experiment
Yeah - but you're, what, 40 years old? On the topic of memory: I've lived 44 and a half years so far Youngster :) I'm inclined to agree about forgetting lots of stuff, but formative events and experiences hang around long after trivia has gone. For example, you probably can't remember what you ate last week (unless there was a significant meal out with friends, or you took some care to cook something unusual), but you almost certainly remember the meal on your wedding day. Reinforcement occurring shortly after a significant event causes it to be remembered better, so I...
brucecohenpdx commented on Thought experiment
I would expect to see a standard distribution in the longevity of corporations, with a mean not much different from what we see today (though the median might be much larger because there will be a very long tail). That's because the makeup of a company changes a great deal in the first few years of its existence as it goes from a startup or spinoff to a mature organization operating in a mature market. And in the course of that change different kinds of people will be attracted to work in it, certainly at the top levels, if not...

Responses to Comments from jamie.practicaluseful.com

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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