sfx

Recent Actions

• Commented on Covid on Mars
  Well, I don't know, it's a wild card... ideally it's true, there shouldn't be any firearms in the hands of civilians on Mars. There might be non-projectile weapons for police forces, maybe? But then, ideally, there also shouldn't be any...
• Commented on Covid on Mars
  I'd say, hard lockdown right away, as others already said. Looking globally, there are a number of countries that clamped down the infections pretty well and got it under control mostly (many Asian countries, Australia, NZ). What they got right:...
• Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
  Exactly - renewable energy storage becomes a solved problem as soon as electric cars become wide-spread. It's ironic how often one reads "renewables don't work, as we can't store it!!" and "electric vehicles are bogus, if you run them on...
• Commented on Social architecture and the house of tomorrow
  Drone goods delivery is stupid and impractical in densely populated urban areas; the only niche application for it I can see is to speed up deliveries in suburban and exurban areas. I agree. Railguns are much better and faster :)...
• Commented on Social architecture and the house of tomorrow
  A bit late to the party... Regarding the topic of "dwellings in 100 years": Looking at rising house prices, increasing population, urbanisation, wipe-out of coastal cities, etc., plus the widespread adoption of VR replacing the need for physical space with...
• Commented on The Inevitable Brexit Thread (2)
  My company is going to a major annual trade show in the UK next week. As every year, we were planning on driving a van across from the mainland, with all our exhibition gear. Last year, standing in Dover waiting...
• Commented on Three pieces of news about the Laundry Files (UPDATED!)
  "As many authors have discovered the hard way, their readers are fans of their best-known series, not fans of their work in general: spin-offs have a very hit-or-miss reputation." Out of curiosity, what is the approximate ratio of sales (or...
• Commented on Publishing: A Slice of Life
  Interesting to hear your experience as a professional. Some things matter, some don't at all. The funniest experience was a sales guy trying to convince me to buy a fancy 0.5m optical TOSlink cable for $100, instead of the $10...
• Commented on Publishing: A Slice of Life
  Your examples are valid, but suffer from confirmation bias: you're not taking into account all the failed predictions yes, yes, that's very true... if one could accurately predict which SF writer will have happened to predict the future (and...
• Commented on Publishing: A Slice of Life
  (mmh, somehow half my previous comment disappeared... bad cables?) was going to say: I'd think that pro-audio protocols would use forward error correction (FEC) to combat bit errors - much cheaper to use some software redundancy than relying on fancy...
• Commented on Publishing: A Slice of Life
  oh, ok - I assumed this was about "fancy" CAT5 cables for audiophile extremists (the people who would spend thousands on a rock, if told that it somehow improves quantum coherence in the oxygen-free brain of the listener...) I did...
• Commented on Publishing: A Slice of Life
  another theory: Maybe someone has identified SF writers as eerily good predictors of future political events. Tor was apparently not a target so they're not onto you yet, but who are William Gibson or Bruce Sterling with? Getting early access...
• Commented on Publishing: A Slice of Life
  I fully understand, and I didn't mean to criticize or push buttons. It was intended as a joke, and more a comment on my own inability to put down books (or trilogies, for that matter) once I start them... Patience...
• Commented on Publishing: A Slice of Life
  My guess: that's what you get for writing mean cliffhangers. When I finished book 2 of the Merchant Princes, I went "WHAAAAT?!? YOU CAN'T STOP HERE!" so loudly at 2am that I woke up my partner, who then promptly bought...
• Commented on The Nakamoto Variations
  Satoshi Nakamoto is an emergent AI that came into existence on a D-Wave quantum computer, and depends on NP-hard algorithms (problems where recognising a correct answer is easy, but finding the answer is a matter of non-deterministically looking at a...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  As a non-native English speaker, I fully agree - pronouncing english words is mostly a guessing game. There's a nice poem summarising it perfectly, which you might already know: I take it you already know Of tough and bough and...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  People don't want to read new. People are... funny. (Tim Minchin) But are the complaints about scifi in this post really about scifi these days, or just plainly about bad books? Lazy worldbuilding and unrealistic tropes also exist in other...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  Thanks for your comments and recommendations re. Egan. I heard his name pop up a lot when asking about hard sci-fi, and this was the first I read, so I was a bit disappointed - it just seemed to leave...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  (See "Singularity Sky" for my take on that subgenre: it's all fun and games until Admiral Hornblower runs into a cold-war hunter-killer SSN ...) oooh, loved that bit - although once looked at this way, ruined most space battles for...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  An additional thought regarding world building in general: I think to build up the "grit" that makes the world look real requires that the author has a very good understanding of how this fictional world works on all levels, but...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  Putting rocket fins on a Cadillac didn't turn it into a spaceship But apparently putting rockets on a roadster did... Not a very practical one though. (Sorry, got distracted by that whole "billionaire is about to send a sports car...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  I actually did, recently (permutation city), but it didn't work for me at all. I didn't get/buy how the virtual world keeps going after being shut down. What is it supposed to be running on? I was holding out to...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  It's not so bad - I think I have another Neal Book that I haven't read yet, and that might just be long enough to bridge the time until Ghost Engine comes out... and since the Merchant Princes series is...
• Commented on Nom de Teleport
  “I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg Ron stole Meggy's heart away and I got Sidney's leg.” (Douglas Adams, The restaurant at the end of the universe")...
• Commented on The sky's gone dark
  just to clarify - drones will always be better for low-altitude, ultra-high resolution imaging - but you can't operate continuously below the stratosphere, and you can't span the entire globe economically. Low-flying drones are for on-demand applications - I think...
• Commented on The sky's gone dark
  That really depends what ends up cheaper. Of course drones exist and can work, but often just one technology dominates the market, and other technologies decline and can't be ramped up in weeks (but maybe in months or years). Solar...
• Commented on The sky's gone dark
  Another thought - I'm no expert, but I have trouble imagining a Kessler event at some altitude affecting many other orbits (e.g. LEO objects would probably not scatter to geostationary, etc.). But say, if there are international agreements to open...
• Commented on The sky's gone dark
  You're absolutely right about farmers embracing technology - that's why I picked this example, because I found it more difficult to find another scenario that would directly depend on technology with potentially dire consequences if it fails. I personally know...
• Commented on The sky's gone dark
  "Connection lost". Refresh. Nothing. Crap. Joe was having a bad day. It all started slowly a few weeks ago, occasional outages of live image feeds, harvesters going astray due to bad position data, but now it was all blacked out....