KineticLensman

KineticLensman

  • Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
    On the subject of training, another big infrastructure constraint is the training estate. The ‘obvious’ parade grounds where soldiers learn to march during their initial / basic training are only a small part of this. Much more significant are the...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
    Charlie, I really enjoyed Season of Skulls and liked Eve as a protagonist. I remember thinking that in some ways Eve's experiences were very like Miriam Beckstein's, notably the modern woman in a patriarchal society, arranged marriages, boring coach journeys,...
  • Commented on Pass or Fail
    There's all the speculation about whether, in the case of execution by guillotine, the head remains conscious for any significant amount to time needed to experience the physical distance from the body; I suppose less gruesomely, how long perception can...
  • Commented on Normal service will be resumed eventually
    Very sorry to hear about your loss. I love your writing and this blog but I'm very pleased you are putting your recovery first....
  • Commented on Typo Hunt: The Labyrinth Index
    Yes, they are mixed up. MI6 - the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) - is the FCO's intelligence service. MI5 is the Home Secretary's Security Service, and does UK domestic counter-intelligence. "In the UK, SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, does the...
  • Commented on Publishing: A Slice of Life
    There are open source phishing toolkits available on GitHub (let alone the dark net) so the technical barriers to entry (for the scammers) are now very low. And I'm guessing that typical publishing houses (which are not exactly critical national...
  • Commented on Sitrep
    Colonel Kilgore? Is that you? My how you've grown. // Apologies to OGH...
  • Commented on Sitrep
    the people with deep pockets who seem most interested are the military The BigDog project was canned in 2015 because the Marine Corps decided that it was too noisy, would be difficult to repair in the field and didn't...
  • Commented on The Nakamoto Variations
    Sorry, but Satoshi Nakamoto as Doreen Green just doesn't work. Satoshi Nakamoto is obviously Monkey Joe, Squirrel Girl’s squirrel sidekick, who as per Wikipedia is ‘adept in the use of computers’. Just before Monkey Joe’s demise at the hands of...
  • Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
    Taking for granted that the gadget tech will work, what about the issue of 'world-ownership', i.e. ownership (and policing) of the virtual spaces that people plug into with the gadgets. Taking social media and IoT as examples of how things...
  • Commented on Bread and Circuses (circumlunar version)
    Yes, exactly. The only credible use case is a Fithp invasion...
  • Commented on Bread and Circuses (circumlunar version)
    Why couldn't North Korea create an old school Orion Nuclear Pulse space craft, and how soon could they launch it? It's old school vapourware (chemical explosive demonstrators not withstanding) with some very exciting failure modes. You need a very...
  • Commented on 2117 revisited
    and let the mad hackers loose on them Okay, it only involves 1000s of cores rather than millions, but this is essentially what has happened with NVidia GPUs being re-purposed as deep-learning engines, and now explicitly sold as such...
  • Commented on 2117 revisited
    Going back to the original question: Intergenerational issues. Is it a fair assumption that current generational patterns will still be extant and that if so they might impact language use? As per the Greg Bear Eon references way upstream, people...
  • Commented on The light at the end of the tunnel (is not necessarily an oncoming train)
    GCU Thrown Teddy...
  • Commented on Reality is broken
    Aha! Hence the frankly preposterous cover up for the recent fire at Allenby Barracks, Bovington (some Forces TV / Daily Mail nonsense about junior officers duelling with flare pistols). Obviously the dragons returning from the gunnery school at Lulworth....
  • Commented on What are you reading this summer?
    "Digital Apollo" by David Mindell. The central question examined by the book is "Who should control the flight: the astronauts, the guidance computer, or mission control"? The book has some great insights into real rocket science, and the clashes between...
  • Commented on Competition Time!
    CODENAME: VISCERATE REALITY CLASSIFICATION: JOLLY-SENSITIVE, Laundry eyes-only BACKGROUND: Although RIFT OF OCCULUS [Ref 2] showed considerable early promise, the hand signals used by ROO lusers to interact via MS Kinect with entities in the virtual environment unfortunately resembled a set...
  • Commented on Some notes on world building
    'Plucky Britain' could 'stand alone' only if it could rely on massive resources, esp. food from its colonies. Well yes, but the people who would care about that detail aren't the target demographic for my tongue-in-cheek alt-history novel proposal....
  • Commented on Some notes on world building
    There has to be some sort of "Worldwar: In the balance" variant here... WWII, 1940: Plucky Britain stands alone. But strange alien interference takes out Chain Home Low. The Spitfires are wiped out on the ground. The Martians land in...
  • Commented on Some notes on world building
    "Lonabar, in the Second Galaxy." Close, but they also exported exotic dancing, if I recall correctly....
  • Commented on But it's not April 1st yet!
    Okay, how about "VR is still an April fool, AR is the story that you aren't really sure about"...
  • Commented on But it's not April 1st yet!
    2-3 years down the line and it'll all be VR/AR interface. AR/VR are definitely Aprils Fools (as I think you are suggesting :-) ). I think that VR and AR will at best diversify and extend the PC space...
  • Commented on Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
    once a biometric authentification factor is compromised, there is no way to repudiate and replace that factor Remember that the stored biometric data is a function of the input data (e.g. a fingerprint retina scan) AND the algorithm used to...
  • Commented on Brief interlude
    Is Leeds the one that doesn't have a twin town, but is in a suicide pact with Grimsby? Disclaimer: lived in Leeds for eight years, initially as a student, very cautious about going anywhere near Elland Road....
  • Commented on Deploying the monomyth in Space Opera
    Awesome! Although what the Imperium hasn't realized is that switching genres to Cyberpunk will allow the wife (deactivated but still deadly tech ninja assassin) to join the fight...
  • Commented on Defining space opera
    So, I checked out the intro to the 1974 Aldiss collection ‘Space Opera’. He put it thus: “Science Fiction is a big muscular creature, with a mass of bristling antennae and proprioceptors on its skull. It has a smaller sister,...
  • Commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
    Actually, now I think about it, wasn't the Apollo 13 problem caused by a malfunction in some part of the service module's fluid infra? I just wanted to pick up on Apollo 13 because it illustrates some of the...
  • Commented on What Goes Around...
    The classic romance industry (e.g. Mills and Boon) doesn't so much have low quality control as the expectation of an undemanding product. In fact they have seem to have a well-defined checklist for desired content, with variations for contemporary, historical,...
  • Commented on What Goes Around...
    Interesting question. I wondered whether one way to test the trend would be to: 1) collect a representative corpus of fantasy fiction from the last few decades 2) read them all and determine whether each passes an equivalent of the...
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