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• Charlie Stross commented on If I had a Billion Dollars
  Sean the Mystic: this is your yellow card. In case you don't know what that means, I refer you to the moderation policy before you post again. Hint: I own this blog, I haz a political flavr, and you just shat in my cheetos. More to the point, you were rude. Maybe you were being ironic, in which case, no problem. But to my nostrils, it reeked of fightin' talk. And I've got a simple way of dealing with that: I ban you and delete your comments....
• Charlie Stross commented on If I had a Billion Dollars
  Hmm. There are a couple of places I'd spend most of a billion euros. One is where Bill Gates is already going: finding vaccines for the eight commonest childhood diseases in the tropics. They kill millions a year, but the vaccine project isn't profitable so there's no real incentive for big pharma to go there. Come up with cheap vaccines and the governments of the countries where they're endemic will pay; the toll on human resources is phenomenal, and coming up with cures will, within a decade, add tens of millions of young adult workers (in addition to alleviating immense...
• Charlie Stross commented on If I had a Billion Dollars
  Alex: nuclear reactors, by their nature, are heat engines: they need somewhere to dump lots of waste heat in order to satisfy the laws of thermodynamics. In practice, this results in them being built on rivers (big ones) or coastlines -- mostly coastlines. What is the cost of a mega-tsunami hitting a nuclear reactor complex, overflowing the flood defenses, and kicking the backup generators to run the cooling systems offline? Couldn't happen, could it? Frankly, figuring out how to deflect tsunamis away from already-operating and vulnerable BWRs may be the only way we can convince the general public that these...
• john.ohno commented on If I had a Billion Dollars
  I would probably put it into a fairly undirected PARC-type deal: find smart, driven people who can't sit still for more than a few hours without coming up with cool ideas, and pay them. PARC was, economically, a disaster -- XEROX never put much of their stuff into production -- but nevertheless it had a major impact on tech because of the way unassociated groups would look at and copy the ideas. In this way, PARC is rather like Project Xanadu, and had either been more profit-driven or less blue-sky (or less profit-driven or more blue-sky for that matter) they...
• Charlie Stross commented on If I had a Billion Dollars
  Speaking of vertical farms ......