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Comment Threads

• Greg. Tingey commented on I, Singularity...
  anonemouse @ 140 "Because Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov are out of print and impossible to find. " WRONG There were "classic-SF" reprints available at the British Library exhibition I mentioned elsewhere.; Google Amazon, or something. It just ain't so ..... Charlie @ 144 Let's not forget the supression of Suttee, whilst we are at it. (?) Dirk Bruere @ 150 Not so sure. Ive read and re-read "Hitler & Stalin, Parallel Lives" (by the late Alan Bullock) several times, and there was a LOT more in common between those tyrants. Mao, of course was attempting to emulate the "first...
• brucecohenpdx commented on I, Singularity...
  I think the notion of the unique individual is more about a commonly held myth than about the way societies actually function. A good part of the reason for those myths (we could call them "the zeitgeist", or "the accepted wisdom" if you prefer) is that the cost of constantly re-inventing the mechanisms of government is very high, and often too high, on top of the cost of non- or extra-legal succession, for the new government to get things running again before someone else decides to grab the levers. So we have the "divine right of kings", coupled with some...
• Moderator Alan commented on I, Singularity...
  Greg occasionally types 'a href+' instead of 'a href='. The result looks like a link, but isn't. You should find it works now....
• Charlie Stross commented on I, Singularity...
  Er, no. The NIF is nothing to do with generating commercial electricity and everything to do with keeping the US nuclear weapons stockpile viable -- which is where AWE (the Atomic Weapons Establishment) comes into the picture. NIF runs a single fusion pellet through its beam line every couple of months. Each pellet costs around $0.25M. It produces a tenth as much output energy as the input to the lasers. To make a viable reactor, they'd need each pellet to cost around 25 cents, be running them through at once per second, and produce 2 orders of magnitude more energy....
• Charlie Stross commented on I, Singularity...
  You are wrong. (However, it's not for me to tell you precisely how I know you're wrong.)...