Adam Rice

Comment Threads

• mhd commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRiver_H300_series That's way too tiny. You gotta go at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series Portable devices weren't really that rare, it's all about ubiquity and use cases. I mean, the short wave of "wearable computing" would fall partially in the deviation point of this timeline, with MIT ultra-nerds carrying "small" computers on slings, using weird one-handed keyboards to control them and monokular displays to augment their daily lives with the power of Emacs or whatever... With no internet file-sharing beyond comp.sources.* to speak of, my thoughts went to Cuban-style sneakernets, where all the latest streaming seasons are regularly traded via portable hard...
• Charlie Stross commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  My guess is that a Clipper chip mandatory roll-out would be followed a few years later by a highly embarrassing exploit in the wild, caused by someone working for a foreign state-level actor's crypto agency deciding that Being Rich was better than Being Patriotic and filching a zero-day. At which point the backdoor keys baked into semiconductors would render the entire system useless, so the banks and other crypto-dependent parties would hastily roll out non-backdoored software cryptography protocols (ahem: see also SSL) that could be layered on top of a Clipper-compromised link with no loss of security. And the Five...
• Guy Rixon commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  "And on a side note, I started watching the TV series last night about the Horizon accounting system scandal at the UK (English?) Post Office. Is/was it as bad as the TV series makes it out to be?" It's worse. Since that series aired (and long since the series was filmed) there have been more revelations of utter fuckery. Essentially, those directly driving the prosecutions knew damn well that they were false, but proceeded anyway and then obstructed any process that might show their prosecution to be wrong. Those in Royal Mail (who were the parent company of Post Office...
• anonemouse commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  ...am I misreading, or does the Archos' capacity not top out where the iRiver starts (20GB)? I knew people who took the completely reasonable attitude that iRivers were a box around a hard drive + firmware, so took it apart and stuck in the highest capacity hard drive that'd fit......
• Robert Prior commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  for sure, lessened opportunity to edit it towards a deliberate political agenda? Maybe, but don't bet on it. Your own government (and media) did an excellent job of controlling the narrative during the Gulf Wars and after 9/11. I don't think "national hysteria" is too strong a term, especially when compared to, say, Britain during the IRA bombing campaign. If we're going for alternate history, maybe we could have America actually learn something about terrorism by observing other countries and rather than repeating their mistakes try to copy their successes?...