Bellinghman

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• Commented on Admin notice: server crash
  I do so hope you actually meant 'veracity' there....
• Commented on Admin notice: server crash
  Hooray! (LiveJournal right now is showing me a picture of a goat. If anyone ever hoped 'the whole of the Internet' could be up at the same time, they should long since have been disabused.)...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  I've always taken it as being the truth, with the Mythos per se being a distorted reflection filtered through a layer of unreliable narration tainted by misinformation and outright insanity, and then reassembled by a bunch of conspiracy theorists trying...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  And it's that, allied with effectively limitless raw computing power, which would be scary. Heck, the alternate approach of simulating a brain's neurons, but being able to do so at any speed multiplier you like, and with many more neurons...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  It seems a profound lack of imagination to use a time machine to make your computer work better. What, even when they're seemingly infinitely better? Even when they become Godlike AIs? (To reliably reset reality is probably going to require...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Ah, historical accident. I (well, actually my wife) was one of the subscribers to Ben's publishing venture, and we were looking forward to FoF. I wonder whether if Big Engine had survived that extra couple of months and had managed...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  Damn, but a set of trainers was so cheap these days, thought Gaz. Gone the days of Far Eastern sweat shops sewing them together — these days, you poured a couple of pounds of plastics into your printer, selected the...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  I was rather impressed by the echoes of WJW's The Praxis....
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Okay, so the reason we don't hear of them being used in that role was not that they couldn't be, but that they mostly just weren't? Hmm, in-flight refuelling was a viable technology at the time, and one that would...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  I was aware of the VLR B-24 Liberators (a rather different aircraft in many ways from the B-24s that were bombing Europe). I wasn't aware there was a B-17 equivalent....
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  On the subject of hitting submarines, you can't just switch your heavy bomber force over to attacking submarines. To take out submarines, you need either to take out the submarine pens, or you need to hunt down the submarines and...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  How about, instead of saying there was this guy who patented the nuclear bomb, you actually point us at a source? (Your apparent inability to name the most famous physicist of all time didn't help you credibility.) For instance, Leó...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Ahem. If you're going to post gibberish interspersed with wild statements, perhaps, instead of saying "I've read repeatedly", you could actually manage a citation. Just the one. Just this once. (Oh, and from a credible source, given that if you...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  I've sailed from Hiroshima. Admittedly, that was a short-hop ferry to Miyajima from the far west of the city, not from the port, and you can still see Hiroshima from the other end of that crossing. Hiroshima is a coastal...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  None. You're positing replacing a now known and costed (though very expensive) technology with an unknown one, in order to save money. If there's one lesson from the history of UK defence procurement, it's that trying to solve a problem...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  lower cost ways of having the capability/deterrence (like putting them in orbit) You keep making this assertion. Calling it 'cheaper' when you're going to need a shuttle program to go up and collect the things for servicing is a little...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  I recall seeing Jordin Kare giving a presentation on that laser back in ... 2009. With all due respect to him (and he's the husband of a friend), I think it's a solution that's gone looking for a problem when...
• Commented on Forthcoming UK Audio Books
  'Extreme'? Perhaps if it's only the meal itself. But 'going over to the parents for lunch' could quite easily involve leaving after a leisurely breakfast, starting back in the late afternoon, and spending a few hours there. I'd reckon that...
• Commented on Forthcoming UK Audio Books
  Not only decent public transport, but also a compact country whose regional accents can be crammed cheek by jowl. As it happens, Bob is a Norwich lad. His original broad accent is actually quite hard for a Londoner to untangle...
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  The proliferation of CCTV (not nearly as prevalent in the US as the UK, from what I understand) may be helpful If there's one thing more prone to be derailed by new technologies than SF, it's the detective and police...
• Commented on The Fumes of Mordor & Other World Building Models
  So how much did you use this for the setting of the landside parts of The Bohr Maker? I identified that setting as probably South East Asia somewhere, but I'm now wondering whether it was one of your mutated Hawaiis....
• Commented on Obituaries
  There's a surprisingly thoughtful piece by Russell Brand in the Guardian, giving a perspective from the point of view of one of 'Thatcher's Children'. (I may have to reassess the man.)...
• Commented on Brief note: drinks, Wednesday 17th, Kuala Lumpur
  Our gay Flemish friend who's living in KL with his Malaysian fiancée is a bit peeved not to be able to make it. (Said fiancée dislikes the taste of alcohol, though we've tried all sorts of things on him, including...
• Commented on Why I Do Self-Publish
  I dread to think what Douglas Adams would have done with self publishing. He was always prone to dancing with a deadline - I imagine that if he'd been into SP, he'd have spent a lot of time tinkering with...
• Commented on Obituaries
  Even the final Rover 75 is nice. My MG-ZT (which is mostly a 75, with different trim and some tweaking) is a very nice long distance cruiser, able to drive from Southern Germany to Southern England without me feeling dead...
• Commented on New Guest Blogger: Linda Nagata
  Since Charlie highlighted that in the introduction, I suspect you may get an answer to that. Remember that his recent article was "Why I don't self-publish". Not why anyone else shouldn't, though certain members of the commentariat seemed to have...
• Commented on A message from our UK sponsors
  I finally got round to reading Rapture last week (an import edition that's been hanging around for ages on the wrong shelf in the wrong room, hence it wasn't staring at me from the to-read shelves). Insane fun. I have...
• Commented on New Guest Blogger: Linda Nagata
  Welcome Linda. I read The Bohr Maker during the just-gone Easter weekend and enjoyed it immensely - and I can see from that book why Charlie was so impressed by your work. I look forward to your posts here. (Scrabbles...
• Commented on Mitochondrial Singularity
  No, I didn't expect it to be about oil. I expected it to be about consumption, and the case in Iceland is that they're not consuming it themselves, they're exporting it as much as they can. It's because their method...
• Commented on Mitochondrial Singularity
  That table is a little misleading in some ways - the top consumer being Iceland is due to the fact that they run almost entirely on renewable energy, a mix of hydro and geothermal. They have so much renewable energy...