Philippa Cowderoy

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• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Slavery is, alas, perfectly legal in a lot of the US - so long as you have your intended slave imprisoned for a criminal offence first....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  "Hey, I just put you in a coma for an arbitrary period of time but your body's fine - or at least I got you a perfectly decent replacement. We're good, right?"...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  While arguably a mild spoiler, it's worth mentioning that Newsflesh deals with the "is this human nature?" bit to some extent too. The entire mammalian population is effectively infected with the cycle of abuse from the cellular level on upwards,...
• Commented on Social architecture and the house of tomorrow
  The medication case is common enough, as are other disposal requirements - there'll be hazmat infrastructure in place, and moderately smart toilets that can be configured to read from really not very smart bracelets/etc. The moderately smart toilets will not...
• Commented on Social architecture and the house of tomorrow
  Don't think I'm positing no breakthroughs in regenerative medicine, just that it won't reduce usage to the point nobody cares. Powered chairs are another point in the general micromobility design space too, and if you've got regenerative medicine that still...
• Commented on Social architecture and the house of tomorrow
  Having at least one faraday cage room is either highly illegal or socially mandatory for many. If legal, they're also available as readily as booths in a café or restaurant. If illegal, the comms infrastructure is capable of detecting it...
• Commented on What do you know about my inner demons?
  Excession is merely the most blatant Culture story to point out that even Minds aren't credibly incorruptible, too. And of course, the consequences are terrifying when you think for a moment....
• Commented on The Labyrinth Index: sneak preview!
  "Please choose a less accurate codename"...
• Commented on The Labyrinth Index: sneak preview!
  We've seen that world with the elves. It doesn't work here because hardly anybody had the power before modern-day computing - a sorcerer might be able to control a few people, but sooner or later K Syndrome kicks in. You...
• Commented on The Nakamoto Variations
  Nakomoto is actually Ted Theodore Logan, looking to make money for band supplies. Only nobody knows this and he needs a lot of time to learn to play....
• Commented on The Nakamoto Variations
  Nakomoto's BtC encode the bootstrap for what we now call Roko's Basilisk. British agents must act to prevent temporal taxation with way too much representation....
• Commented on The Nakamoto Variations
  *fought, dammit. Though possibly not the most inappropriate of typos...
• Commented on The Nakamoto Variations
  1) Satoshi Nakomoto has foreseen Cold War 2 and the means by which it will be thought, and is trying to convince the social media and advertising giants to accept bitcoin. Unfortunately nobody knows which side Nakomoto is on. 2)...
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  The way things work, the fact you can use it for treatment in a guided environment is evidence it reaches the right places to cause when there's an inevitable SNAFU though. If you want to look at it another way:...
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  This is pretty much what I'm getting at with e-sports - as a spectator sport, the latest Street Fighter incarnation (let alone KOF XIII) is just not like actual martial arts at all. All the strategy is in how you're...
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  Survival horror haptics leading to diagnosed PTSD seems a likely one, too - especially as you really can't predict what'll mess you up until you're familiar with something....
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  I understand why it's an issue in VR (and I'm guessing the speed of players' strikes is fixed rather than based on how fast you move), but I always feel pretty snarky about 2D fighters where supposedly proficient strikers punch...
• Commented on From Here To The Holodeck
  I sometimes hear people talk about VR e-sports, and I have to admit I really don't think that's going to work well outside of things like RTS. Latency is a major issue when it comes to "players doing flashy things"...
• Commented on A bright and shiny hell
  Mobile (not smart) phones were the big deal for that. Line rental at home has always been a thing so it was a natural extension and offering the "rent-to-own"-style contract really did make them more accessible right until the cheap...
• Commented on A bright and shiny hell
  Take "always" in its milder hyperbolic form (compare and contrast with "everyday") and normalise for population density so you're talking about people rather than landmass covered: does it still seem that implausible? I'd be entirely unsurprised if major cities get...
• Commented on A bright and shiny hell
  Could be worse: were I in that position I'd be charging the shaver from my phone/tablet via USB OTG!...
• Commented on A bright and shiny hell
  It's possible with a modicum of conscious effort or plain practice to tell whether a sound's coming from approximately level or significantly above you. And the level of obtrusiveness a drone's measured against is frequently that of a significant number...
• Commented on A bright and shiny hell
  Yes, you're coming from the wrong end. The bigger total battery capacity buys you not having to think much about when to charge: if you're on the move a lot, having to find a socket on arrival and unplug when...
• Commented on A bright and shiny hell
  The problem with blockchains for voting is that we've yet to see a cipher survive a voting lifespan since general hardware computers came into being. So if the blockchain itself ever leaks (which is basically a certainty), you now have...
• Commented on Book day!
  As a quick point: CASE NIGHTMARE * => Bob and Mo losing each other. We'll never know how much they care about everyone else unless something is actually worth losing each other for. Eldritch parasites effectively feed on the threat...
• Commented on The World of Tomorrow
  Somewhere on the way, any kind of intersectionality gets dubbed an "extremist ideology" by at least one major western government because it's a challenge to divide&conquer and the usual media bullshit alone isn't working. There's a generation of disabled adults...
• Commented on Traveller RPG, Firefly, Dumarest, Vatta's War... are they all "Star Punk"?
  Yeah, I learned to have more than one hobby even if there's knowledge crossover! I even appear to be using different ones to respond to different unpleasant exes... Then again, I'm way past "enough stress to work" and into "too...
• Commented on Traveller RPG, Firefly, Dumarest, Vatta's War... are they all "Star Punk"?
  Lucky! I think it's fair to say that it's into hit territory given how long it's been running and how much the budget keeps growing (comparing the anime of Bakemonogatari to Tsukimonogatari, say) rather than being yet another chancer "cute...
• Commented on Traveller RPG, Firefly, Dumarest, Vatta's War... are they all "Star Punk"?
  Netflix have licensed Bebop, and it's accessible to considerably older audiences given its own influences. It's also still the go-to gateway anime in a lot of communities, not least because the English dub is still the usual end of argument...
• Commented on The light at the end of the tunnel (is not necessarily an oncoming train)
  Ships hang around a long time and have Minds of their own - they might not have just the one type, but they're going to end up with types just as a means of social navigation....