Ian Mackenzie

Ian Mackenzie

  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
    Thank you for that. It's the first actual Gillies Report that I have seen. Still on target after all these years. Much Appreciated, Ian....
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
    In the spirit of morbid humour... Surely the people with big red buttons have learned the lesson of Maralinga: If you want to render an area rapidly (and lastingly, on a decadal scale) uninhabitable, wrap your physics package in cobalt...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
    Mr Stross. The Government has received your documentary on 21st Century Britain, amusingly titled "The New Management". One adjudicator was concerned that having rich wives present the severed heads of their spouses to the Prime Minister would be unsanitary, but...
  • Commented on Do my Laundry
    Bad Tavern name? How about: Toilet to Tap (may be trademarked by privatised water co)...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    We're well past comment 300 so, I was wondering if anyone had filked the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" to update it yet. (Moderators please delete this post if not appropriate). This is a first cut: [Verse 1:] God...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    "Read an alt-history where instead of issuing a blanket pardon for Nixon, Ford issued a pardon with "This is what we know he did, this is what we suspect he did. We're pardoning him for all of that." Which was...
  • Commented on Necroqueen!
    Long explosion: I was meaning a significant length (ie, multiple kilometres) of pipeline exploding in some way due to fuel-air ignition & propagation, with obvious (extended) pipe rupture. And not a single point where external explosives were detonated to rupture...
  • Commented on Necroqueen!
    IMHO: I think that if you had a LONG fuel-air mixture that decides to go voom, then the seismic signature would be very different (ie, longer, and more like an earthquake where ~100km of fault gives way) from a localised...
  • Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
    My copy arrived this afternoon from the Book Suppository (now a tentacle of $EVIL_RIVER, unfortunately) It's a great read. I will have to re-read it in context now, of course :-) A copy-reading glitch I found on page 14 of...
  • Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE
    What would I like a rump Scottish parliament to do? Well............. (note tongue completely in cheek for this post) There's an awful temptation to suggest that they declare that the United Kingdom of Scotland (aka Scotland And Not England (SANE))is...
  • Commented on Typo Hunt: The Labyrinth Index
    Not so much a typo as a physics glitch - TOR hardback, page 127: [Slide 11] Lunar space elevator (Project Moonstalk) goes from the lunar south pole to L1. The Lunar South Pole is ~88 degrees away from the closest...
  • Commented on 2117 revisited
    "With 7nm processes on the horizon (and atoms on the order of 1-3nm across)" I think you mean 1-3 angstroms (1A = 0.1nm) for atom size/bond length. Still not many atoms across a 7nm wide wire, but it gives IC...
  • Commented on The light at the end of the tunnel (is not necessarily an oncoming train)
    Hopefully culturally unambiguous ship names you don't want to meet: Recreational Genocide It's no longer a planet It was only a LITTLE supernova... Organicide No Living Enemies Dead Organics Have No Legal Standing Brane Collision Extinction Event...
  • Commented on I can't keep up
    Hi Greg, Might I suggest investing in a no-name USB keyboard? - it has TWO page-down keys, and, at a cost of single-digit pounds, can assist you in lowering your stress levels by deliberately going past and ignoring Seagull output....
  • Commented on Evolver
    Just for fun - note tongue in cheek: This comes about because someone has an ... unexpected ... success in uplifting cats with opposable claws and tells them that being a humanitarian is a good thing. They run out of...
  • Commented on Empire Games
    I had the numbers because I thought the ones who put the quantum dots into the group of humans and gave them the first toy (knot) could move through the vast multidimensional space that a knot-user who starts at a...
  • Commented on Empire Games
    My take on the knots and world-addressing... Each world is designated by a sequence of numbers (eg, 3, 76, 230, -17, -84, 0, 0, 0) Each knot multiplies one of the numbers that applies to the person's locality by -1....
  • Commented on Nightmare Stacks competition results ...
    Congratulations to all the winners. I'm flattered that you liked ETLA2 - it seemed like a useful utility for the Laundry - especially to avoid information leakage about existing code names. The idea was initially sparked by the previous competition...
  • Commented on The unspeakable truth
    I thought NZ was the informal post-apocalyptic meetup (at least according to commanders of US nuclear subs)?? Rather lacking in amenities compared to a functioning europe, though....
  • Commented on Competition Time!
    Note: not first entry - just for amusement Designation: BUZZWORD SALAD Purpose: Informavore defense Deployment: BUZZWORD SALAD relies on the metabolism of the informavore: it feeds on free energy (nucleons with non-maximal binding energy, strained nitrogen bonds, etc) and the...
  • Commented on Competition Time!
    Name: Cthulhu Denial Hastur Bypass Nyarlathotep Negation Classification: Rate-Limited Challenge-Reponse Universal Authentication protocol Deployment: CDHBNN functions as a hyperspherically meta denial of service (1)(2) to those of a different universe. In effect, the entire universe is used as a one-time...
  • Commented on Competition Time!
    Name: Special K Super-L Classification: Lethal Anti-Super weapon Deployment: Some Supers will put the Laundry Operative in the unenviable situation of having to deal with a Super who is both a clear, present, and immediate danger to the public or...
  • Commented on Competition Time!
    Name: Norm-L Classification: Non-Lethal Anti "Super" weapon Deployment: The rise of abnormal abilities in random individuals from the general population - so called "Supers" - has, unfortunately, put significant personal power in the possession of a small percentage of people...
  • Commented on Competition Time!
    Name: Wire Brush Of Enlightenment Classification: Educational tool Deployment: A worryingly high number of Laundry Operatives, when faced with the opportunity to engage in an occult activity, will act as if they believe that normal safety procedures do not apply...
  • Commented on Competition Time!
    Name: Fe-Lin Classification: Short to medium range weapon. Deployment: Due to events involving CASE NIGHTMARE SPECTRUM, our universe has recently been subject to invasion by Hostile Irom-Sensitive Entities (HISE). These entities are believed to consist of at least one species...
  • Commented on Competition Time!
    Name: ETLA2 Classification: Laundry Admin staff only Description: ETLA2 (Replaces ETLA GENERATOR) is a utility for generating acceptable Laundry codenames. It can be requested to produce names amenable to grouping (eg CASE NIGHTMARE ZETTAELECTRONVOLT and CASE NIGHTMARE ATTOHERTZ), and will...
  • Commented on FAQ: The Laundry Files--series timeline
    To clarify my sentence above: If we're going to have a future, then I would prefer one where the flavour of one's sexuality is a bad predictor for life-happiness. There seems no need to choose a future that's even more...
  • Commented on FAQ: The Laundry Files--series timeline
    I'm pretty sure that writing stuff for my tastes would be too small a market, but... I don't see any reason for LGBT characters to have a problem with their sexual orientation. And I don't think that had anything to...
  • Commented on Deploying the monomyth in Space Opera
    SO with Alien Space Bats eh? Hmmmmmm... Alien Space B(r)at has an attack of Dunning-Kruger syndrome and has to bail out over unnamed earth city (1) ASB discovers that the subset of local bipeds totally devoted to greed and self-interest...
  • Commented on Repurposing Memory
    Hi Dirk, When you say "If you posit a sufficiently large multiverse then with finite computation it is possible to reconstruct anyone from arbitrarily small amounts of information.", I have a question or three... Are you saying that your computation...
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