ffutures

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• Commented on So ...
  Sorry - re Shamrokon, I meant to say that it looks like it will be fun, I'm not posting via time tunnel!...
• Commented on So ...
  It seemed like a pretty good set of results - nothing I objected to anyway, you appear to be about 33% of my successful votes but the others were all pretty good so I'm not disappointed. I meant to say...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  Used Langford Fractal Parrot as a Livejournal user icon - for four years before enough people were affected to trigger alarms. If it had been Facebook the results might have been catastrophic......
• Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
  I for one welcome our new Planetary Supreme Overlord. Can this PLEASE be extended to darts too?...
• Commented on Checking in
  Orphan Black is reasonably well known amongst TV-watching fans even in the UK, I think, season 1 was shown on freeview terrestrial TV here. It's definitely an SF / technothriller (premise - someone produced a large number of clones of...
• Commented on Schadenfreude
  Well, that's not a huge surprise, on the whole. Be interesting to see what happens next. With gold, as with diamonds, there are some really cool things you could do with the stuff if it wasn't kept artificially scarce and...
• Commented on Miscellanea
  Re tank-driving elves - I take it that iron allergy isn't one of their problems? If it is, a few bags full of iron filings and a big fan would make a very nasty WMD... Re privatisation, don't forget the...
• Commented on Beer, Brooklyn NY, this Thursday
  Reminds me to ask, are you going to be at Picocon?...
• Commented on A Virtual Filmmaking Primer
  I don't have the talent or inclination to try this, but I do occasionally create illustrations for the RPGs I publish. One resource I've found particularly useful for anything involving space or space travel is the freeware program Celestia, which...
• Commented on Making history personal
  Live in - Victorian semi-detached house, circa 1855 - I used to think it was older but I'm reliably informed I'm wrong. Educated in - School buildings dating from 1794 onwards. Worked in - School buildings dated from 1792 onwards,...
• Commented on Spook Century
  Re governments spying on their friends - why are you surprised? A: The spy agencies have to keep busy to justify their budgets, and economic and political intelligence on allies is useful to their masters. B: It's easier, and probably...
• Commented on Spook Century
  Thanks for the link, that's a cool (if somewhat scary) app. BTW, it only shows up in the app store if you look for iphone apps, not iPad, if anyone else is having trouble finding it....
• Commented on (Flash fiction) A message from the Laundry public relations office
  I for one welcome the presence of our Reptoid overlords, and wish that they'd get on with taking over the world. They'd have to do a better job than most of the current governments......
• Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
  Re. columns: ebook readers smaller than say an iPad are fine for fiction and other documents with a continuous flow of text; mostly they're awful for documents that need to contain graphics, references, sidebar information, etc. I write RPG books,...
• Commented on Another deceptively simple question
  And if you go back to paper, John Garforth's Sleep and the City Trembles (Panther 1969) was an interesting predecessor of the "choose your own adventure" format, a programmed spy novel in which there were multiple viewpoint characters and scene...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  That's still a wide road (mostly 4+ lanes) and fairly light traffic. Re automation, text OCR is a mature technology by anyone's standards, as I think you'll agree. I use a recent OCR program, a good scanner, etc., and still...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  OK - I live in London so my perception of this may be different to someone who lives in rural USA. I am also cynical about the reliability of this stuff, if that wasn't already apparent. I should add that...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  Certain types of vehicle become increasingly unworkable on public roads - motorbikes, for example, will be VERY difficult to automate, as will the scooters that a lot of people rely on for transport in the 3rd world. We might see...
• Commented on Upcoming appearance: FutureFest in London
  I thought about going to this, then I found out it costs £36 per session (not per day - per session, e.g. half day, with no discount if you want more sessions), so I've decided to pass. Do they anticipate...
• Commented on Parasites
  Ringworm - a family of really successful fungal parasites which we will probably never wipe out, but aren't in themselves very dangerous....
• Commented on What have we learned?
  I think terrorists learned again what they always knew, which was that the disruption they cause is out of all proportion to the amount of damage. The 2007 London tube bombings did considerably less damage than the lightest night of...
• Commented on What have we learned?
  Also the first episode of Seven Days, which had a plane carrying (I think) a chemical weapon crash into the White House....
• Commented on Time tourism
  Unfortunately have to agree - one of the things I generally find myself writing into material for my Forgotten Futures RPG, which is based on Victorian and Edwardian SF etc., is that the cultures depicted in this fiction usually have...
• Commented on Sitrep
  Was that the hotel curry? I had it on Sunday and wasn't very impressed, but it didn't actually make me ill....
• Commented on Sitrep
  I'm guessing the timing is deliberate - they think more overseas visitors etc. will be interested in attending if they can catch two cons. My feeling on this, unfortunately, is that I really can't afford two big London cons a...
• Commented on Monarchy versus the Panopticon
  My blog post from Monday: Apparently the only important thing happening in the world this evening is that a heavily pregnant woman has gone into labour, possibly a day or two later than expected. Makes me wonder what was shuffled...
• Commented on We interrupt this broadcast ...
  Mine should have been delivered on Monday but I was out, so I ended up collecting it from the post office yesterday - it then emerged that Amazon had sent me two copies, the reason being I'd accidentally ordered it...
• Commented on In the pulp
  Many thanks - now ordered!...
• Commented on In the pulp
  Went to look on Amazon UK and they have the Euro-cover, which IMHO hits a few Freudian buttons of its own. Is there a link to it that gives you any additional kickback?...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  We only know about the Laundry - it's possible that there are other UK organisations that Bob isn't aware of that are just as bad as the Black Chamber. Just because Bob thinks he knows the score doesn't prove that...