hairyears

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• Commented on So ...
  More congratulations! Now, should I... (a) Swing by Reddit and see what all the nice young men have said about Kameron Hurley's Hugos (and whoever came below 'No Award'); or (b) See what John Scalzi has to say about it?...
• Commented on Holding pattern
  I look forward to a chapter consisting entirely of: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" A question for the literary geeks out there: are there obvious signifiers - in-jokes, coded phrases, quotes from [redacted] multipart fantasy...
• Commented on Loncon 3: Charlie's worldcon schedule
  In answer to jonathan.lennox42, I will be a panellist on The Ruling Party. I might do a little research on common economic motivations of successive cabinet ministers: I do not claim to be an expert, and I may yield my...
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  What if the 3-5 years' pain with a 20-40% income cut turns out to be a 98% cut in income for the rest of your life, with that 2% constantly under threat from your monopoly distributor - who owns the...
• Commented on One week to go to THE RHESUS CHART
  Preordered and eagerly awaited. Anything planned at WorldCon, to further raise the profile?...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  The terms of the enquiry are as follows: Identify the means by which [REDACTED] persuaded two of our graduate trainees and a seconded consultant from [COMMERCIAL CONFIDENTIALITY APPLIES] plc to engage in a practical demonstration of 'intensive animal rearing techniques'...
• Commented on Crass commercial interlude
  Mugs, mugs, mugs: are we all workmen? Why is there no Nyarlathoteacup?...
• Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
  Not all the newspapers: there's always the Financial Times. They got me through the Dead Diana squelchfest by reporting Day 3 of the national outpouring of grief with four short paragraphs on an inside page under the headline: "Significant rise...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors
  Ta. Duly pre-ordered. Waterstones' site isn't as bad as some, but they make it very clear that online sales are not a priority to senior managers, and that Amazon are welcome to remain the market leaders for ease of use...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors
  Time for a stupid question: how do I pre-order this book? Bonus marks for bypassing Amazon. And yeah, I could probably find a link to do that myself. As a fan, I have the motivation; but making it easy is...
• Commented on Interstitial note
  Blowing up planets, plural. Difficult: they're built to last. Reading the comments, I like the idea of using the polar jet of an active black hole: that's just about the most destructive thing I know that remains within known physics...
• Commented on Lighting up again
  For your gothic horror novel of 21st-Century employment practices: read about a taxpayer-subsidised financial instrument that makes employees more profitable dead than alive: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-28/guest-post-suspicious-deaths-bankers-are-now-classified-trade-secrets-federal-regula Also: www.DeadPeasantInsurance.com...
• Commented on The prospects of the Space and Freedom Party reconsidered in light of the crisis of 21st century capitalism
  Piketty's got it right about the concentration of wealth, and he's identified the shift from productive investment to rent-seeking. There's a cause-and-effect thing here: are low returns the reason for the shift to rent-seeking? Or could it be that all...
• Commented on Lighting up again
  We have much to look forward to. I remember a few conversations at Eastercon: 'Gothic' describes it quite well, but there's room for 'baroque' and 'Its what Equoid did for My Little Pony... Only its doing it for Warren Ellis'....
• Commented on Implications
  "on SF/F, the world is a character" Quite. A few mainstream authors have that ability to make their setting a rich and memorable character, and I wonder how many SF fans have read Len Deighton's cold war thrillers (Funeral in...
• Commented on A hypothesis
  So more people die because the door to the flight deck is more useful as a safety feature than a security barrier. Since when has risk assessment played a part in security theatre?...
• Commented on Circumstantial connections
  Let's do this the easy way: ask the rwlevant questions, hope that crowdsourcing the research gives us useful answers. 1: How many airliners have been brought down by terrorists, ever? 2: How many airliners have been brought down by catastrophic...
• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  No, the obvious market isn't micro-targeted medical insurance spam: it's blackmail. The profit margins are higher. And the data is tagged for identification by condition. Abortion - anything gynaecological at all - can be used to end a woman's political...
• Commented on Rule 34, meet Kafka
  I've been thinking about countermeasures. An obvious one is to modify your webcam to inject a 'toxic' image every hundred frames or so. Something like a pair of huge and hairy buttocks tattooed with 'F* THE CHELTENHAM STASI'. Unfortunately there's...
• Commented on Can We Merge Minds and Machines?
  This is going to read like I'm anti-technology: I'm not, but I don't believe in shipping new features and extensions to software until the bugs in the existing version are fixed; and this is a general principle you would do...
• Commented on Why AIs Won't Ascend in the Blink of an Eye - Some Math
  Greg's got a good point, but there's an error in the language he's using; he's pointing at the wrong concept. The blue line rocketing upwards and approaching the vertical is a singularity; the others all rise exponentialy for a while...
• Commented on How To Survive A Death March
  Deathmarches: done a few, and they're the reason I prefer tactical development on the trading floor to cubicle slavery. But you do get them, sometimes. Breaks are important: so, too, is task tracking. Every project has discrete small tasks, some...
• Commented on Introducing Hugh Hancock
  One of the difficulties with discussing a new technology is that we might sound like nerds, arguing whether Mr Bleriot's wood-and-canvas monoplane is better than the wood-and-canvas biplanes that are the obvious design for aircraft; or we might sound like...
• Commented on Introducing Hugh Hancock
  How far will we get with machinima? Will 'real' film go the way of live plays on stage, a 'real' performance with something indefinable that cinema cannot capture, but relegated to a tiny minority of the world's performing art? ...If...
• Commented on Sitrep
  WHAT F*@#ING CHEEZBURGER?...
• Commented on Sitrep
  Ceiling Cat is watching you masturbate. Ceiling cat? No. The other one. Watching you do lolcats with Libertarians....
• Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
  Heinomatic: you are definitely going to Hell and it will, in the beginning, be Word....
• Commented on A likely tale
  Okay, now I've read A Bird in Hand, and it would 'read' very well - not that I have any intention of practising on a train full of Dutch teenagers. The final pun is quite dreadful, even by my abysmal...
• Commented on A likely tale
  I remember Eastercon a year or two ago had an item for reading out participant's 'White Hart' tales; the stories were quite good, but none of them were very good as spken word - OK I guess, to read; but...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  How about designing a car that you can't remotely brick? How about buying a car that the manufacturer can't brick? I doubt that you can buy a phone with that assurance; and, while you and I can probably jailbreak a...