joelfinkle

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• Commented on Do my Laundry
  I'd definitely like to see how the don't-call-them-elves are integrating into British society. How does the New Management feel about them, for instance?...
• Commented on Chicon 8 schedule
  Cool, hope to see you there (bumped into you in an elevator at the LAST Chicon)....
• Commented on Hugos, 2022
  Hope to see you in Chicago (my home region) - I was pleased to meet you at the last Chicon. Same hotel as last time -- which has been host to more worldcons than any city in the world. Note...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
  Examples of reporting on medical glass shortage, sieved from the first page of google. Reuters: Schott AG won't let suppliers reserve production until they know it works - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-schott-exclusive/exclusive-bottlenecks-glass-vial-makers-prepare-for-covid-19-vaccine-idUSKBN23J0SN ABC News: A bunch of supply-chain anecdotes, also alleging the US...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
  One of the big critical path items for the vaccine is medical-grade glass vials for the doses. Billions of vials are needed, and there really really isn't enough out there. Especially with another H1N1 flu on the horizon, we've got...
• Commented on COVID-19
  Odds are the mortality rate is a lot lower: There's a lot of sub-acute cases out there, where people think they've got a cold or mild flu, and are passing it around similarly. This is probably especially true in Iran...
• Commented on Tentative hypothesis
  You didn't happen to like the Essential PH-1 phone, did you? I love mine, but I'm still trying to figure out why that failed on the market (aside from Andy Rubin's scandals)....
• Commented on Someone please sack the script-writers
  Microsoft has already been creating pretty good, and very deeply integrated Android apps: using your Windows device as a second screen for the phone, the Office suite, and a competitor to IFTTT whose name I've forgotten. Actually making an Android...
• Commented on Sitrep
  Would you be happy to receive three "Equoid"-length Laundry novellas in a year, rather than a single "The Nightmare Stacks" (which is actually longer in word count)? Mostly, although the way TOR prices its hardcover novellas it ends up costing...
• Commented on What can possibly go wrong?
  See also Connie Willis' book Remake - actors can only get jobs as mo-cap for classic stars whose estates license out their likenesses. Great satire turned all-too-real....
• Commented on Laundry summer madness sale!
  hoping The Delirium Brief is not about halucinogenic underwear...
• Commented on 2117 revisited
  Speaking in emoji has already been proposed by Greg Bear in Eon, where the society wears a device which holographically projects pictograms. And the Swype keyboard already proposes substituting an emoji of words that match the descriptions. You're stuck in...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  ... or manually controlled flying (usually through the above asteroid fields). Trek has been really bad about this, but it was always about the human superiority to the machine (Cmdr. Data the notable exception, but he wanted to be a...
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  What I fear is that something like Mike Scott's suggestions come about, which is terrifyingly similar to ASCAP and the other copyright clearinghouses for music publishing, in which money comes from the delivery side of things, goes to the clearinghouses,...