nickgold42

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Commented on World building 301: some projections
Does it matter? A piece of electronics most people carry on their person most waking hours of the day, and have within several feet of them most non-waking hours, is already pretty much the ultimate bug, with camera, microphone, GPS...
Commented on Incidentally ...
Are you sure it's not a very advanced AI masquerading as a pet cat? Hmmmm?...
Commented on Rudy #1. Digital Immortality and the Lifebox
Dr. Rucker -- DOES anyone have the film option for SOFTWARE? If not... What would you take for it? :) SOFTWARE, and now WETWARE which I'm reading now, are the first "cyberpunk" books I've read where characters upload themselves (or...
Commented on Upcoming Guest Blogger: Rudy Rucker
This is so exciting, I'm just reading the Ware Tetralogy for the first time, and it is having an immense impact on me. Anything that combines cyberpunk, edgy humor, and non-dualistic philosophy, in a fantastically-written package, is just of course...
Commented on Today's chewy reading
Almost 250 posts and not one person, unless I missed it, has brought up the possibility, slight as it may be, that perhaps one or more "UFO" incidents might be a legitimate sighting of an SRP? Come on folks, admit...
Commented on Cynicism
Isn't there the chance that some basic common sense policies could make things much better than where we are now, and seem to be headed? Is "the answer" really that difficult? Here's my USA-centric view, anyway: • Let's simplify the...
Commented on Gadget patrol: Bigger is better?
shrug I use my smart phone with one hand constantly, for browsing, app usage, etc. Always one-handed while on the loo, for instance. ;)...
Commented on MeTube: Infinite Loop
Charlie, I promise that this is not intended as an insult: You come off as quite charming in person in this type of setting. Interestingly, this is not always the impression I get from you based on your interactions with...

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Charlie Stross commented on World building 301: some projections
Check back now -- the prematurely-posted-then-redacted piece is now up, in full, via the front page....
Charlie Stross commented on World building 301: some projections
Technologies tend to get cheaper as time goes by. In unrelated note, that means that nuclear war is pretty much inevitable at some point. I don't think so. Nuclear weapons solved a 1940s problem by being a lot cheaper than a thousand bomber raid (as a tool for taking out strategic targets such as ball bearing factories). But they come with huge political baggage attached. Meanwhile, JDAMs are getting ever cheaper and solve the same problem with 1990s technology at much lower cost and without the same political baggage. Now, if you said that nuclear terrorism is pretty much inevitable...
scott-sanford commented on World building 301: some projections
The term "States Rights" is a racist, male supremacist, corporatist dog whistle. And sometimes it means some rights should devolve onto states rather than being hoarded by the federal government. (A topical example is marriage legislation.) Decentralized governance is a valid political preference, and not everything is a code word for something else. In any case, can we get away from the 19th century and talk about the 21st for a while?...
justjohn commented on World building 301: some projections
Speaking of "afraid of the sky," I theorize that our aversion to looking at the Sun may be at the root of some people's religious thinking. In the wild, the problem with looking at the Sun is that your eyes take time to re-adjust to looking at your surroundings, rendering you easy prey for that time. And rather than evolving eyes that could adjust quickly enough, it's easier just to stop looking at the Sun. (I'm trying not to make evolution sound like a conscious process with plans, which is a trap many fall into.) (What got me thinking about...
Charlie Stross commented on World building 301: some projections
What makes you think that a dictatorship is a better way of organizing a society undergoing resource-depletion stress than a democracy? Or anarchism? Please explain your reasoning....

Responses to Comments from nickgold42

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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