cstross

7 ms·

1.
by cstross 4mo ago
I'm not a fan of actually-existing late-stage capitalism, frankly. What I want is Banksian fully automated luxury gay space communism. (You can quote me on that. I hate what tech has turned into.)
2.
by cstross 4mo ago
This was written in 2005(!) -> No, I wrote that in 1998. It was published as the novelette "Lobsters" in Asimov's SF Magazine in 2002, made the Hugo and Nebula shortlists in 2003 (it didn't win), and later became th
3.
The Radiant Future (Of 1995)(antipope.org)
6 points by cstross 2y ago|0 comments
4.
by cstross 3y ago
[ deleted ]
5.
by cstross 3y ago
Oh wow, it ran MWC Coherent! I still have a (printed on dead trees!) manual for Coherent 3.2 (286 version, circa 1990-91) kicking around. Ran multiuser (login via tty or virtual terminals on the console) in 640Mb of RAM, off a 10Mb fully in
6.
by cstross 3y ago
Worth noting is that because Starship HLS carries astronauts, it has to be capable of abort-to-orbit -- that is, to cancel the landing at any point and return to Lunar orbit. The Apollo LEM would have done this by shutting down and dumpin
7.
by cstross 3y ago
I notice that the news media are bigging up the *private enterprise* angle for some reason -- marketing of commercial transport services maybe? But I also note that Odysseus cost NASA a little over $100M on a fixed price contract, per Ars T
8.
by cstross 3y ago
The problem with aviation is that if you get your innovation wrong, people die . With E-VTOL, which is presumably aiming for local-to-local flights, you have the added problem that if you get your innovation wrong, potentially bystanders
9.
by cstross 3y ago
Short inter-city distances over land run into competition from high speed rail. Which I know is not a thing in the Americas, but is all over Europe and can compete with turboprop airliners on point-to-point time. (Remember, railway statio
10.
by cstross 3y ago
It was published in 2005 -- actually I wrote the 9 novelettes that went into it from 1998-2003 (they were originally published in Asimov's SF magazine from 2002-2004 before I assembled and rewrote them to make the book).
11.
by cstross 3y ago
Also worth noting is the work of the late George Turner (d. 1997), notably The Sea and Summer and Beloved Son .
12.
by cstross 3y ago
Not only am I not Californian, I'm not American: I'm a left-wing Scot living in Edinburgh.
13.
by cstross 3y ago
Amusingly (or enragingly) one of the effects of the Sad Puppy voting slate in 2015 was that it pushed William Patterson's magisterial and definitive biography of Robert A. Heinlein -- who the Puppies mostly adored -- off the shortlist
14.
by cstross 3y ago
What Einstein did do for the Atomic Bomb was to co-sign Leo Szilard's letter which got the attention of President Eisenhower and kick-started the Manhattan Project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93
15.
by cstross 3y ago
Please can you add a big bold warning right at the top of your article? As it is, the safety details are buried way too deep for casual readers who might be skim-reading by the time they get to it. Even a "heads up: this stuff can in
16.
by cstross 3y ago
Modern airliners are designed for a 30 year service life, this one is barely at ten years old, so it won't be airframe at end of lifespan. One of the engines has only 800 cycles; the others are around the 3000 mark (so roughly 300 flig
17.
Understanding the world science fiction convention(antipope.org)
144 points by cstross 3y ago|52 comments
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by cstross 3y ago
if true demonstrates a deep level of organization ineptness It's true, but your mistake is in assuming an actual organization exists. WSFS is just a club, the membership of which consists of the paying members of the current worldcon
19.
by cstross 3y ago
It's bullshit. There was an extensive campaign in favour of a particular faction circa 2013-17 organized by two loose groups (the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies) which in retrospect were best understood as dry runs for Gamergate, bu
20.
by cstross 3y ago
you seem to think that Dave and Ben have any control whatsoever over the Chengdu worldcon. They don't. World science fiction conventions are autonomous and independent of one another, apart from (in theory) having to abide by the WSF
21.
by cstross 3y ago
Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. McD-D had for a couple of decades prioritized military/defense/space contracts over civil aviation and had turned into a finely tuned machine for milking government cost-plus contracts
22.
by cstross 3y ago
That's a good starting place, then. (It's still polite to ask/let the heirs know what you're doing.)
23.
by cstross 3y ago
I can't find the bibliographic details for the 2013 edition, but the 1992 one was published by Addison-Wesley, so it's quite possible that anyone participating in this project to "liberate" the text will get a cease-and-
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by cstross 3y ago
Here's my original talk: four times the length, much more detail, and not paywalled! https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...
25.
by cstross 3y ago
I am guessing here, but I worked at SCO (when it was a UNIX VAR, not three vexatious lawsuits in a trenchcoat) and the killer was always licensing fees, especially to AT&T. Sun bought a royalty-free license to SVR4 from AT&T which
26.
by cstross 3y ago
Essentially a more sophisticated BASIC Absolutely wrong. PASCAL was invented by Professor Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich specifically for teaching structured programming, circa 1970 (year of first release). It's a descendant of ALGOL (1
27.
by cstross 3y ago
No, representative democracy does not give us freedom. All representative democracy give us is the ability, collectively, to sack a government that has outlived its welcome for some reason. (What happens after that is a complete crap shoo
28.
by cstross 3y ago
Here, in case you don't want to read the entire piece, here's the conclusion it's all there to lead up to: Today, we have become citizens of a global, Brezhnevian capitalist state, which, in its failure to provide an inspiri
29.
by cstross 3y ago
Is there a text transcript anywhere? (For those of us who hate video and can't absorb information that way.)
30.
by cstross 3y ago
Reminder that this article was about an aircraft built by Airbus . (Airbus is not Boeing.)

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