cstross

@swlabr @techtakes Anybody can nominate: the true sign that the simulation has been handed over to drunken frat boys will be if he *wins*.

@gerikson He probably bought it BECAUSE Gibson wrote about it in a novel and he thinks it makes him look cool and special.

@Soyweiser Thalidomide was mostly a British problem (that led to the UK's CSM getting teeth). The FDA in the USA really got rolling after the Elixir Sulfanilamide poisonings in 1937: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_sulfanilamide

@istewart @techtakes Spoiler: it's not his natural hairstyle, he's been caught deliberately mussing it up before going on camera. Also, his friends and family call him "Alex" (short for Alexander), not "Boris". It's all an act.

@BlueMonday1984 It's going to be like Alves dos Reis all over again, isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis

@nightsky "touchscreens everywhere" isn't an aesthetic choice, it's a cost-of-goods choice: which adds more to the cost of a physical product, a bunch of bespoke embossed buttons/keys for specific tasks, or a single mass-produced touchscreen?

It's the same reason modern electronics uses embedded microcontrollers rather than actual properly designed task-specific gate arrays.

@m @dgerard @o7___o7 @techtakes Back in 2007 I was a guest of honour at Penguicon. ESR was there and we got talking. As of 2007 he was all-in on all the insane "Eurabia" conspiracy theories and islamophobia. If you'd taken his word salad and substituted "jews" for "muslims" Julius Streicher would have hired him as a columnist in a split second. (That's when I added ESR to my list of "people I will not share a platform with".)

He was somewhat less cray-cray in 2003.

@froztbyte @techtakes

Here, have a Macintosh Centris/Performa 610!

That button on the right? It's not a floppy eject button, much to the chagrin of hordes of students during the 1990s, but an on/off power button ...

@dgerard I dunno if you've read it but one of the wellsprings of this lunacy is "The Physics of Immortality" by Frank Tipler (1997), in which an astrophysics prof tries to square the circle of cosmological expansion and the resurrection through simulation, outing himself along the way as a very conflicted Christian fundamentalist who is determined to torture relativity until he can derive Jesus ... https://archive.org/details/frank-tipler-the-physics-of-immortality/mode/1up

@grrgyle @techtakes I suspect steady/incremental returns mean dwindling asset value in the current business environment, typified by rapid churn and major tech transitions every decade (to say nothing of climate change and an unstable global political situation). If 10% of your investment portfolio becomes non-viable every decade (eg. no good owning coal fields any more) you have to grow fast or die. At least, that's how the investment funds see it.

@froztbyte Your term of art in economics to describe this shitbaggery is "Veblen goods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

"a type of luxury good… for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure."

@BlueMonday1984 Betcha the authors aren't getting paid industry-normal royalties (10-15% of net receipts) on those Veblen goods …

(A few of my novels have been sold as limited-run signed first editions. Typically for 50%-100% more than the normal hardcover price, so maybe 3-5% as much as this nonsense. Cost of goods for a leatherbound, gilt-trimmed luxury edition is maybe $5-10, plus 10% of the cover price for the author. So someone in the middle is making serious bank.)