cstross

@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.

@dgerard Do not mess with HP, they have the *real* orbital weather control lasers! /s

@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.)

@mountainriver Also of note: the Helios Airways Flight 522 disaster. (Loaded 737 crashed, everybody killed … because of a locked cockpit door: plane depressurized and pilots' oxygen failed, cabin crew—inc. a pilot—were unable to gain cockpit access in time to save the plane before it ran out of fuel and crashed.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522

@Soyweiser You're assuming the first Starship to Mars has a cargo of canned primates. Rest assured, it can't and it won't. (Also, I doubt Starship will be ready for Mars—extended duration in space, remember—in time for the 2026 launch window. Although a robot probe as a payload launched atop Starship is entirely possible in that time frame: you don't need reusability, just a bloody big payload bay and the ability to reach orbit once, which Starship achieved as of OFT-3.)

@gerikson @techtakes

Anyway, if I was going to go mining 3He in space I'd bear in mind it's in the regolith because it's part of the solar wind and gets trapped there. Is it possible to collect it more cheaply using a really huge solar sail (with station-keeping as a side-purpose) made out of a membrane that traps it directly and can be reprocessed to outgas the stuff? That way you're not grinding up gigatons of fucking rock to extract an incredibly rare volatile.