101–110 of 557 posts
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He'll block you on twitter for politely quibbling with his presentation of facts.
I say: don’t bother trying to talk to minor celebrities on Twitter. If you want discussions, HN (and other well-moderated forums) are the place to go. Twitter is just the Internet version of that scrolling celebrity soundbite bar on cable TV.
>Quietly and without any fuss Ruth Bader Ginsberg has had a stroke: Pence indicates that her replacement will be a pro-life fundamentalist Christian. (Goodbye Roe v. Wade and, quite possibly, Griswold v. Connecticut.)
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.
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Is there a deeper meaning to take from this? Some people block anyone negative on Twitter. He's free to use the platform as he pleases, I see no reason why someone should feel obligated to have or present an externally valid reason for blocking others.
Some people also have a quixotic definition of "facts", and figuring out if that's the case can be exhausting for popular users with thousands of followers.
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It doesn't read as mockery of you (or anyone) to me. It seems like criticisms of "random nobodies" on Twitter.
I don’t know. Personally, I don’t think that anyone should be referred to as a “random nobody”, whether they be Twitter users or not.
Don't understand that line - Chickenpox is not vaccinated in the UK, and public health bodies in the UK choose not to do so deliberately because of public health. The reason is that older adults are vulnerable to shingles - which can be more serious - and being exposed to childen with chickenpox on the regular is thought to give them an immunity boost and prevent them from getting shingles or make it less serious when they do. Charles Stross is from the UK so I am quite surprised he doesn't know this.
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Last time I checked, there were dozens of commercial satellite ISPs ramping up their launches. Do these companies have a plan to deal with potential collisions and the potential space debris that would cause?
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." (RIP Douglas Adams)
Useful low orbital shells around the Earth are an awful lot smaller. They're still big, like the sky is big, but airplanes do manage to, at least somewhat regularly, collide with each other "in the middle of nowhere" (most midairs are around airports, since there are a lot of airplanes heading in and out of them).
Aircraft debris, however, falls out of the sky in short order. Orbital debris doesn't.
The probability of an initial collision is fairly low, but once you have a few, or someone decides to show off their new ASAT weaponry (which is functionally a satellite collision, just one of them only having been in space for a short while), you now have flak that won't go away, moving in all directions at orbital velocity. That, then, has the potential to start causing all sorts of problems, and once that's taken out a few more satellites with orbital-energy impacts, you start having a real problem.
Will it happen? Those invested in littering certain useful orbital shells with satellites claim not. We'll see.
“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…
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"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." (RIP Douglas Adams)
Space is hugely, vastly, mind-bogglingly big. Useful low orbital shells around the Earth are an awful lot smaller. They're still big, like the sky is big, but airplanes do manage to, at least somewhat regularly, collide with each other "in the middle of nowhere" (most midairs are around airports, since there are a lot of airplanes heading in and out of them). Aircraft debris, however, falls out of the sky in short or…
I've heard SpaceX claims to deal with it by putting their satellites in an orbit that requires periodic boosting to stay put -- if they don't, satellites decay and de-orbit after a few years.
The plan is, I think, to regularly retire (de-orbit) and replace these satellites so they can continuously improve the design, and as a nice side-effect any collisions or otherwise misbehaving objects will at least stop being a problem after a known maximum span of time.
Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains about things going too fast? Future is complex, and not only "good" developments happens and start changing everything faster than ever before, bad ones does too. And we aren't rational enough to avoid the bad ones. Anyway, I'm more worried about the consequences of climate change that are not the slow rise of the global sea level than about COVID. That is…
I wrote Accelerando from 1998-2004. That's a third of a lifetime ago. It's normal to slow down as you grow older!