cstross

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.)

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 the opening of the novel published in 2005.

I emphasized: the direction things were going in was obvious in the late 90s.

And don't *ever* let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.

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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 installed setup. If I remember correctly you were limited to 64Kb code & 64Kb data per process, though ... (Coherent 4.0 removed the addressing limit).

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 dumping the descent stage then lighting the ascent motor: Starship is a single stage that should have enough fuel and oxidizer left after a successful landing to lift off and return to orbit with a minimal payload.

I expect if astronauts aboard HLS lose their altimeter they'd have to abort the landing immediately -- to proceed without it would be the height of recklessness. But Odysseus had no abort-to-orbit capability so was committed to landing.

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 Technica.

By way of comparison, the Indian government's Chandrayaan-3 mission, the lander of which touched down in 2023, cost roughly $90M.

So private space isn't automatically cheaper than 100% government agency-run missions: it just depends on the agency.

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 on the ground die when your flying car falls on them.

It's absolutely not impossible to do it right (i.e. with nobody dying). But if you do that you need to hit existing aerospace engineering safety standards for stuff like multiply redundant flight control systems, traffic routing that avoids extensive flight over densely populated areas, and so on.

And then you discover you're competing with an unexpected combination like, say, robo-taxis feeding a high speed rail station with 220mph trains running every 15 minutes and your business model turns out to be the new Zeppelin, not the DC-3.

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 stations are almost all in the centre of the departure/arrival city and there's no security theatre to delay your boarding: also, service frequency on some high speed inter-city routes is as high as one departure every fifteen minutes, utterly unlike Amtrak.)

Scotland isn't really a market for short distance electric flights unless you're thinking of the Highlands and Islands, where less than 10% of the population is scattered across crinkle-cut fjords.

France/Netherlands to Sint Maarten/St. Martin is, IIRC, served by wide-body airliners because it's both legally part of France itself (at least the St. Martin half of the island) and it's a significant tourist resort.

And if you think the EU and UK have laxer safety/regulatory standards than the FAA, you might want to re-think your position ...

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).

Also worth noting is the work of the late George Turner (d. 1997), notably The Sea and Summer and Beloved Son.

Not only am I not Californian, I'm not American: I'm a left-wing Scot living in Edinburgh.

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 for Best Related Word (a Hugo category usually occupied by scholarly works of SF history and criticism) in favour of utter garbage like "Wisdom From My Internet" by Michael Z. Williamson because the Sad Puppy organizers were so out of touch with events outside their bubble that they weren't aware the biography had been published.

You can take this as an illustration of the risk of an organized voting slate scoring a huge own goal.

Sad Puppy 2015 slate: https://www.scifiwright.com/2015/02/sad-puppies-3-announces-...

Patterson biography, volume 2: https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Heinlein-Dialogue-Century-1948...

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%93Szilard_lette...

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 injure or blind you permanently if you don't follow safety procedures!" in the first paragraph would help.

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 flights/year, which sounds about right for an A380: they service long-haul routes).

It might be a case of (3), with the added problem of there being a glut on the market due to the availability of newer, less maintenance-intensive wide-body twinjets with >400 seats these days (Boeing 777X, Airbus 350)?

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. The WSFS constitution is a set of rules for the WSFS business meeting which handles stuff like the bidding process for the next-but-one worldcon, and running running the Hugo awards. But there's no continuity of WSFS membership or governance from one worldcon to another except insofar as some people may be members of two or more consecutive worldcons.

It worked for 80 consecutive worldcons, then broke when it ran up against folks who didn't abide by the norms of behaviour that the rules presuppose.

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, but they flopped (all they could do was rig the shortlist: but the Hugo voters are allowed to vote "no award" if they don't like the menu, and they did so with gusto until the rules could be reformed to make nomination-brigading impractical).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies

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 WSFS constitution. There is no permanent floating worldcon organization that oversees these events. It has worked up until now -- through 81 conventions in a variety of countries -- because everyone abided by an unspoken agreement to observe the rules.

The Chengdu concom appeared to be following the rules right up until they didn't any more and went "rules? what rules?"

Here's your brief intro to what worldcon is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcon

(Disclaimer: I'm a three-times Hugo award winning author and the author with the most appearances on the Hugo shortlist from outside North America.)

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. They also had a bad case of Jack Welch management disease.

Over the years after the merger, Boeing's traditional management was largely replaced by the imported profits-over-everything culture of McDonnell-Douglas. This is, to put it mildly, not your grandparents' Boeing any more.

Because the design life of an airliner is on the order of 30 years, it took years to decades for the cultural change to become visible on the outside, but the 737 MAX MCAS debacle is symptomatic of the change in priorities to focus on hitting sales targets over engineering and QA, with lethal results.

(The simple fact that they had to add MCAS to compensate for changed handling characteristics in the 737 MAX isn't damning on its own, although it was a marketing-driven decision: really, at 50+ years old, it's past time Boeing designed a clean-sheet 737 replacement to compete with the A320 family. But then Boeing didn't see fit to mention MCAS in the pilots' handbook. An MCAS failure can cause a 737 MAX to become unflyable if it fails and the pilots don't understand what's going on, and that has led to two fatal crashes. And the 737 MAX MCAS is controlled by a single sensor, introducing a single point of failure. A dual sensor option is available to customers, but at extra cost -- and this is unforgivable. And now we learn that new-Boeing's institutional response is to demand exemption from FAA oversight? It's not looking good!)

That's a good starting place, then.

(It's still polite to ask/let the heirs know what you're doing.)

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-desist from Pearson Plc's legal department/anti-piracy people.

Caveat: the 2013 edition doesn't seem to be available via Amazon so may well be formally out of print. In which case, Wirth's heirs can issue a rights reversion letter to Addison-Wesley and claw the rights back, then relicense the text libre. Or they may already have other plans for re-issuing the book.

Either way, it'd be polite to ask first before "liberating".

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...

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 became Solaris, but it cost them on the order of $200M (if the figure I was told was accurate). SCO had a royalty-free license to SVR3.2 but had to pay out $250 to licensees for each copy of SCO Open Desktop 3 they sold (the precursor to SCO Open Server in 1995) for stuff like Motif, IXI Desktop, the Microsoft C compiler they still used ...

I suspect Apple went to AT&T for royalty-free terms and were quoted a price that, in the troubled Spindler/Amelio era, they simply couldn't afford for a niche product (the servers).

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 (1960), which was pretty much the first structured programming language and introduced functions that could be recursively invoked -- ALGOL is the ancestor of C and PL/I as well as Pascal and relatives (Modula-2, Oberon, etc) and is hugely important.

BASIC came out of Dartmouth College in the US in the mid-sixties and the emphasis was on interactive invocation: early BASIC was almost completely non-structured (GOTO for flow of control, minimal subroutines, IF statements with no ELSE).

While both Pascal and BASIC were intended as teaching languages, they took radically different views of what to teach. And Python is different again: Python has the virtue of a simple and consistent core syntax, but wasn't designed for teaching -- it was designed for scripting, and was developed in the early 1990s for computers with 2-3 orders of magnitude more resources than early BASIC and Pascal.

Object Pascal/Delphi (Delphi was Borland's proprietary implementation with RAD for Windows) is an outgrowth of Borland's Turbo Pascal from the early 1980s, which in turn took Wirth's Pascal and added some essentials that had been missing -- notably dynamically allocated strings, modules, and finally object encapsulation -- that made it much more suitable for writing serious code: for a while Turbo Pascal was a viable competitor for C on MS-DOS.

But Pascal is in no way related to BASIC.

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 shoot.)

When opposition parties start to triangulate -- that is, to define their policies in terms of what the government and perceived extreme opposite are doing -- rather than by espousing a concrete ideology or policy platform, we end up with everything converging on one dominant faction's idea of how to do things: a one party state in all but name.

(Which seems to be where we are here in the UK right now, and to a lesser extent in the USA.)

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 inspiring frontier—gone are the days of Kennedy’s “New Frontiers” or Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”—has slowly ossified and wrapped back upon itself. My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition.

(And when the author mentions a Brezhnevian state, bear in mind he actually grew up in one: he knows whereof he speaks.)

Is there a text transcript anywhere?

(For those of us who hate video and can't absorb information that way.)

Reminder that this article was about an aircraft built by Airbus.

(Airbus is not Boeing.)

The Cambrian explosion was, however, constrained by the partial pressure of oxygen in the hydrosphere (and, indirectly, the atmosphere). And free O2 couldn't begin to build up in seawater until after the Great Oxygen Catastrophe when the crust and upper mantle was finally fully oxidized, mopping up all the unoxidized iron and other elements. (Which in turn killed off almost all previous life forms, which were methanogenic and to which oxygen was a deadly poison/metabolic waste product.) The speed with which this happened was in turn constrained by tectonic subduction ... it all turns out to be a knotty ball of string that took at least a couple of billion years to unwind.

An angle you may not have considered is passenger safety.

Imagine if this happened to an airliner in flight: there'd be criminal charges for sure, not to mention huge damages and lawsuits from the families of the dead if some of the control systems locked up in mid-air.

Trains are not quite as susceptible to disaster arising in the course of operations as airliners, but a Newag Impuls 45WE runs at up to 160km/h in service with up to 218 people on board. (Their speed record is considerably higher.) A sudden breakdown in service is at a minimum going to cause timetable havoc and knock-on delays for other trains and at worse could lead to a mass casualty accident.

(John Deere tractors don't usually carry 200+ passengers and Apple computers don't usually get deployed in safety critical situations. So, different!)