It’s as exhausting as dealing with an early-stage dementia sufferer—one with a trillion-pound budget and nuclear-weapons-release authority.
It was one of ours originally, but no human being can sprint around a building with their helmet off and backpack missing in a fimbulwinter cold enough to freeze liquid oxygen.
Is not happening yet, contributes Boris. Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happ...
I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was...
I don’t mind going without clothes, but being without a microprocessor is truly stripping down. It’s like asking a sorcerer to surrender his magic wand, or a politician to forswear his lies.
I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to ment...
His remit will be to monitor the use of reality-modification weapons by both sides in the conflict and to assure the civilized worlds that the New Republic does not engage in gratuitous use of time tr...
He looks like the bastard offspring of a multitool and a mangabot.
Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now! It’s
Dear God, whispers Pete, it’s full of posters!
But his former day job—he is still a vicar, and his bishop is remarkably reluctant to raise a fuss about his apparent conscription by a secret government agency devoted to issues which can best be des...
But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.
Back to my question: is it better to reign in Hell—or should I aspire to be a citizen in the early years of a better nation?
As Terry Pratchett observed, inside every eighty-year-old man is an eight-year-old wondering what the hell just happened to him; in
And convincing someone that an outrageous ritual has caused them to forget the constitutional bedrock of their society is hard.
When you’re sentenced to drive a Smart car on a road where everything else has a speed best described by its mach number, you tend to pay attention.
Crisis. Attempts were made to organize a captive breeding population, but the natural objections of the population in question to being so manipulated—combined with our own innate reflexive obedience—...
Can’t decide whether his next show should be a sitcom about government bureaucrats or a horror series
A man cannot make himself believe a lie just because it profits him. Men
Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn.