Eric Reasons

I love just about everything Mike Masnick writes (even though I throw in the occasional asterisk to his techno-optimist viewpoint ). He recently posted this piece on the hysteria that has surrounded Hollywood each time a new technology shows up on the scene to threaten it . This latest example comes courtesy of Mary Pickford (), claiming that Pay TV will be "the death of the motion picture industry." Or, in a similar vein: Of course, this has clearly not come to pass, and I can appreciate Masnick's point about history repeating itself, but I say in the comments: The difference between the disruption seen in 1959 and the disruption today, is that it was two different (but related) industries that were vying for control of a distribution medium. Throughout media's modern history, the reigns of power have changed hands but there was still scarcity in play (sometimes artificial, sometimes natural). The gatekeepers changed positions, but they were always gatekeep...

Charles Stross is a science fiction author. He keeps a blog running for a his fans, and shares a good amount of give-and-take with them about his writing process, ideas, and activities. And he writes sentences like this: Writing a space opera with FTL means accepting causality violation. And accepting causality violation means  computing with closed timelike curves  or, in simpler terms,  really strong deterministic solutions to P=NP, and then some . Procedural AI hops out of the FTL hat like a demented magician's rabbit and the singularity takes a shit all over your neatly designed Napoleonics-in-Spaaaaaace boardgame table. Read the whole thing if you're a fan. If you're not a fan, go grab some of his books and become one.