They're managing the company responsibly as a going concern, not as a pump-and-dump opportunity. They're keeping the lights on and the workers paid. And you're pissed because you've got a steady job with training opportunities, a salary, and some moderately valuable shares, instead of an unearned, over-valued payday? Sign your letter of resignation and cash in, if you're that upset about it. Use that money to found your own company and whore it out to the biggest billionaire idiots you can find. Not willing to take that risk? Then quit whining, you whiner.

And in that sense, Stross has a point: he's identifying tropes that separate the authors that base their work on scientific plausibility from those that base their work on science-sounding fantasy truthiness, hence "shibboleths".

Parent fails English interpretation. The first sentence groups Ashley Madison members with other freethinkers as the subjects of illegal action. Freethinkers aren't the perpetrators, they're another class of victim roped in by the AM crowd to make out that hacking a cheaters website was just gosh-darned un-American.

Of course, the hackers aren't doing this out a sense of morality. Quite the opposite in fact - they just want to stir shit up and cause havoc.

Did we read the same articles? Neither commented on the profitability or productivity of Gravity Payments following the bump in pay at all. What they did say was, out of 120 employees, 2 whiny millennial narcissists threw their toys out the cot and quit when they found out they couldn't differentiate themselves from their colleagues by the heft of their pay packet. And that their friends might tap them for a loan what with all that extra cash they used to be taking home.

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face...

Because it violates the Treaty on the Functioning of Europe. Treaties take precedence over parliamentary laws. That's why they're so dangerous and shouldn't be negotiated in secret.

The ad-blocking better include those bloody irritating ads that switch you out of the browser with no warning to the App Store for Clash of Clans, or some other flavour of freemium shiteware the kids are degrading themselves with these days.

So the camera's set up in the hall facing the front door and the end times have come. My sanity's being eroded by the eldritch horrors nibbling at my numinous being AND the parquet floor in my hallway's going to get scorched by my incinerating corpse when I try to see if that's the newspaper or the hand of a shambling lunatic poking through my letterbox..? Bloody typical.

I'm sorry that death frightens and confuses you.

Never say never. If you do, start your sampling with an IBM 5100. That'll be the best for debugging the big UNIX problem coming up in 2038. That model can read all the old IBM codes.

Or 125m towers on each side. That's a bit more doable. But... then there's a chance an Islander will climb Satan's ladder and glimpse the beguiling lights of civilisation. Won't end well.