No, you get to do whatever you like with your house.

However, to prevent people from having a nice house like yours, you've burned all the blue prints and don't let anyone take any pictures. Then you demolish your house when it is no longer useful to you to make sure no one else can enjoy it. Now, it is a loss to society, especially if you had some ground-breaking, architectural inventions in it.

In different times you would execute all your builders and possibly blind your archetect too (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_astronomical_clock). I guess DRM has been around forever.

I know all about Konging Off! I Kong off all the time; in fact I'm Konging off right now.

Actually, I'm only 30; It was only recently that some old guys explained to me that Donkey Kong was not invented in that psuedo-3d game for the super Nintendo (which I imagined this story was about). Apparently, it has something to do with Mario (that guy I know from Super Mario 3). I've never seen the original game.

If an eight year olds are writing computer viruses using "Move the Turtle," then I for one will be insanely impressed and consider hour of code a phenomenally unbelievable success. I will probably also have to retire from my job since I will be replaced by elementary school children, because if they can throw some blocks together to create computer viruses, I have no doubt they could do some digital signal processing as well.

When you post a suggestion like that on a site filled with people capable and weird enough to follow it, then serious discussion of consequences is merited.

We don't care if normal people notice it's just a joke and move on, because we are not among them.

Now I'm wondering how consistent GPS signal in my lab is...

Yes! If someone doubts a fetus is a person, we should summon that fetus to testify by writ of habeas corpus (which allows a person being held captive to have a say in court) and then, once acknowledged as a person, we can free the fetus from captivity.

Also, don't call them "fetters" or "boy" it really offends them.

Hi soviet budget committee,

We've spent a $100,000,000 so far on extensive experiments and still failed to discover an invisible, undetectable, force that no one's ever seen before. Why don't you invest 10x more in this theory? We can't do these experiments for any less, this force is reeeeaaaaallly hard to find: it has never been observed, has no basis in anything we know about reality or existing science and has failed to show up despite extensive testing worldwide.

What else are you going to do with $900,000,000? Feed your starving populace after you decided that the other non-pseudo-science idea that abusing crops made them more fruitful than watering and fertilizing them properly, which no-one had ever observed working before and all experiments to demonstrate it failed?

I hear that we may be competing with the space race guys who are trying to find a certain tea-pot in orbit between us and Mars. I must say that our force is way more real than that tea-pot even though our research will be more expensive to pursue.

Thanks,
Dr. Totallynotanutjob

P.S. Some say we must have some sort of mind control over the budget committee to keep getting these funds, but we just smile and let them meditate on their own statements. I'm sure you'll give us the extra money.

That reply is actually especially relevant to this discussion. I don't like Stross's writing much; the characters aren't very interesting and his plot twists aren't handled well, but I keep reading his works for the all the mathematically derived apocalypses and computer generated magic.

Speaking of The Laundry series, he had to change the villains in the Atrocity Archives after they, Al-quada turned out to actually be planning an attack on US soil.

I think he needs to start writing something pleasant and nondistopian, because it is looking more and more like someone is channeling his writing into the real world. Uh oh, I think he predicted that too, in The Jennifer Morgue.

Don't worry, he won't stop writing; he just won't publish this particular story. He's going to go write something else which he thinks you will enjoy reading even more!

These descriptions, to nerds, are like titty-shots in movies are to high school boys. Sure, maybe we go through the whole plot once once or twice, but what we really got the book for was to reread the technical, oh so technical, descriptions, and boners, err...uh, bonus for equations that we can work into simulations.

Also known as filler-between-technical-descriptions. I doubt anyone is ever entertained by that alone.

I tried to Google this; still not sure what you're talking about here, but it sounds boring too.

It certainly does not, but my assumption from reading about this was that this was an overreaction due to the legal system's ignorance of technology, but now I'm realizing that this could be just plain overreaction due to the legal system's long standing record of overreaction.

Above, I'm noticing that most other commentators and moderators made the same assumption I did, making GPP an especially relevant post.

It would be like fining the top _people_ at JP Morgan $trillions and then putting them on probation too.

The C[A-Z]Os could care less what happens to the company and the economy, they still get to go retire with their golden parachutes.

Well, "cherry blossoms" no, but acetophenone, which evidently smells like cherry blossoms to reporters "activates a known odorant receptor (Olfr151) ." They also believe they know the gene responsible for setting up this pathway, and when they look at it in parent's gametes after traumatizing the parents: "revealed CpG hypomethylation in the Olfr151 gene" which is saying: some chemical changes that should strengthen the receptors in offspring.

Also, they don't claim an "aversion" was added to the descendents, merely a sensitivity. Assumably, allowing offspring to quickly pick up a strong aversion if they needed to.

Go get some acetophenone and mice; I'll look forward to commenting on your results.

The problem you have is, how do you find these people that don't advertise? And once you find them, their talent isn't shown on their resume and they don't show off their code in past past works, how do you detect it?

I'm not just trying to poke holes in your idea; as a developer with a really dreary resume, and an office that frequently needs to hire local talent, I would actually like to know,

New abstract coming up: