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Humans are just barely intelligent tool users Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

Charles Stross

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Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Humans
Stopped
Deficient
Leaving
Carrier
Average
Sadly
Converged
Tools
Evolutionary
Meme
Intelligent
Barely
Smarts
Smart
Selection
Hairy
Language
Users
Memes
Use
Tool
Darwinian

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Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.
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I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it.
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Can I remember I remember lots, I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.
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I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.
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Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy?
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Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)
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Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.
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I don't do football. (Grew up in Leeds in the 1970s. Football there was indellibly associated with the National Front, i.e. violent fascist skinheads.)
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I'm not planning a kickstarter game. And I'm not really a game designer.
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Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.
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I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch.
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Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism at worst, it's being unoriginal.
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I reckon I can count on 30 more writing years, averaging a book a year (I can't keep up the 2-2.5 a year I used to do these days). And these days I've gotten round to wondering, for each new idea, do I want to be remembered for this? before I get to the point of spending a year on it.
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I've reached an age at which I'd rather pay more for something that just works than roll up my sleeves, reach for a spanner, and make it work. Time is money, and the older we get the less of it we've got left.
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I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)
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Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
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The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.
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The problem with ebook filesharing is simply one of scale. But I think the piracy problem is massively over-rated.
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Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
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