Many people like to claim “my time is worth the $/hour I could have earned”. It’s usually bull.

If you are paid hourly, it is 95% likely that your hours are set by your employer, not you. You can’t spend a random extra hour working to get another $X. If you work on a project basis, you’re going to end up working for all the hours that the project takes, regardless of whether that happens now or next week. And if you’re an independent professional/contractor, like a therapist or a plumber, your limits are the …

• Melissa Olson, Nightshades
• Harry Connolly, The Twisted Path
• Ryk Spoor, Princess Holy Aura
• Faith Hunter, Flame in the Dark
• Mira Grant, Into The Drowning Deep
• Brandon Sanderson, Oathbound
• Jim Hines, Terminal Alliance
• James Allan Gardner, All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault
• Sebastian de Castell, Spellslinger

I liked all these books recently.

Nightshades is the beginning of a new series: FBI vs vampires. It’s well-written, has a tight plot, and is short. Gore, not sparkles.

The Twisted Path is the rebirth of Connolly’s excellent Twenty Palaces universe — it was discontinued by the publisher after the initial three …

Your company probably needs a librarian. Maybe more than one.

A modern librarian selects, installs, configures and administrates knowledge management software. They are experts in organizational methods and search techniques.

A librarian may take in paper documents and convert them to electronic formats. Everything gets stored, indexed, and made searchable and retrievable. Wikis are re-organized, old information marked for review and status updated: is it still correct? reliable? useful?

You have email that concerns a whole team, contracts with history, agreements with revisions. Librarians control the automation that keeps track of that for you. You have customer contact databases — a …

It’s not enough that Net Neutrality be enforced. That’s just a basic requirement to keep corporations from completely exploiting their customers.

What would a good long-term solution look like?

We can look at history. In 1982, the eight-year antitrust suit against AT&T was ended by the breakup of AT&T into multiple entities, seven of which had a regional infrastructure and one of which held on to long-distance, research, and computer hardware and services. In addition, the de facto monopoly was broken by requiring transport service to be available at a wholesale rate to any qualified party …

If you have a Mac and DNS resolution seems really, really slow — like, five seconds or more per lookup — check to see if you have an IPv6 address. You probably do.

Then check to see if you have an IPv6 DNS server listed. I bet you don’t, or it’s wrong.

Solution: add an IPv6 DNS server to your list.

• Google DNS IPv6: 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 8844

• OpenDNS IPv6: 2620:0:ccc::2 and ccd::2

I was a customer of RCN for seven years. The service was fine, in the really boring way that you want commodity services to be. There were occasional glitches, and a few months where the internet service was particularly bad due to our house being at the end of a cable run.

The price slowly creeped up.

Last week, the bill read over $180. Clearly time for a change.

I called up RCN before work, and the helpful customer service rep worked for about 20 minutes to eventually offer me a change of phone service that would knock $10 off …

For any given technology, there will exist at least one point in time in which people are simultaneously not trusting it for being too new and unproven, and other people are depending on it in production.

– me

Every decision involves a cost/benefit analysis. Sometimes they are formal; often they are drastically informally. Either way, people inevitable leave out costs and benefits that they are not aware of, have forgotten, or are otherwise invisible.

The resiliency of a system is proven by its behavior in an emergency.

The design of a system is proven by its daily usability.

I collect pocket knives. It’s rare for me to be dressed and not have a knife in my pocket. Knives are useful tools. I usually find a use for one three or a dozen times a day.

Modern production knife makers (the sort of designer/producer/ manufacturer who turns out a thousand knives of a given design rather than one or two) have a tendency to give marketing-driven names to their products. Some of that marketing disturbs me.

Because I always have a knife, it would naturally be the case that if I were arrested, I would have a …

Ken MacLeod writes science fiction. His job to write stories that entertain us while, perhaps, presenting some interesting ideas. He doesn’t have to be a prognosticator. Nobody really thinks that the future of humanity will be to separate into fast-thinking, fast-evolving AIs in Jovian orbit versus nanotech-equipped paranoid biological humans in the inner system. That’s just a fun story.

One of those interesting ideas is that the natural place of communism is in bottom-up structures rather than top-down. Families tend to be run more or less as communes — everyone contributes what they are able to do, everyone receives …

“Great question” means “I have a prepared answer.”

“Good question” means “I have an ambivalent answer.”

“Interesting question” means “That’s controversial, and I may not want to commit.”

“What an interesting question”, though, means “I didn’t expect to be asked that and I have no idea.”

Let’s suppose you have a really good idea for a business.

Not just “we’re going to be an easy-to-use centralized middleman for a previously unorganized and possibly unrecognized market” which has been done enough times that half of your success will be in getting customers to recognize you and the other half will be in not screwing up — where was I? — but a really good idea. The sort of thing that could make your grandkids into spoiled rich parasites who vote Republican.

It’s true, you might not need a lot of money, or people, or resources — at …

We have a general problem in this country, and I think we could use a general solution to solve it.

Health care, Internet carriers (and the wired and wireless telecom which is a smaller part of it), electrical and water utilities, banks - possibly others — should not be for-profit corporations. They have too much incentive to bleed the citizens that they ostensibly serve. Nor does a pure charitable foundation work well for this. They tend to be either moribund or driven by charismatic leaders with a succession problem.

Let’s create an intermediate category called “tightly regulated businesses”. (I know, they …