john.ohno

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• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  Checks (and, to a lesser extent, carbon paper based credit card systems) seem extremely strange to me -- having been born in the late 1980s and thus gained enough income to need a bank account during an era when debit...
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  To what extent does the visibility of region differences increase pressure to improve them? I mean, when what was available was represented by what was available from the local brick-and-mortar the casual reading audience didn't know what they were missing,...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  The third floor xerox machines are not to be used for copying summoning sigils, as per the signage. There are isolated xerox machines on the fourth floor with appropriate wards for this purpose. While the creature was eventually contained, damage...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  A syntax highlighting plugin for old high enochian does not belong in public upstream vim repositories. This breach had several casualties. While we appreciate having him among our ranks, Bill Joy would have been better off outside of residual human...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  Shub-niggurath is not subject to 'take your child to work day'....
• Commented on Competition Time!
  [REDACTED] accused of abuse of residual human resources for distributed bitcoin mining; caught while trying to expand the mining pool to the off-site data center on Yuggoth. Disciplinary action unnecessary -- employee's sloughed skin has been deemed no longer capable...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  Despite paperclip shortages, the use of SOE equipment to empirically verify the Banach-Tarsky theorem is strictly prohibited under section 23.5aw of the handbook: "employee is hereby forbidden from any and all attempts to violate mass-energy conservation laws, including but not...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  We recommend disciplinary action for [REDACTED] with regard to his insufficient oversight of fifth branch's annual musical. While this event is important for morale reasons, the mortality count from last Wednesday's amateur production of The King in Yellow is now...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  I thoroughly enjoyed Supergods, but it may be tangential to your concerns right now (although it has plently of good historical material and spends a lot of effort on correspondences and the cultural ramifications of superhero mythos). The main thesis...
• Commented on Lighting up again
  The stalking is mutually desired in a conflicted way, right? So, maybe it's like a hazy landscape of potential drunk sex partners, and the eventual novels are expensive (but possibly, after a long gestation period, a source of pride) love-children?...
• Commented on Heartbleed note
  The craziest thing about the heartbleed hype is that it's not proportional in the least to how serious it is (compared to other recent vulnerabilities in the SSL/TLS domain). This is not to say that heartbleed isn't bad. Heartbleed is...
• Commented on A nation of slaves
  A world without the necessity of work (say, with a guaranteed income) probably wouldn't have less labour being done. Good work -- work that fits heuristics A and B -- is satisfying regardless of whether or not you need to...
• Commented on April Fools Day is Cancelled this Year.
  Sometimes, April Fool's jokes are too subtle to be amusing. Yesterday, I ended up watching a news report from an unfamiliar network claiming that it was 80 degrees F in Ohio, and that a student at a Massachusetts high school...
• Commented on Schadenfreude
  rather than merely being a pointer to a counter in a game which becomes more valuable the faster things change hands This reminds me a bit of a theoretical 'bank tax' -- sort of a reverse interest -- based...
• Commented on Baboon Fart Odyssey
  If replacing every word in a copyrighted work with your own words is copyright infringement, some large percentage of the participants in this year's NaNoGenMo are in danger from perversely pedantic copyright lawyers; systematically replacing words was one of the...
• Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
  One nitpick: bitcoin transactions aren't hard to trace. In fact, they are extremely easy to trace (...to addresses, which can usually be trivially associated with people or organizations), because the entire history is in a public file that everybody with...
• Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
  Does having the book contradict recent revelations in the news cut into sales, or are you avoiding it because it rubs you the wrong way? Because I don't think the core fan base (readers of this blog, I guess) particularly...
• Commented on The cult of justice
  If we assume #3 to be true, justice is the only religion to construct a reasonable functional facsimile of its own god, consciously -- which is amusing, albeit tangential....
• Commented on Do Zimboes dream of Electric Sheep?
  I'll read it again later, but this piece reminds me too much of Peter Watts' Blindsight. In fact, I'd call it a distillation (except that the zimboes aren't detected, specifically because nobody thinks to look for art)....
• Commented on Another deceptively simple question
  Two more thoughts: One (and this is already happening to some extent) is that, as e-books become more common and eat out the market for mass-market paperbacks, we'll start to see very fancy and expensive 'special edition' hardcovers intended for...
• Commented on Another deceptively simple question
  If e-readers continue to increase in popularity until nearly all professional publications are available in (legitimate) electronic form, I suspect that writing and editing tools (primarily but not exclusively for non-fiction) will significantly change, particularly in the way in which...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  In the west, urban sprawl will probably become more pronounced but less dense as self-driving cars begin to fill the niche between distances best traveled by car and distances best traveled by airplane (one-hour and two-hour flights will disappear except...
• Commented on Time tourism
  While it's not a time-travel story, Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle spends a large amount of time exploring privilege from various perspectives in a historical context and doesn't gloss over the fact that it's a crapsack world, but it nevertheless doesn't...
• Commented on What have we learned?
  9/11 wasn't the first terrorist attack to be used as an excuse for implementing surveillance-state elements, by a long shot. I'm not sure we learned anything, in particular; it's just that this particular event happened in a sweet spot technologically...
• Commented on Cheap Reads!
  In the united states at least, this particular practice has historically been upheld as part of fair use (the acquisition or creation of a spare copy for personal use). So, at least it's arguably legal. I wouldn't recommend relying upon...
• Commented on Marking time, more thoughts
  The situationists spent a lot of time talking about how urban planning is affected by a laborless society (and thus about laborless societies -- which is a bit strange amongst marxists), and their essays on the subject are some of...
• Commented on Monarchy versus the Panopticon
  His fate is shared, to a lesser extent, with some others in similar positions. Celebrity children can often eventually disappear (and often they do on purpose), and sometimes they can spend enough time out of the limelight to come back...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
  Completely tangential, but if "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alive" is a typo, it is the best typo I've ever read. I'd read the hell out of any book you wrote set in biological architecture....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Halting State
  The official second life client (and most forks and re-implementations) is in C++, although there are a few re-implementations in Java and in C# (all of them written after the source release, around 2008). Both the official second life server...
• Commented on Short Story: Bit Rot
  I should try that. Shout "I want hard science fiction for a new century" at random people on the street until one of my favorite authors writes me a short story (or I get carted away)....