scentofviolets

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• Commented on Down tools
  Ah, that would be Jack Vance's The Anome, if anyone who doesn't know the book is interested....
• Commented on Down tools
  This is starting to sound like something out of Niven's Theory and Practice of Teleportation: with no restrictions on sending packages, rival factions quickly bomb/gas/infect each other back to the stone age. Or at least back to technological levels where...
• Commented on Down tools
  Heh. You know how hurtin' old bands will release a three-CD set with audits of how their 58-minute signature work from thirty years back came to be (often for absurd prices like $100?) Maybe Charlie can release those 800-odd Scrivener...
• Commented on Down tools
  My writing nirvana device would be a 5.5" iPhone phablet . . . Geeze, that's tiny. Your fingers must be a lot smaller than mine (I have a desktop machine just for the keyboard/monitor. My fingers are most definitely not...
• Commented on Gods and genre
  Parents are frighteningly impotent, just as they're portrayed in the movies. As the parent of a young adult and whose home was often the center of kid activities, I beg to differ. It was sometimes painfully obvious which children...
• Commented on Gods and genre
  And what is this "code"? Honesty? Bravery? Compassion? Strength? Integrity? Selflessness? Honour? [Most especially that one] Well, the code of the Manly Man is hardly the exclusive promoter of your first seven virtues! (though possibly it's not unlike libertarians claiming...
• Commented on Gods and genre
  Well, sure, the whole black-and-white manly virtues thing as exemplified by John Wayne has a certain cultural appeal. I got no problem with that. But in real life John Waynes tend to either get their asses badly kicked multiple times...
• Commented on Gods and genre
  Even so. 'Magic' seems to devolve down to taking the ad hoc approach (with sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic consequences) to gadgetry. The lazy way out, IOW. Yeah, I can see the gods being lazy. They can manufacture a Pegasus just...
• Commented on Gods and genre
  Hint: humans are a weird mix of nature/nurture, and in this area I think male humans in most human societies are socialized in a manner that leaves them emotionally stunted. They can mature out of it -- if they realize...
• Commented on Gods and genre
  As for the Asgardians being gods, pretty sure they were advanced enough aliens that technology=magic had been reached, and sufficiently advanced aliens are indistinguishable from what gods are often thought of as being. Heh. Cynical me would modify that with...
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  Lo these many moons ago, there was a company from the Isle Of Man who - after much paperwork - gave you access to a web app which would generate a new virtual credit card every time you ran it....
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  Because (c) the web was designed at a time when microbilling was impossible over TCP/IP dialup, and we still haven't truly solved that problem in a portable manner. DING! DING! DING! We have a winner. This is the big problem...
• Commented on The Rhesus Chart: Chapter One
  a series of unfortunate events . . . Hmmm. Is by any chance either Bob or Charlie a Lemony Snicket fan?...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  The window in which an N-state logical base could be a reasonable contender was very small. It took a bit longer for designers to stop fiddling with word length and adopt the 8-bit byte. You can no doubt supply your...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  Not so. In fact, R & D work way back in the 1950s came up with completely successful ternary circuitry based on parametrons (non-linear oscillators pumped by three phase AC). It was just that work on conventional approaches had moved...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  The pink starfish use a trinary* logic and their current top processers use 96bit architecture, but they are looking to go to 192 bit soon. Three-valued logic has some nice enough properties, computationally speaking that people have been trying to...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  Give me credit for knowing that much! I'm just curious about what features would be considered 'universal' in the sense of what other civilizations are using. The pink starfish men of Patrick V probably don't use 50/60 Hz A.C. It's...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  Er, that should have been 2034, not 2014. I don't think it too much to ask that standards for html 5 be committed to by 2034....
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  WRT the IoT, there's one very important ingredient needed to make this work (or at least, work passably well), and that is -- standards. They haven't been hammered out yet and possibly that's because hardware capabilities are changing so fast....
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  Given the ad-driven mechanism of funding, I'm seeing the IoT as being a lot more Phil-Dickian than Culture. How'd you like to wake up every morning with your toaster asking if you'd like Aunt Jemima syrup with your waffles and...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  One wrapper to bind them all and in the darkness find them . . ....
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  What other languages would be locked in besides Perl? C? Fortran? Cobol? Conversely, how much scope is there for new languages to emerge? I can't think of anything that hasn't already been done somewhere (though I cheerfully admit I don't...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  I strongly suspect that actually, one of the major occupations of programmers in 2034 — Perl and otherwise — is going to be finding and cleaning up the remaining 32-bit time_t's. Dumb question, but is 64-bit architecture more or less...
• Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
  Well, high school sports and parks-and-rec sports can still be pretty fun to watch....
• Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
  As for wind turbines, there's a really cool wind generator design out there by Saphon Energy that has no blades. I'd never heard of this; it was sufficiently intriguing that I did a little research and found that it looks...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  Yes, that's exactly it: the vendor/retailer interface. Why this stuff hasn't been rationalized yet is beyond me. You'd think there would be incentives to do so on both sides. But -- again -- chuckles at my naivete. Anyway, the larger...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  Inventory management systems don't necessarily talk to accounting systems, much less to the systems accessible to editors, when they date back to the pre-computer age and have been iteratively upgraded ever since. Gods yes!!! Two observations to show this is...
• Commented on Vacation
  My mistake, you're quite right that while the heat and humidity is unpleasant, it's the solar stuff that ages your epidermis and gives you skin cancer. Also, Charlie, if you spend any time at all the Disney complex, BRING IN...
• Commented on Vacation
  Nothing to recommend in addition to the excellent suggestions above. However, a cautionary note: It's going to be hot. Very hot and very humid. It's amazing how the climate there ages anyone who spends significant time outdoors; I've seen people...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  So, overall impression so far - They are where they are because they've done a lot of business decisions very right. So... Accepted, some of their behavior (now and past) has been anticompetitive and author abusive. Businesses are where they...