vivtek

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• Commented on How Do We Get There?
  I will say that the thought of an infinite amount of Venice sounds pretty nice to me. Automated masonry assembly is something I've been thinking about lately. Did you know that bricks are made from dirt? And that mortar is...
• Commented on How Do We Get There?
  I've always thought post-scarcity won't be so much a question of increasing support, but reducing the cost of essentials to the point that a house, or food for ten, represents pocket change. This is more or less where technology is...
• Commented on Brief interruption
  Whew, grueling trip. You must be to the point where the things in the room move when you're not looking at them....
• Commented on The one that got away
  I got one that didn't get away - you've perfectly captured why I love my house. It was built in 1885 by a local industrialist for three people (plus servants) - he and his wife had a single daughter. They...
• Commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
  Oh, don't give me that, Charlie - there have always been open frontiers in Europe. They just often have inconvenient populations of other Europeans on them, and it's really only a very recent development indeed that you've stopped killing each...
• Commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
  I think it's just an escapist thing. As the planet gets more crowded, people need to think that there's a frontier out there they could retreat to - and in the past, that's pretty much always been the case. Now...
• Commented on Pink Stuff Patrol
  I ran across a short article about building comment forms that screen out spam pretty effectively. It's not a Movable Type plugin as far as I know, but it might help: http://nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html To all the people talking about forcing login...
• Commented on Trick Question
  Well, what actually makes up good soil is still an area of active research. Although I suppose you'd want to do hydroponics for the actual growing, you're still going to want some kind of mulching process digesting waste....
• Commented on Coming next <em>September</em> ...
  I fully intend to like the hell out of it....
• Commented on Salt Beings
  This one did. Hi from rural Indiana!...
• Commented on Science Fiction as Foresight
  Hey, the FBI uses fiction in their training, too!...
• Commented on Sartorial semiotics
  Then it's a good thing you're not across the border under the wonderfully democratic government of Mitch Daniels. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)...
• Commented on 9/11
  Ugh. As I've said before, two exploding buildings and 3000 dead, to the United States, were a bee sting. The rest of the story has been the anaphylactic shock. I had really hoped not to be in the United States...
• Commented on MeTube: Infinite Loop
  Yeah, the questions were difficult to understand - but not nearly as bad as many presentations I've listened to. I have to give you thumbs up overall. I'm not sure why I'm so video resistant - but everything on video...
• Commented on More on books
  Sorry, Charlie, it's all too easy to think of the UK as mythological ("There is no Easter Bunny. There is no Tooth Fairy. There is no Queen of England. This is the real world, and you need to wake up!")....
• Commented on Because I have too much spare time for reading ...
  I got no larger opinion; I read SF because I'm driven to, not because I spend time analyzing it. I'm only commenting here because of the double mention of the Kovacs series, which is good, but causes me a sharp...
• Commented on Why I'm not on Google Plus
  No-one in the US except for Puerto Rico, you mean. Where, by the way, you will have a tendency to break systems if you don't have two non-hyphenated last names....
• Commented on Why I'm not on Google Plus
  Yeah, I remember that HNN thread (threadfest, actually - there was a similar one pertaining to addresses, at least as peril-fraught a domain) and loved Patrick's list then, too. As a middle-namer myself (my father's name is my first name,...
• Commented on Brief announcement
  I'd buy it....
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  Hope is not a plan....
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  I suppose what I should have said is that the real work of programming is at the semantic level, because without understanding the problem to be solved, the solution itself has no meaning (haha, see what I did there?) The...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  You still need technologists to make sure your tools - which you need - will do what you think they're doing. But even more importantly, a sufficiently elegant technical analysis will generally involve a great deal of semantic clarification of...
• Commented on Aten't dead yet
  Double marks for the title. Granny Weatherwax is the best....
• Commented on Wicked (1)
  Karl, if you want a programmer, I'm on board. Give me interesting enough specs in Wicked (2) and I'll start without you. Last time I wrassled with this notion, though (two years ago) the group was too large and diverse...
• Commented on Living with a writer
  My family knows when I'm doing software debugging as opposed to technical translation - they say it's the only time I seem truly angry. My wife, now, goes into Deep Physics mode in the same way. You interrupt at peril...
• Commented on Brief absence
  Yeah - too bad he's got no credentials, otherwise this blog might be valuable reading. Looking forward to more Laundry!...
• Commented on "Yes, but what are your <em>credentials</em>, Mr Stross?"
  What discuss? Credentialism is the hobgoblin of little minds. I'm still boggling about Mr. Numpty's sense of entitlement in this - are these more or less verbatim quotes? Seriously? Final thought: should there actually be a licensing requirement for Internet...
• Commented on Where to get signed copies of "Rule 34"
  How about if we stalk you at your home? (Not that I'm planning to. This year.)...
• Commented on Thought experiment
  I guess I'm way late to the party, but this is what finally induced me to start a comment. Charlie @ 91: It's possible that surviving 200-year-olds will have learned to take the long view. But I wouldn't bet serious...
• Commented on Small but perfectly formed annoyance
  There are text diff tools for Windows - let me Google that for you: diffutils at gnuwin32. (I personally use an ancient tool from the Microsoft compiler toolkit. It sucks but I'm used to it.) Word is a different beast...