anonemouse

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• Commented on Loncon 3: Charlie's worldcon schedule
  See you at "The Ruling Party," at least....
• Commented on App store annoyances
  This is one of the reasons Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia made me so sad: it permanently turned MeeGo into a niche phone OS. Debian on yer phone, skinned to be usable by even severely tech-challenged people; what's not to like?...
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  maybe this virtual credit card generator could be distributed as freeware. It would need to be picked up by the banks, not the customers; the people deploying it would need access to Visa (or whoever)'s credit card creation API. It's...
• 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
  You mean Flattr?...
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  It's possible, in that it's already happened. Meet Inkshares and Patreon (the latter appears short of prose writers, but that doesn't seem to be because the platform prohibits them)....
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  Bandcamp's prices are set by the artist, and "pay what you want" is an option. So the price isn't set per market by someone who knows what the market can bear, but is set by the people who in theory...
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  Can't tell if you want novels to be movies or video games; please disambiguate....
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  Is there any chance that you could see programming go through the equivalent of what the Industrial Revolution did to textile manufacturing, with lots of it broken down into highly specialized tasks that can be done by someone with the...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  I'm reliably informed Erlang is what you're asking about, though perhaps not massively parallel (that's what Hadoop is for)....
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  There are some objections (Shava Nerad's second comment; Google Plus is apparently too braindead to allow direct links to comments) to Brin's frankly Panglossian attitude....
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  I suggest you take a look at Karl Schroeder's "Ventus"....
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  Corn stalks are also used as animal bedding, then fertilizer. Or am I the only one who's forked straw and shovelled manure? :-) Part of the problem with using sewage as fertilizer is that the Victorians only built one combined...
• Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  Non-food plants for biofuel implies either a decrease in food grown or more land under the plough - both deeply unrecommended. Incidentally, some algae are an edible crop....
• Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
  Why would an independent Scotland need a border at all (beyond a line on a map and some updated "Welcome to" signs on either side), given its almost automatic membership of the Common Travel Area?...
• Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
  *applause*...
• Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
  Have you seen the kinds of things Roman sports fans got up to?...
• Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
  It's not the internecine conflict Scotland would have to worry about; it's the "interesting" shaking-out of the separation. Though no matter what anyone thinks of Salmond, he's no de Valera....
• Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
  I will point out the Irish arrangement was set in place following quite a bit of bile too, so hopefully it's still on the table. Following that as an example you might be stuck with Faslane for a bit, though....
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  Also, I'm pretty sure the US government doesn't tell Europe what to do. (Maybe they try, but Europe's their own nations; they don't have to listen.) I'm not disagreeing with your argument as a whole, but some rebuttal evidence for...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  Subletting other people's cloud to your customers; some do it, generally by adding value in some way or other. Amazon don't. And neither do IBM (who are getting out of low-margin manufacturing; they'll be shipping a new Power CPU next...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  The moment it jacked up its prices, a competitor could enter the market and undercut it. So it has to keep competing against any business that might enter the market if it goes too far. Two of Amazon's competitors in...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  Another objection: everyone has noticed Amazon has gone from "online bookseller" to "internet supermarket," right? Even if books dry up completely for them, they still have a business....
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  I know people who started their career riding herd on Amazon's servers; Amazon's cloud is built, owned, and operated by them (to the point they recently won a contract to replicate said cloud in Langley for the CIA, making IBM...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  You do know Amazon took over the Book Depository too, right? Take a look at the Hive....
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  There isn't a "climate change" challenge. There is a "build an aeroplane that flies London-Edinburgh at comparable speed to today's aircraft emitting as close to zero carbon as possible" one. Whoever designed this understood the need for achievable goals, it...
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  What's the difference between "don't include the website at this specific address" and "don't include the website at this specific address for this specific search term"? The ruling covers removal of specific information, not general Bad Stuff (probably - the...
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  You've never gotten a "chillingeffects.org" notice in your results on a Google search? Google can and do remove links to copyright infringing material from their results. They post a link to the DMCA request instead. Here's an example....
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  "Sure, just send us the offending links. All of them." It's data protection law. You can only have it removed when it's inaccurate or out of date, so you have to tell them the exact problematic page....
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  Exactly how are name collisions supposed to be relevant?...