anonemouse

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• Commented on A message from our UK sponsors (again)
  Yes, there is more security in the Verified by Visa system. The banks use that fact to claim any fraud is the customers' fault and to foist the liability onto the cardholders, i.e. us. See Ross Anderson's thoughts on the...
• Commented on A message from our UK sponsors (again)
  Pan McMillan's webstore demanded I use "Verified by Visa" to buy Jeff Noon's latest, at which point I told it to fuck off. If I've gone to the hassle of doing an actual handing-in-cash bank deposit to avoid using Verified...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Obligatory sci-fi exploration of the idea: Poul Anderson's "A Man To My Wounding", which deals with a world where "politics by other means" means declared "states of assassination" rather than war - and where there's been a sudden theoretical breakthrough...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  What's keeping Syria from threatening the use of its chemical weapons stocks? The fact that Obama has told everyone the US will suddenly get Very Involved in Syria's future governance if they use them? That may not have stopped...
• Commented on Why I Do Self-Publish
  I don't know how much of Hitchhiker we'd have gotten - probably some, as a chunk of the material was produced with the BBC was standing over him with a big stick; ditto Dirk Gently, with some of the bones...
• Commented on What are words worth?
  "Hibernian English" has some odd constructions - and a tense or two - that are in Irish, but not English. Examples....
• Commented on What are words worth?
  You can localise within Northern Ireland, Belfast is particularly easy, Derry/Londonderry is different. There are people who maintain they can differentiate all 32 accents of the different counties of Ireland. I can't, but wouldn't dispute the assertion. There's also generally...
• Commented on Mitochondrial Singularity
  Well, given one of the early advocates of the theory of symbiosis was one Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, they were both right and very, very wrong......
• Commented on The permanent revolution
  I was thinking more of deliveries from suppliers rather than to customers, but I freely admit to grabbing the first halfway plausible application of an NP-complete solver and throwing it in as illustration, rather than making a thoroughly considered point...
• Commented on The permanent revolution
  The day we're able to model a stock market completely is the day the world turns very weird: markets are NP-complete, and it appears to be possible to encode any other NP-complete problem in a manner solvable by the market,...
• Commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
  You haven't seen "author's preferred" editions? The one that springs to mind first is Raymond E. Feist's 'Magician,' but apparently Neil Gaiman has one for 'American Gods,' too. It's also fairly standard for trade paperback comic collections to have a...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  I qualified in the '00s, and my degree programme started with logic design and joining point a to point b with wire and ended with Haskell and web programming, bouncing off various selections of the ground between those points. As...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  I'm in Ireland, working for an IT multinational. The desks immediately surrounding mine belong to Pakistani, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Scottish and Colombian employees. This is unexceptional. Talking to friends working elsewhere in the IT business here, the company...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  Regarding independence in Northern Ireland: I invite you to contemplate the fact that limiting the flying of the Union Flag on Belfast City Hall to (roughly) the days public buildings in other parts of the UK fly it resulted in...
• Commented on Me, talking
  The engineers would fall even further behind in getting this stuff into a usable state than they are now. :-)...
• Commented on Me, talking
  The company Better Place - which uses the battery-changing model - is mentioned upthread. I discussed some reasons why it's not an ideal one; for the pro side, their former CEO gave a TED talk....
• Commented on Me, talking
  I'm in my late twenties, and it's even worse: phone calls are for very time-dependent stuff ("I've pulled up to the door, you'd better be out in 30 seconds" level) and "business engagements". The only people I've spoken to on...
• Commented on Me, talking
  Considering I started trying to figure out how to do eye-tracking from muscle movements soon after coming across these, I had similar thoughts. ",)...
• Commented on Me, talking
  Have a look at these things, which seem to be slowly condensing from vapourware. They look like particularly chunky and unstylish versions of the thick square glasses that were the fashion ~5 years ago (so people have already demonstrated willingness...
• Commented on Me, talking
  If you can spare the time, SailRail is thoroughly good value. For me, getting home from Brighton to Dublin on a weekend for the price of the midweek Dublin-London flight out really illustrated this....
• Commented on Me, talking
  Steve Mann's wearable computing rig has apparently been replacing ads in his sightline with "second screen" type content (low-urgency messages etc) for years now, so the problem's been solved once for actual physical ads. And re: new spam. Google has...
• Commented on The jet lag game
  The (possibly made-up) story is that a Mosquito crew who wanted to show off could drop as many blockbuster bombs on a target as a Lancaster - while they could only carry one they could drop it, return to base,...
• Commented on Me, talking
  The big problem with Better Place (and the stated reason they were given their marching orders when they attempted to move into Ireland) is that you need a Better Place-compatible car to use a Better Place battery-changing station, and they...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  As has been pointed out upthread, the real Rube-Goldbergness of the Curiosity landing - the Skycrane - was to prevent the landing thrusters' exhaust polluting the landing site. Any manned landing could descend right to the surface without that step,...
• Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  If I had the expertise, I'd be figuring out how to write permaculture lessons into cheap cell phone apps that can play in the developing world. I'd also be working on cheaper ways to perform soil tests, possibly with a...
• Commented on The jet lag game
  QHI sell melatonin via post - they're reliable, and the taste in my mouth the morning after argues they're not selling me sugar......
• Commented on The World Shrinks Under The Weight of Madness
  And as a possible explanation of how they got funding, I recommend Strange Days Indeed, a book on just how insane the 70s were from the very top down (link is to the Guardian review)....
• Commented on New Guest Blogger: Ian Tregillis
  We're 30 comments in to an (among other topics) "Nazis as occultists" thread and no-one's mentioned Hellboy? For shame. ",) (Hellboy's occultists are, of course, much more complicated than merely being Thule Society holdovers, given it's an "all myths are...
• Commented on It's a Wonderful Life
  It's even worse than that....
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  You're right, but behind the times, apparently (that article was posted last July). This means there's Kurdish autonomous zones in Iraq and Syria, and so Turkey is deeply worried - worried enouugh to reopen talks with the PKK, it seems....