mikko.v.parviainen

mikko.v.parviainen

  • Commented on Service update
    As someone on the other side of the world I think we'd all be better off if there was a better model for collective action by small nations than the empire and federation models we see breaking around us. 3-5...
  • Commented on Service announcement: upcoming outage(s)
    Quite - there are plenty of people who grew used to a culture of self-signed certs in the workplace, where they were advised and encouraged to ignore or work past browser warnings. Organisations have had to grow enough maturity to...
  • Commented on Service announcement: upcoming outage(s)
    except that if they do so over SSL then the MITM attacker gets nothing. Well, except if the user clicks "Proceed anyway" or equivalent when the browser says that the certificate does not match the server. Not that there's much...
  • Commented on Service update
    A peripheral European anglophone nation of some 5 million people is not going to have the ability -- or the perceived need -- to practice diplomacy on the basis of it being the heir to a global empire and still...
  • Commented on The Ferguson Question
    Whatever happened to "To Protect and Serve"? While I don't know much about the US police, I know that there are a lot of different police organizations there. I don't know your reasoning for that quote, but I thought for...
  • Commented on Down tools
    I suffered for my research and I don't even get to subject you to it! Waah! I would be interested in reading about that, but I understand that it couldn't fit in the book, and writing a companion book explaining...
  • Commented on Who Owns SF?
    I found this book by that name, and the description seems to match: Farm, Forge and Steam It looks like it's a roleplaying supplement and only an ebook, so it's probably not on Amazon. I'm not sure if it's this...
  • Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
    (and by "pain" and "medium", I invite you to consider how you'd reply to a proposal that you take a 20-40% pay cut for 3-5 years). On the lower end of that range, well, yeah, I have worked at...
  • Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
    A joke I once heard: Man to little boy: "Little boy, does it ever stop raining in Edinburgh?" Little boy: "I don't know. I'm only nine." And a real conversation: Student 1: "My intro to Edinburgh was icily horizontal sleet...
  • Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
    I would disagree with that. An out-of-region DVD does get payment to the rights-holder. Which does matter. I was about to say the same thing to dirk.bruere, but then I realized that you can buy a DVD and not ever...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    Thank you everybody who corrected me on the self-modifying code. I learned new things today. Apparently I haven't been thinking about JIT technologies enough, and really haven't seen the edges of computing. Developing software in Harvard architecture is quite different...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    I also agree with OGH that the Von Neumann architecture is one of the leading root causes in the insecurity of computers. There were times when it helped to do some stuff, but those times are long past, luckily. That...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    The nearest solution to this is rolling upgrades and patch fixes. The NSA/FBI creates a toolkit "May2014" using exploits currently available, works with MS to have fixes for these incorporated in the next security release, then expires the toolkit at...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    While I am willing to argue in favour of C for the kernel, and some low-level libraries, there is simply no justification for using it to write applications. Pointers and buffer overflows are some of the hardest issues with C,...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    They [NSA] could have created transport-layer security which had backdoors they could exploit, but which made all the bad-things harder. But no, they didn't provide any security against anything. The problem with backdoors in general is that they are usable...
  • Commented on The prospects of the Space and Freedom Party reconsidered in light of the crisis of 21st century capitalism
    I don't know if I'm missing a joke, but Toronto's in Canada. "Warm" and "south" are not words typically applied. We-ell, depends on your point of view. Toronto's latitude is a bit over 43 degrees. The average lowest temperature for...
  • Commented on Checking in
    Something I sometimes struggle with is the soundtrack. One effect of age, and also of hearing damage, is that we lose some of our ability to distinguish speech from background noise, and that has long been a sore point...
  • Commented on A nation of slaves
    There's a bit of a logistic problem arranging cover for what's seen as a "normal" working day, but with so many places running for far more than the default 8 hours per day there have to be answers in place....
  • Commented on Circumstantial connections
    Would it be in poor taste to start speculating about wandering clouds of black smoke, sightings of wild animals not normally native to the area, and mysterious underground installations...? At least it wouldn't be a purgatory then. More seriously, this...
  • Commented on Miscellanea
    The British railway system is a horrible mishmash of supposedly competing companies (because, yaknow, competition!) and internal markets (because the actual infrastructure can't be divided, you can't have multiple companies running the signalling on a stretch of track), and it...
  • Commented on "The next big thing"
    It's not new any more; arguably the first of it was "Consider Phlebas", back in 1986. And "James Corey" has your back. So, it's like the New Wave of British Heavy Metal? At least some of the bands have been...
  • Commented on Commercial announcement
    (And it's neither a purely chromosomal trait nor a natural one: rather, there's some very advanced self-replicating engineered objects taking passage inside the world-walkers' central nervous system, and a hack to control them. And the hack is somewhat broken. This...
  • Commented on Commercial announcement
    Yes, I was also wondering how the "first" world walker came about. After my previous comment I started thinking that the first one could well have had the pattern with him or her and then just passed it on as...
  • Commented on Commercial announcement
    The original tinker was a deserter from the people who created the dome, running as far and burying himself as deep as he could. I'm just wondering how many generations it took and how the braid was preserverd, or re-discovered....
  • Commented on Commercial announcement
    Miriam Burgeson For some reason this fills me with glee more than the other things. I just read the new editions, and although Miriam isn't a... nice person at all times, this relationship was something that I thought was a...
  • Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
    Who needs one of those "operating system" things when you can run ROM BASIC?! Who needs ROM BASIC if you can run ROM Forth?...
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    Lack of circulating money is bad Even though I'm not an economist (more of an engineer), it seems to me from what I've read economics that the point of money is to circulate. Our current economy just won't work when...
  • Commented on Speaking of book covers ...
    Also note that Bob is growing older by about one year per year of real time in the publishing schedule, at least up until "The Rhesus Chart". So he started out aged about 26-27 in "The Atrocity Archives" and is...
  • Commented on The revolution will not be hand-stitched
    Yes: in the long term, we're all fucked. As it happens, I've lately been re-reading the roleplaying game GURPS Transhuman Space. It's set in the year 2100, with a quite magic-tech Transhuman world. I quite like the game, and I...
  • Commented on I have a new book cover
    I can just imagine someone will complain "But I have the whole series in paperback. This'll mess up my shelving!" We-ell... I was about to say that, or rather "This makes me wait more for the paperback." I think I'll...
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