cdodgson

cdodgson

  • Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
    This is weird: Is there some reason consumers should care more about Hachette than Amazon's two-day free delivery? I'd say Amazon won the PR war before it started. One of Amazon's tactics against Hachette has been to limit inventories, with...
  • Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
    Amazon has posted a statement about this mess in the Kindle forum: http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx1UO5T446WM5YY Short summary: "nothing personal, it's just business". As to the effect on their customers: " this business interruption affects a small percentage of Amazon's demand-weighted units. If...
  • Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
    Being a full-time author becomes statistically impossible. (There may be a small number of best-sellers, but becoming one is equivalent to winning a lottery and impossible to base career plans upon.) Does anyone have statistics on how many Big 5...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    The problem with backdoors in general is that they are usable by other parties than the one who designed it. There is no backdoor which NSA could implement in such a way that they could be certain that they were...
  • Commented on Heartbleed note
    Well, at this point, Heartbleed exploits have landed in the Metasploit framework, so if the black hats aren't using it yet, they will be very shortly. Looking back further, at least one security researcher has found apparent Heartbleed exploit attempts...
  • Commented on April Fools Day is Cancelled this Year.
    It follows that the following are both completely for real: Mary Robinette Kowal says she's been running Scalzi's blog in his name for the past month (including the "reader questions" week): http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/ive-john-scalzi-past-month-didnt-notice/ Subversion source control project switches its own development...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    How about making IFF transponders permanently powered when the "weight on wheels" sensor says "we're airborne"? One of the few reasons for manual control of IFF power is so that pilots can shut IFF down when taxiing at busy airfields....
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    This is becoming pretty silly speculation for a case explainable by a depressurization or electrical fire followed by random flight profile changes as if flew around for a while before crashing. So, a programmed change in the flight path hard...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    One further piece of information, from the New York Times: As of the aircraft's last ACARS ping, at 1:07 AM local time, the flight plan had already been altered in the plane's flight management system. This was while the crew...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    Here's a pilot with a boringly mundane but tragic hypothesis. Which, to summarize, is that the plane suffered an electrical fire, which caused the radios to fail, and the pilot to turn back towards Malaysia. And then the pilot was...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    Have you got a cite on the "coded message" reports? I've been on flights which put the radio on the passenger entertainment system, so I've heard a whole bunch of air traffic control handoffs, and having the pilot say "goodbye",...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    There's a dirty trick: you charter a bizjet from Heathrow to La Guardia or Newark. It takes off on schedule. You also file a flight plan from, say, Khazakstan to Algeria, identifying your 777 as a freighter. Which should have...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    If it was intruders bursting into the cockpit, they managed to surprise and overwhelm the flight crew sufficiently that they didn't have time to raise any alarm, which would have taken only a few seconds. By the time whoever was...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    Whoever did this has royally pissed-off both the USA & the PRC - was this a wise move? Which suggests it is not N Korea. Well, the best evidence against North Korean involvement is probably just that the plane's last...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    A few thoughts on the "political" scenarios: First off, there's a big problem with the 250-ton cruise missile scenario: getting the thing to its target without it being detected by radar, interdicted, and shot down. Ordinary cruise missiles deal with...
  • Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
    Greg@62: How dare you slander the Founding Fathers?! It wasn't slavery/emancipation that motivated them; it was not paying the tab for redcoat services in the French & Indian War. It wasn't slavery/emancipation per se that motivated them, because the British...
  • Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
    Links to statements from NHS and PA Consulting here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7335319 Notably, they claim that "the data set does not contain information linked to specific individuals". I read that as saying that names (and, hopefully, addresses, phone numbers, and other such...
  • Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
    And Google don't have access to this data, no matter how many scare quotes Twitter users apply to the news. PA Consulting are using a storage service and a data query engine that Google provide. Google don't have legal access...
  • Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
    So, 125 GB of data. Uncompressed and indexed, with no particular attention to storage requirements, this could blow up to maybe a terabyte. That used to be really big, but these days a stock relational DB (say, Postgres) running on...
  • Commented on Schadenfreude
    Personally, I think this would be a very good time for Scotland to look, hard, at the Euro. Depends on your time horizon, I guess, and what you expect from the ECB. Unfortunately, one plausible reading of what's been going...
  • Commented on Schadenfreude
    I am sure that Charlie will understand that if Scotland votes to leave Great Britain it will have to create it's own currency. To continue using the pound under such circumstances will make Scotland just a theoretically independent thrall of...
  • Commented on Schadenfreude
    "We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error." --- Tyler Winkelvoss. No tears for the trust fund baby --- but the Reddit /r/bitcoin thread on war stories...
  • Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
    The thing about analogizing the history of Unix with that of Christianity is that Christianity was dominant in its society for millenia, and I'm not sure Unix ever was. At least outside of academia, through the end of the 20th...
  • Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
    Gimmicked keyboards and mice have all sorts of wonderful potential attack modes. My favorite doesn't involve wireless at all. There are long-standing rumors of weaponized exploits against operating-system level USB stacks: plug in a device with the exploit, and the...
  • Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
    The original Reuters report on IRS use of NSA-sourced intelligence (filtered through the Drug Enforcement Agency's "Special Operations Division") is here. Note that the IRS agents were specifically directed to omit any reference to the source of the information....
  • Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
    Law enforcement is the tip of the iceberg; I expect it to be shared with tax authorities... The news is still ahead of you, I'm afraid: Reuters: IRS manual instructed agents how to hide secret DEA/NSA intel. The IRS is...
  • Commented on Trotskyite singularitarians for Monarchism! A political speculation.
    Belated side note: If you'd like to see neo-reactionary software, it's here. This is one of Moldbug's projects --- under a different name (Curtis Yarvin, which is his wallet name for all I know, but it does seem to be...
  • Commented on Trotskyite singularitarians for Monarchism! A political speculation.
    I think tactically, this is a response to the mass decline in personal power of a big chunk IT professionals as the economy heads ever further south. Could you unpack that a bit? A lot of the sympathizers for this...
  • Commented on Another deceptively simple question
    More recently, China Mieville was asked this sort of question and said he expected to see books appearing with alternative edits, often unofficial ones, like music does. Imagine, say, Halting State remixed to follow a different character's point of view....
  • Commented on Another deceptively simple question
    One good example is short fiction like Equoid. That story would be difficult to publish commercially in paper by itself. Yes, a few specialty editions will come out, but it's not going to be at the local big box next...
Subscribe to feed Recent Actions from cdodgson

Following

Not following anyone

Specials

Merchandise

About This Page

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Propaganda