sabik.eta

sabik.eta

  • Commented on App store annoyances
    My major pet peeve is that the user isn't in control of the permissions. The user should ALWAYS be able to disallow particular permissions, and change them, with fake data being presented if the app demands it. If Google won't...
  • Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
    Are people like "Fuel Air Solutions" going to deliver a million barrels of oil, every day, straight off the bat? Are they going to be able to double that by next year? Yes? You're talking about a $30bn/year market demand,...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    Isn't that pretty much the definition of a bug?...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    Another thing to note in favour of higher-level languages is that both "bugs per lines of code" and "lines of code per hour" tend to be fairly constant across languages. This means that if the HLL allows you to do...
  • Commented on Generation Z
    Venus acceleration due to gravity at the surface: 8.87m/s^2, i.e. 90% of Earth gravity. This is way closer to what we evolved under than any other planet in our solar system. Actually, this is not quite accurate — Saturn, Uranus...
  • Commented on Generation Z
    Ah, bother; I was thinking a hot-air balloon, perhaps a sufficiently large geodesic dome (Buckminster Fuller's Cloud Nine), but if the outside is unbreathable steam, that won't work. That would be the big advantage over Venus, if the outside was...
  • Commented on Generation Z
    If it does trigger runaway, then things are much worse. Converting the earth to a steam atmosphere is not compatible with any life that we know about. Even thermophiles will be toast in those conditions. Hmm, would it be survivable...
  • Commented on "Write me something fresh and new, but make it just like the last one"
    Lots of potential using a house/architecture as a character or a spell. Who says spells must be uttered or written -- they could be built just like potions are mixed. I think Sluggy Freelance did that about a decade ago?...
  • Commented on A nation of slaves
    In one region, currently growing, female education is common, fertility relatively low, and life is relatively good. In another, which is shrinking for the moment but still contains most of humanity, female education is uncommon, fertility is rather high, the...
  • Commented on Implications
    In fact, there's no reason to think that a intelligent alien species couldn't make some sort of complex society without fire. Once you have an intelligent alien with a complex society, they'd be able to take a naturally-occurring fire and...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    Whew. Imagine being a passenger on this flight. [...] You know you're going to die ... there's not a damned thing you can do ... and you have maybe an hour to contemplate it. Fortunately, passenger oxygen doesn't last that...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    BTW, as far as locked doors are concerned, there's a story from late 2012 / early 2013 where one of the pilots went to the toilet, and when he wanted to return found that there's no response over the intercom...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    This would also be consistent with the report of "mumbling" when another aircraft attempted contact with them......
  • Commented on Circumstantial connections
    Maybe the military don't want to admit how much they actually can see? All output from military radar is classified, presumably, because you don't want the others to know how well you can see, even if it is quite well...
  • Commented on Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?
    60 years ago is 1954. The Jetsons were on TV in 1963, and flying cars were a routine part of the future in the '70s (Larry Niven's "Known Space" is full of them). Neuromancer is only 30 years old today...
  • Commented on Sitrep
    Through Guildford, which has lots of trains already, going across the putative freight-flow? That is the problem, not building anew chord @ REdhill! OK, if that's the only problem with my proposed routing, I'm rather pleasantly surprised! That's like 10km...
  • Commented on Sitrep
    I think there is a strategic option for a rail version of the M25 to allow rail traffic to get to the Channel tunnel without passing through the most congested rail network in the country -- getting a trainload of...
  • Commented on Sitrep
    Merchant Princes watch... child's toy made from titanium. Also 3D-printed. But it's the titanium that's interesting, because there's so little reason for the choice of material... almost as though they made it out of whatever was to hand....
  • Commented on Sitrep
    Solving the housing crisis is easy, to the first-order approximation: build another million houses. Why stop at a million? I thought the current shortage was a quarter of a billion... Of course, having seen (and lived in) a million-flat project,...
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    Please read the "2.2 With bitcoin, reserve banking is impossible" section of the paper I linked to - you, I, or the author has misunderstood something, and I'm not sure which of us it is. I think it's the author...
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    Neither can normal banks, with traditional currency. Actual Bitcoins correspond to M0 and MB, in the same way that notes and coins in circulation and in bank vaults correspond to M0 and MB. The banks don't create new coins or...
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    It's impossible to conduct reserve banking in Bitcoin due to it solving the double-spend problem - a bank can't both hold a coin and lend it Uh, the entire point of fractional-reserve banking is that the bank holds only a...
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    So if I want to talk about Bitcoin, where do I find Satoshi Nakamoto? Where is his office? Is he really just one guy or an anonymous group? Read up on the March 2013 "Bitcoin fork". In short: A software...
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    Some of the rhetoric around Bitcoin gives me the same impression of arithmetic fizzy thinking. Not to mention algorithmic fizzy thinking. It's amazing how much of the entire sales pitch of Bitcoin is based on either an outright lie or...
  • Commented on Commercial announcement
    Laundry series/Merchant Princes cross-over? See mission patch posted up-thread? (At #9.)...
  • Commented on Commercial announcement
    When Miriam first stumbles into X she sees Y. So she mistakes it Z. That seems to happen to her a lot....
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    The coin limit is created because WE THE MINERS want that limit. Good. Now, what is the decision mechanism that will lead to this? The mining pools. Anything that's agreed on by (a) the authors of the standard client, and...
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    One aspect — both the original article and the bulk of the discussion are based on what might be called the official bitcoin narrative. However, it's not the truth — it's more of a cover story, really... I'm pretty sure...
  • Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
    I'm attacking the internet of things, not necessarily smart devices. The thing that's both fascinating and absurd is that people keep conflating the two. That's because the two are in practice pretty much the same thing, at best two sides...
  • Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
    The nice thing about luddite revolt in the face of an internet of things is that it costs little or nothing. Beyond a smart grid for balancing the load from distributed, small scale wind and solar installations, there aren't a...
Subscribe to feed Recent Actions from sabik.eta

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