brucecohenpdx

brucecohenpdx

  • Commented on App store annoyances
    Been doing this dance for awhile, starting with an iPod (3rd or 4th generation) that I still use as an internet radio, & an iPhone 3. The Macs I used then are gone now, and I have 2 new ones,...
  • Commented on We need a pony. And the moon on a stick. By next Thursday.
    Sigh ... Another academic field militarized. Now we're going to have to start training combat rhetoricians....
  • Commented on Checking in
    Congratulations on your nomination, Charlie, and good luck on the award. I haven't read Seanan McGuire's Velveteen books yet; per your recommendation I've put them on my long reading list (there is no short list, only long and longer). But...
  • Commented on Yet another bad idea
    Bullet points? At least .50 caliber, I would think. Nuclear Disarmament: Weapons of Mass Destruction to be disposed at sites to be designated in Iran and North Korea. Other sites as appropriate depending on reaction to first disposals. Full Employment:...
  • Commented on Can We Merge Minds and Machines?
    The War On Drugs Used By Those People is getting more and more unpopular. The Inner Party members who run it are going to be looking for another war pretty soon; bio augmentation might make a nice target for them....
  • Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
    I spent part of this morning reading Steven Wolfram waxing poetical about how the new distributed Mathematica / Wolfram Alpha / Wolfram Language will use symbolic computing to become the dominant computing paradigm. A lot of it was nothing new;...
  • Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
    Don't worry about the kettle, we're already borked. It turns out the radio chips in our phones were designed in the 90s, when designers didn't care about security; they're full of backdoors and exploitable bugs. It's possible to take over...
  • Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
    It looks like bitcoin-mining malware may already be here. Bitcoin-stealing malware definitely is....
  • Commented on What scared H. P. Lovecraft
    "Not racist"? Read the description of the redcaps in the Chicago spaceport in IIRC "First Lensman". Also the barber at the end where the Arisians' predictions are verified. And isn't OGH's "Missle Gap" a combination of Lovecraftian (imagine the effect...
  • Commented on The revolution will not be hand-stitched
    Since we've identified several candidate technologies for "printing" custom-fitted clothes, and at least 2 of them are going to be used commercially in the near term to manufacture specialty garments, I think there's a good chance there will be large...
  • Commented on Making history personal
    One night during a cross-USA trip I slept in Mesa Verde National Park, the site of an Anasazi pueblo construction started in the 7th Century or so. The part near which I was sleeping was probably built in the late...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Sorry, couldn't resist that last comment. But I agree completely with Charlie. I've been using editors and word processors even longer, almost 40 years now. At one time I had to be a Word guru for my wife, who wrote...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Word!...
  • Commented on Do Zimboes dream of Electric Sheep?
    I've often thought that since the existence of zimboes proves the existence of the soul (or some other form of spiritual secret sauce), that there ought to be a market for a bottled version, to be used by zimboes to...
  • Commented on Do Zimboes dream of Electric Sheep?
    "Just good model building"? ISTM that model building is a fundamental part of human intelligence, whether it involves building models of spatial structures, of the behavior of physical objects, or of the internal states and possible behavior of other intentional...
  • Commented on Another deceptively simple question
    ISBNs, or their successors, may end up being associated with URLs for versions and/or extensions of a "book". This could be important for linking from one bit of context to a specific version of another, say in a reference to...
  • Commented on Another deceptively simple question
    A couple of years ago, I did some experiments in building a tutorial on plane geometry on top of a dynamic geometry environment with an interface built on an interactive fiction engine. You are at the origin of the Euclidian...
  • Commented on Another deceptively simple question
    My 2 year 3 month old granddaughter was visiting a couple of weeks ago, and her mother had forgotten to bring the kid's Kindle along. I got out my iPad, and the kid watched Curious George cartoons on YouTube for...
  • Commented on Parasites
    [ DELETED BY MODERATOR - human specialities disallowed ]...
  • Commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
    Mention of "The Man Who Folded Himself" reminds me of Chris Roberson's "Here, There, And Everywhere" which tells a similar story about a female protagonist, though she's much more willing to insert herself into the events of the times she...
  • Commented on On Syria
    My suggestion would be to distribute the NAAK kits and accessories to the general civilian population, not worrying about which side they're on. Make sure there are enough that the combatants don't feel the need to grab them all for...
  • Commented on On Syria
    With regard to the tremendous outpouring of outrage about the use of chemical weapons, I have to ask, are they really so much nastier than a lot of other battlefield weapons that it's necessary to take military action that will...
  • Commented on On Syria
    Your sergeant agreed with mine, and with what I've read, especially about atropine, which is toxic, and can kill you if you weren't first exposed to a nerve agent. There would need to be very clear instructions in each kit,...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: The Fuller Memorandum
    I spotted Dr. Mike, because I'm a great fan of his work, though not having read Price I didn't see the connection with "The Scholars of Night". Speaking of which book, when I discovered Mike (unfortunately after his death; I...
  • Commented on The Northern Wild: How to Save New York?
    Oh, and also in the US, crime rates in general and murder rates in particular have been going down steadily for more than two decades, and are now at long-term lows. That's why the prison-industrial complex has been so eager...
  • Commented on The Northern Wild: How to Save New York?
    At least in the US, first ring suburbs have been turning into lower-class ghettos, often racially-divided, over the last 30 years. That's certainly true here in Portland, where most gang activity has moved to Beaverton (west-side suburb) and Gresham (east-side)....
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
    Another anecdote about the dangers of being working class. In the 1950s & 60s one of the big US chemical companies encouraged the workers who cleaned out the reaction vessels in which polyvinyl chloride was synthesized to get in there...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
    As an off-white middle class male who grew up in the 1950s in the US, I disagree very strongly with the idea that the period was "not too bad". Everyone in that society had a role given to them, and...
  • Commented on Neptune's Brood: an excerpt
    Any society that has a single concept of rights, giving them fully to one class of beings and not at all to all others is massively broken. We need to be able to deal reasonably with children, who must have...
  • Commented on Neptune's Brood: an excerpt
    Human civilization is fairly toxic just now: slavery is doing quite well thank you, in some of its most pernicious forms, vicious internecine conflict is common on all continents except Antarctica, and we seem to be heading back into a...
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