wulf88
Recent Actions
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Commented on The Ferguson Question
As your other commentarians have pointed out, the US never actively subscribed to the Peelian principals of policing. The first official police force in the US was formed in Boston in the 1830s. We were about a century behind Great...
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Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
Charlie: Why was the Devo Max option left off the ballot? I'm searching through old Guardian articles, but I can't find the reason. Also, don't the Tories have a vested interest in seeing Scotland cut loose? Without the left-leaning Scots,...
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Commented on Upcoming appearance: Frankfurt Book Fair
I was thinking of purchasing a SAD lamp. What brand of SAD lamp do you use, Charlie? And when and how long do you use them in your daily routine? Although I live considerably further south from you, I seem...
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Commented on On Syria
Charlie: FYI -- The US Postal service is currently running a special HAZMAT facility that screens all incoming letters and packages to the US Congress and US Government officials. The recent spat of Ricin letters were intercepted at this facility....
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Commented on The next moves in the Spooks v. News cold war
Charlie writes: "If we see the NSA or other US government agencies getting into the disinformation business, then the end game has arrived: there really is a Deep State developing, and it's adopting the tactics of a secret police agency...
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Commented on Monarchy versus the Panopticon
Maybe you can clarify this a bit, Charlie, but how far away from the throne do you have to be before you're allowed to vote and run for public office? The royal.gov.uk website wasn't very clear on this point --...
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Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
Yes, you're quite right. Dubstep is rocking the foundations of our musical world. Jazz, Blues, Rock, Reggae are now but pale candles against the tidal wave of our Dubstep-permeated culture. ;-) Except that a lot of Dubstep can be seen...
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Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
Who will the people of 2500AD focus on for their image of our time -- 50s and 60s soaps which portray a common consensus culture, or a bizarre swamp of semi-corrupt dumps from Reddit, Facebook, MTV, the 500 Club, and...
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Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
Charlie: Are publisher's contracts really that restrictive? As long as you deliver your ms to the publisher on time, what do they care if you hand in another novel to another publisher? Or are there non-compete clauses? SF is a...
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Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
Well, I'll say it again. I think Glasshouse is the best science fiction novels written in the 21st Century (at least the best novel written in the 21st Century so far). I was saddened that it didn't garner a much...
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Commented on The permanent revolution
My bad, Fatal. By "augmented reality" I thought you meant getting into a Jaron Lanier sensory suit and twerking on the holodecks. I didn't realize that the term augmented reality had been scaled down from total immersion to a pair...
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Commented on The permanent revolution
Strangely enough, though I'm a network engineer today, I did my undergrad work in Archaeology. And the Big Question was "why do civilizations collapse?" Everyone had their pet theories, none of which could be conclusively proven. Among the theories were...
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Commented on The permanent revolution
Fatal Error wrote: "The awesome trend right now is not wired networking but wireless which will lead to augmented reality which is going to change the world yet again." While it's true that wireless spectrum isn't well utilized, currently the...
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Commented on The permanent revolution
That's cool to hear about the hollow fiber, George, but that .33 C number you have seems too low for any fiber I've dealt with. The velocity of propagation in multimode step index fiber would be C divided by 1.538...
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Commented on The permanent revolution
Well, even 100GbE is at its core 10GbE bundled together. It depends on either 10 lanes of glass fiber (in both directions) to carry the signal -- or four lanes of 25gig using Wave Division Multiplexing. So that's why it...
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Commented on The permanent revolution
Joan wrote: "As for today, I see no sign we're slowing down. A quantum computer was just proposed, a million times faster than what we have today." Just because we can run an algorithm faster doesn't necessarily mean we're improving...
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Commented on I suck at New Year Resolutions
So why did you commit to delivering a trilogy in 18 months? Was there pressure from the publisher to meet a very short deadline? But don't most publishers shy away from releasing more than single book by an author in...
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Commented on The ticking clock
My bad. My vision isn't as good as it used to be. But it was good question that you didn't ask!...
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Commented on The ticking clock
Charlie: I'd question whether any the corporate examples you posed are truly efficient. Or perhaps your point was they're only efficient in their ability to divert wealth to the sociopaths running the organization? Perhaps I'm stating the obvious, but big...
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Commented on The ticking clock
David L @99 asks: "AS a matter of interest, what's the difference between 'the illusion of self-hood' and actual self-hood?" I guess I'll pose you a couple of thought experiment as my answer... If you were suddenly to suffer a...
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Commented on The ticking clock
Timothy F @102 said: "They started producing bio-fuels because the governments forced them to in the name of the environment..." I remember it slightly differently. In 2005 the US Government passed legislation that a certain percentage of gasoline (petrol, for...
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Commented on The ticking clock
Dirk bruere @70 said: "Except there is no 'you' to be reincarnated." Yup. You got it. Instead, it's your non-you that gets reincarnated as another non-you. But remember that the mind in Buddhism is considered to be an aggregation of...
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Commented on The ticking clock
Dirk bruere @70 said: "Nobody is reborn. There is no soul to be reborn." Dirk, if you're a Buddhist, you're falling into the mistake of nihilism. The doctrine of anatman means "no self" (not "no soul" as it's often been...
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Commented on The ticking clock
Apropros length of life, it was Heinlein who pointed out (and I'm paraphrasing) that we really all live the same amount of time. We can only live in the now due to the nature of our time perception (and the...