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cepetit.myopenid.com

  • Commented on The revolution will not be hand-stitched
    A few comments on wildly varying subtopics: (1) A lucrative use, if the "printers" can be made portable enough, will be floor- and wall-coverings. Consider the front parlour with a customized-to-its-actual-dimensions-and-shape "Persian"/"Turkish" wall-to-wall carpet. More to the point, consider this...
  • Commented on Catching a Blighty
    First, my bad on terminology: "Unit" in US military parlance means "battalion". Most of the "horror stories" of US units that one sees about inexperience, poor marksmanship, etc. are relics of the then-common practice of making companies up from local...
  • Commented on Catching a Blighty
    Just a couple of side (snide?) comments on the "US in the first part of the Second Thirty Years' War" issue -- Individual US soldiers made lots of mistakes in 1918. Small units made lots of mistakes in 1918. Even...
  • Commented on Blatant Advertising
    Use, yes. They're in the character set and can be entered with the "Insert Symbol" command. Autocorrect, not so much... especially since no typist outside of Word is taught to use (r) for the registered-mark symbol....
  • Commented on Blatant Advertising
    Isn't MSWord proof — or at least evidence — that the Laundry is real? That's certainly the only explanation I can come up with for some of the ... inventive ... autocorrects built into the system by default. For example,...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Those of us who deal with academic, professional, and legal documents have long despised all word processors... and much of the time, most of the purported gurus who try to tell us how they should look, and hang all function...
  • Commented on A deceptively simple question
    Here's an unintended consequence, although I'm not sure whether it qualifies as "geopolitical": The world's default driving methods will become those of San Jose, California... because that's where the closest-to-actually-commercially-ready systems are being developed. That means: complete inability to handle...
  • Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
    @168: Sadly, the whole "just war" issue (de Groot aka Grotius is just the tip of the iceberg) is a classic example of post hoc rationalization, in which both history and legal doctrine get written by the winners. The history...
  • Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
    @171: Not to be overly pedantic, but there's a big difference between "squaddie knows how to do" and "command structure provides authority to do." Until you've been on PRP yourself, and/or had to certify people as PRP-ready, you've got no...
  • Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
    I'm afraid that shore-based silos are, on a launcher-by-launcher basis, just about as expensive as those on a sub. There's lot of logistics that go into both of them that are hidden away from view; in fact, the manpower that...
  • Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
    The answer to this is distressingly simple, and it is all too obvious when one looks at the core assumptions of game theory: The insane cannot be deterred. They are, precisely because they are not rational, impossible to model in...
  • Commented on The Fumes of Mordor & Other World Building Models
    Here's a good indicator of truly miserable climate mixes in the Continental US: Determine which areas the military issues both tropical and arctic/subarctic clothing to enlisted personnel. (That's "issues as part of the basic uniform set," not "makes available for...
  • Commented on Press release
    I think I'm having a unit-conversion problem. How many Hamiltons are there in a Joyce again? I vaguely remember that it has something to do with Planck's constant and the median weight of an uncooked lamb's kidney, but I've just...
  • Commented on The coming retail apocalypse: some axioms
    I'd like to suggest a secondary cause of problems on the High Street: Tokyo. Really. Or, at least, by analogy "really." Perhaps a little bit of a current US bankruptcy will help explain things a bit. As readers of this...
  • Commented on Mercury, Retrograde
    And here I've just been dealing with the minor annoyances of the installation of buried fiber optic cable up and down the street for a new broadband system for the entire city. Fortunately, they've moved the trencher and I can...
  • Commented on More news from our Martian Invaders
    (To two comments, actually, but the system doesn't allow direct references to both...) Procedurally, there are two ways to deal with the problem; neither excludes the other, and either would be sufficient. (1) As mentioned, a constitutional amendment declaring that...
  • Commented on More news from our Martian Invaders
    As a theorist on American constitutional law and the First Amendment, I have to disagree with part of this. No legislative action can do a damned thing about Citizens United... because it was a decision of constitutional dimension, the legislature...
  • Commented on Cars (again)
    You mean Little Chef isn't vegan-friendly? <vbeg> It could be worse, though; you could be worrying about not food preferences, but food allergies, while travelling (and it's worse in the US than in the UK). There's nothing like feeding a...
  • Commented on The hard edge of empire
    The biggest problem I have with steampunk is that I've actually studied (not to mention, as an aircraft maintenance officer back in my misspent early adult years, confronted the consequences of) thermodynamics... and steam power ain't gonna cut it; the...
  • Commented on Lost in Translation
    And then there are the on-purpose translation errors made for diplomatic purposes... such as George H.W. Bush's purposeful (that is, carefully coached) mispronunciation of the then-President of Iraq's name during the run-up to the Baghdad Air Show (aka the air-warfare...
  • Commented on Where we went wrong
    I'd like to add a couple of revisions to this: (1) I note the irony that using this reply form requires using unsecured JavaScript in HTML. (2) TCP/IP's real problem was that its designers were ignorant of a thousand years...
  • Commented on Insufficient data
    I think Our Gracious Host has underestimated the necessary size of a sustainable, early-21st-century-tech Ehrlenmeyer flask society; but not by an awful lot. The problem is that a "flask" (that is, entirely isolated from external threats/influences and kept in laboratory...
  • Commented on Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss ... not.
    And, for a tear-your-eyes-out moment: The thought of the Madwoman From Grantham wielding the party whip in open session of Parliament... in paisely-patterned leather dom gear and stiletto heels. I can just see Douglas Hurd at the podium being "encouraged"...
  • Commented on Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss ... not.
    I'm thoroughly in favor of abolishing Lords, if only for the means of selection to it; but, from a pragmatic standpoint, I'd prefer to see something else happen first: A severe butting of heads between the new, and relatively untested,...
  • Commented on Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss ... not.
    I was stationed over on Airstrip One during the mid- to late eighties. I have not-so-fond memories of Eggwina and the other vegetables... and equally unfond memories of the Poll Tax riots (they were worse — much worse — near...
  • Commented on CMAP #9: Ebooks
    Unfortunately, this also cuts both ways, for two reasons: (1) Electronic piracy of books often leads to horrendous, embarassing, meaning-changing errors. The "suspension of disbelief" can be extremely thin, at times — particularly for so-called "literary fiction"! — and getting...
  • Commented on CMAP #9: Ebooks
    Excellent perspective as usual, but... you've hit a nerve... The so-called "agency model" is not an agency model. It is, instead, a price-restricted consignment model, and there's a helluva lot of math, business, and legal experience behind price-restricted consignments. Calling...
  • Commented on We appear to have a hung parliament
    <{sarcasm}> The need for a coalition government at present reminds me a great deal of an American aphorism from the First War of American Secession (1774-1783, approximately): "We must all hang together, for we shall surely hang separately." Frankly, I'm...
  • Commented on FAQ: Fanfic
    (1) Citations: I'm not going to string-cite every single case in these chains, and particularly not going to try to run the companion cases down in other jurisdictions. Each character was involved with upwards of twenty cases, and those cases...
  • Commented on FAQ: Fanfic
    I'm afraid that this comment (29) overstates the requirements for infringement of copyright, even under UK law. The 1988 Act (and the common law stretching back to the eighteenth century) also gives the original author the exclusive right to make...
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