
bill.arnold
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Commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
Pessimism about insurance changes driven by ubiquitous monitoring isn't necessarily fully justified. The monitoring could be done entirely privately and owned by the individuals, and they could adjust their behavior to reduce estimated risk to a much lower level, and...
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Commented on We need a pony. And the moon on a stick. By next Thursday.
I enjoy the comment section here because it can usually be read without a weapons-grade internationalized snark detector. :-) Automated sarcasm detection 'only' has to perform roughly as well as ordinary trained people to be valuable. Related, for OGH, first...
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Commented on A hypothesis
"(but why take 7 hours rather than nose-diving at the ocean?)" There are often reasons for disguising a suicide, e.g. insurance or cultural reasons. Also, if the perpetrator died of anoxia then it wasn't 7 hours for them. A big...
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Commented on Circumstantial connections
"Got to say, that sounds much more drug smuggling than anything else.." Continuing down this line of wild speculation, perhaps the drug mules thought they were carrying concealed drugs, but they were carrying something else....
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Commented on Schadenfreude
Ouch. Google images offers to narrow the search and the third narrowing choice is "... with guns". Maybe it's US-only....
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Commented on Schadenfreude
While looking to see if "Bankster's Moll" was a thing (y), I found this bit of etymology http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2008/09/banksters.html (y) earliest known usage in 1933 (Feel free to update wiktionary; not my thing.)...
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Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
"bitcoin might be a NSA project from the start" There are also more exotic theories. I'm sure OGH has a few stockpiled. (e.g. pedagogical parody of gold.)...
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Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
"Some biologists tend to believe that healthy ecosystems have a high diversity of parasites, while ones in trouble (for example, systems dominated by recently introduced invasive species that have outrun their parasites) do not" Thanks for this, didn't know about...
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Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
This is not about the general political alignment in the U.S., this is about shifts in alignment between the 2004 and 2008 U.S. presidential elections. (Bush vs Kerry compared with McCain vs Obama.)...
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Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
No, though that's interesting too. This one, from 2008: http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html...
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Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
edit to my last post; definitely the red band in the election shift map includes Oklahoma....
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Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
What's being described (inaccurately as the "hillbilly belt") is a band of red on a colored map of the US showing shifts in voter patterns in the US presidential elections comparing 2004 and 2008, that stretches from southern west Virginia...
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Commented on (Flash fiction) A message from the Laundry public relations office
Curiously, gold and tungsten have very similar (3 decimal places) density. Gold counterfeiting using tungsten cores has started to happen at a significant level recently. (The comments for that zerohedge article are simultaneously amusing and scary.)...
