dfjdejulio

dfjdejulio

  • Commented on Shiny!
    Holy frijoles, this anthology is good. And that "Trunk and Disorderly" story? For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, it's almost like I'm in some alternate universe where a Jerry Cornelius story could be good....
  • Commented on En route
    (Psst... hey Charlie... when you land and have time to decompress and relax and stuff, make sure to check the iTunes store for iPad application updates. I think you'll see what I'm talking about pretty quickly, and will be considerably...
  • Commented on Shiny!
    Incidentally, for other folks hunting for it, I think this is a properly-formed URL for the collection in the US iBook store: http://ax.itunes.apple.com/us/book/wireless/id357996119#ls=1...
  • Commented on Shiny!
    Awesome! This news got me to finally get off my tuchas and buy "Wireless" via the iBooks store. Though, I had to do a few searches to figure out that's the collection it was in -- you should have mentioned...
  • Commented on Interview
    (Not a question, a side comment: this topic really makes me wish for a threaded view of comments here...)...
  • Commented on Interview
    Have you ever daydreamed about the casting of a BBC mini-series (or series!) covering the Laundry? (I have...)...
  • Commented on Mediocrity
    You know, I think I have to go dig out my copy of the old Infocom game "A Mind Forever Voyaging". It's an excellent game, one of Infocom's best. It's about the first simulated human-level intelligence our society is able...
  • Commented on Mediocrity
    Why is your argument about the ethics of the simulator any different than an argument about the ethics of having children? Yeah, if I'm in a simulation, then the person who is running the simulation is responsible for my death,...
  • Commented on Mediocrity
    That simulation argument is wonderful. I hadn't quite thought it all through in those terms before. The argument reminds me a bit of Hofstadter's stuff on super-rationality, which I suppose can be thought of as an optimistic framing of the...
  • Commented on Insufficient data
    Hm, "what advances would go furthest to reducing our modern societal footprint"? I like that question. I think some sort of incredibly fast mechanism for training and retraining people would top my list. If I could develop expertise in a...
  • Commented on Insufficient data
    HA! It just now occurred to me that you might be brainstorming about a new direction for events in the "Merchant Princes" universe, where "colonization" wouldn't mean quite the same thing most of us have been thinking about....
  • Commented on Insufficient data
    On the "autonomous Mars colony" point, taking the example of real-world colonization, I don't see why the colony has to end up at the same tech-level as the civilization doing the colonizing. At some point, would one be able to...
  • Commented on Insufficient data
    I'm not sure "how many people?" is the optimal way to think about the question. I'm not sure how to phrase my counter-proposal... it's something along the lines of "cognitive mass" or "volume of cognitive complexity". At least some of...
  • Commented on Gadget Patrol: iPad, a month on
    On the subject of adding a stylus with pressure and tilt sensing to the iPad: if I were going to do this, I'd be tempted to make a stylus that had a gyroscope, and a pressure sensor in its tip,...
  • Commented on Gadget Patrol: iPad, a month on
    A quick aside on the iPad's HD-ness: the iPad is HD in three senses. First, on that 1024x768 screen, a 720p video will look better on playback than a 420p video will. Try both. For a 16:9 movie, it's not...
  • Commented on That empty feeling
    Sounds like the day our old startup company finally shipped version 1.0 of our product to paying customers. Getting to that point took us over a year of development, and involved certification by huge, powerful financial institutions (it was a...
  • Commented on Books!
    I am not certain that seeing both the name "Quentin Tarantino" and the phrase "movie rights" in a discussion relating to the latest Laundry novel has been good for my sanity. I confess I'm having a hard time ejecting the...
  • Commented on Gadget Patrol: iPad
    Chris, just in case you didn't know, iTunes songs haven't had DRM for a while now. Now they're just standard AAC files with no DRM. I routinely play mine on my Wii and my DSi and on all sorts of...
  • Commented on Gadget Patrol: iPad
    Oh wow, yeah, the new Stanza is amazing. The thing that impresses me is, remember two of the features I was guessing could keep an alternative to iBooks healthy even in the face of a ubiquitous and improved iBooks? PDF...
  • Commented on iPad: Writing stuff
    FYI, my testing with "for i:" indicates that while the forward and back arrows on a hardware keyboard do work, the up and down arrows do not yet. On top of that, the document import/export feels a bit limited to...
  • Commented on Gadget Patrol: iPad
    I am guessing that Stanza development will stop in the next week or two. We've been told that iPhone 4.0 will get iBooks, and that iBooks will start to sync with other instances of itself (so for example you can...
  • Commented on iPad: Writing stuff
    (OMG, ^right^write, I can't believe I didn't catch that before hitting the "submit" button.)...
  • Commented on iPad: Writing stuff
    Oh wow, fifty pages? That's really terrible. And no arrow keys in DTG? Heh, I know exactly why, and it's the same reason they don't work in iSSH yet, and we need to bug Apple with this: Third party developers...
  • Commented on iPad: Writing stuff
    Played with the "iwork.com" based syncing for Pages? I'm still experimenting with it. For my own very light use, I can store a document to the "iwork.com" cloud, and retrieve it, and I can share the URL with other people...
  • Commented on Gadget Patrol: iPad
    Websription? Actually, you can download the EPUB files to your desktop and drag 'em into iTunes, and they'll sync to iBooks just fine. Just FYI. I have a bajillion Webscription books installed on mine....
  • Commented on Gadget Patrol: iPad
    Basic text editor on the iPad is a solved problem. There's a 99ยข app named GoodReader, and from within it you can create a brand new TXT file, or edit an existing one. Once you've done that you can use...
  • Commented on Gadget Patrol: iPad
    So Charlie, on the subject of an author's toolchain for the iPad... I got an iPad intending to replace my laptop with it. Now, "out of the box" it's certainly not a complete replacement, but I'm a programmer by trade,...
  • Commented on Gadget Patrol: iPad
    Charlie, you're absolutely right that having iTunes be at the heart of all the syncing is completely terrible. I think Macintosh users tend to find it the worst of all. There's unfortunately a very good reason for it. Windows users....
  • Commented on Unpleasant Medicine
    So let's say a bunch of people respond in a way that lets you conclude "it's pretty clear that they're selfish dicks". Well, okay, so what? If 30% or 65% or 98% of the population consists of "selfish dicks", then...
  • Commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
    Charlie, I presented the arguments as I understood them, I didn't state that they were my arguments! But there is a way in which censorship by the market can be preferable to censorship by the government. In theory. Basically, I...
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