Doug D

Recent Actions

• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  This make anyone else think about Henrietta Lacks?...
• Commented on Roll the dice
  For some reason you're reminding me of the old campaign I ran for a bit that mixed "Space: 1889" and "Call of Cthulhu". It didn't run long enough, but the endgame was going to involve the canals of Mars actually...
• Commented on Roll the dice
  I think the whole "underwater adventuring" system would be put through its paces, "water breathing" magic extended/enhanced to also apply in vacuum... Laundryverse puts humans in a lot less hospitable environments than traditional D&D did. Bards, of course, would get...
• Commented on Laundry summer madness sale!
  For those who prefer iBooks over Kindle and who are also too lazy to do searches: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-atrocity-archives/id361826209?mt=11...
• Commented on 2117 revisited
  There's one I think about sometimes, and I'm not sure whether to consider it a variation on the machine translation thing or not. Consider microexpressions, where fleeting thoughts or emotions are extremely briefly exposed via ephemeral involuntary twitches. People can...
• Commented on Some notes on the worst-case scenario
  I do sometimes wonder if another factor here is some hope that global warming will turn more of Siberia into a more viable breadbasket....
• Commented on Ever Young?
  The more I read this kind of thing, the more I'm persuaded that my life has been warped by some thing in my youth instilling in my core a monstrously huge ego. I'm only a few years younger and have...
• Commented on 5 Magical Beasts And How To Replace Them With A Shell Script
  I'm also reminded of an old PDA family from the mid 1990s, stuff running the MagicCap OS from General Magic. It had its own data service you could subscribe to. That network had infrastructure for executing programmed "agents". You didn't...
• Commented on 5 Magical Beasts And How To Replace Them With A Shell Script
  Heh, people have been having this sort of thought for decades. The very first program I ever designed (as opposed to just sitting down and belting something out), as a pre-teen in the mid-1980s before the 80286 was invented, was...
• Commented on Holding pattern (part N ...)
  Here's a fiction-related line of thought that recent IT security news has me pondering: In a decently self-consistent fantasy setting, where the public interacts with magic much the way our public interacts with tech, what would be equivalents of a...
• Commented on The Invisible Library and its perilous Christmas obsessions
  So what you're saying is, gift-giving in the Invisible Library is exactly the same as in real life....
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  One that always used to get me until I worked hard to train myself to ignore it (or in some cases headcanon it away) was "color vision" and "color displays". Basically: our eyes have R/G/B receptors, so we can fake...
• Commented on Nom de Teleport
  You mentioned coming around to games later. When you do, pay particular attention to "Portal"....
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  (Incidentally, back in my payment processing internet startup days, when I was living and breathing this, I did brainstorm and daydream about an eventual hyper-advanced payment infrastructure with arbitrarily low overhead that would "lubricate" all manner of transactions as much...
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  So, the mix of free and paid content can work for some. It's fragile, but it can work. The puzzle as I see it, as related to Charlie's original question specifically about microtransactions, is that whole "mix of free and...
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  Give up on un-blockable ads now please. It's not going to work. Dead end. Either I'll come up with an ad-blocking concept that'll work (and I have a few for the ones you mentioned already), or I will simply stop...
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  Okay, so if I understand you, you're saying just make sure nobody has unmet basic needs, and we do completely away with the concept of professional content creators. Now, just as a thought experiment, please pretend we're in a world...
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  Maintaining a low-volume simple web site has been so cheap that nobody truly needs to monetize it, going all the way back to when I started running my own, back in the early 1990s... as long as your content is...
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  (Hey, Charlie? This might be a fun chat to tap Krugman for, once you've let us hoi polloi rant and gibber for a while.)...
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  Heh, I'm also a customer who does not tolerate advertising and who responds those I can't block with boycotts. It's to the point where if I can't block a YouTube ad or something, I will literally hold up a sheet...
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  ...and in case people thinking that whole "x + y% of n" thing is just people being greedy, making the money flow really usually does have costs that scale with number of transactions (eg. the actual packet transmission for the...
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  One of the problems with scaling down payments (speaking as someone who used to work in payment processing) is that the structure of the fees imposed by the processing networks is often something like, if your payment is for "n",...
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  I don't know how to do it, in a practical way that folks would tolerate, without restrictive metering that would result in "chilling effects" on reading, unless we have platform/client or infrastructure support. One way would be to build it...
• Commented on Book Launch
  I hope (and assume) that it'll show up in iBooks too…?...
• Commented on A product review, and some musing
  On the need to unplug the power in order to plug in external storage for backups and the like, I can't help but wish for some kind of internal microSD card. The other thing that might be nice for travelers,...
• Commented on The Evil Business Plan of Evil (and misery for all)
  Thank you for the link explaining what fly-tipping was. The term made me think of nothing except very very small drunk midwestern rednecks. I think what I'd like to set up for myself if I lived in a world with...
• Commented on Inverted realities
  So... it's not quite the same thing, but where does "Elysia chlorotica" fit in here? This is a sea slug that eats algae, but digests them in a strange way such that the chloroplasts are sucked out of the plant...
• Commented on Inverted realities
  Charlie, if you haven't, you should read the Japanese horror novel "Parasite Eve". Hint: the title is a direct reference to the concept of "mitochondrial Eve", and (part of) the plot could be summarized by "the mitochondria have been biding...
• Commented on Inverted realities
  You're going to give me nightmares about some horrible fictional world in which anthropomorphic lawyers are considered sexy....
• Commented on Some thoughts on turning 50
  Some days, I think I'm lucky that, when I was a teenager, I grew too fast (inches in weeks) and blew out the cartilage in my knees. I had to walk with a cane for a time in my teens,...