abhelton

Recent Actions

• Commented on It's made out of meat.
  I think that, in general, social networks make it more likely that spam will spread, if cleverly designed, and that some unfortunate few will indeed generate revenue for the spammers. At least some of us know how to spot spam...
• Commented on It's made out of meat.
  You're right in that most people don't consider the benefits of anonymity until they've made a misstep non-anonymously. That said, there is a definite benefit to continuing to provide options for those of us who have learned these lessons (sometimes...
• Commented on Interdependency
  @scentofviolets: I'm not sure how my comment morphed into some kind of personal attack. I was merely pointing out, given your apparent incredulity toward SSDs replacing spinning disks, that the idea wasn't so far-fetched. Or how was I intended to...
• Commented on Interdependency
  All memory degrades over time. Hard disks with spinning platters eventually break, and there's probably some limit to reads and writes on the platters themselves. The question is not whether it will need replacement, it's how long it can perform...
• Commented on Interdependency
  I think it may also be useful to examine supply chains, especially of critical materials, in terms of their estimated peak productions. That is, for all the things we dig up out of the ground (oil, natural gas, uranium, copper,...
• Commented on Interdependency
  That's one way of looking at the question. We can surmise that any industry that relies primarily on just in time inventory is susceptible to this, and the more global the supply chain, the bigger the impact. I guess you...
• Commented on Invaders from Mars
  @Bruce: Eventually in this pyramid scheme, either physical goods or ideas have to change hands or be used to make physical good change hands. If all economies were pure information economies, there wouldn't be anyone making our clothes or growing...
• Commented on Invaders from Mars
  I think Tim's on to something with the Santa Claus Machine. Personal fabrication has the potential to massively disrupt most corporate structures, in ways that even the internet hasn't been able to do yet. The reasons are these: 1) the...
• Commented on Invaders from Mars
  Corporations (and most organizations of any significant size) indeed behave very much like hive minds, especially the enduring ones. Read Good to Great by Jim Collins to get an idea of what factors influence corporate longevity: among them is cult-like...