brucecohenpdx

brucecohenpdx

  • Commented on I had a blog entry for you, but it eated me
    I think money arose as a way to delay the completion of an exchange of goods, a way that was more accurate and longer-lasting than remembering the size of an obligation. So if Arg brings a deer back to the...
  • Commented on God Willing and the Robots Don't Rise: Final Thoughts
    Cat, It's been an interesting bunch of discussions we've had with you here. Thanks for enlarging the discourse and making me think about things in a somewhat broader perspective. SF isn't very good at predicting the future, but it's got...
  • Commented on Work Is Never Over: On Publishing and Its Many Faces
    Thanks, Cat; that's a impressive piece of rhetoric. I hope that are some people out there reading it who will be enlightened by your point that there's no mystic secret to success. I don't think anyone could make it any...
  • Commented on Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed
    Business does a lot of "R&D", but most of that is trivial innovation I'd like to agree with this just from my own irritation at having the corporate research lab I worked in shut down in 1992, but while it...
  • Commented on Home again
    it bears noting that incumbents are very rarely voted out of office during wartime. What scares me about this statement is that we seem to have entered a cycle of constant wars of opportunity, in which constantly re-electing the incumbent...
  • Commented on Home again
    (Now, I'm a liberal, and I'm disappointed with him, but it's not because he's turned out to be less liberal than I thought. It's because he's turned out to be less EFFECTIVE than I thought. I had modest expectations and...
  • Commented on Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed
    While I'm not completely happy with the way my city recently implemented the municipal composting pickup, we do have a relatively sane recycling/trash/compost system for a US city. Each residential pickup has 2 wheelie bins, one for all recyclables (plastic,...
  • Commented on Normal service ....
    Greg, If you're talking about Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter Mary, he did support her, though he mostly refused to discuss her in public, and she would not comment on the Bush administration's attempts to push a right-wing homophobic initiative against...
  • Commented on Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed
    Like Megpie71 and her partner, my wife and I are able to stand a higher level of mess than most, and this has become more so in the last few years as we've gotten physically less able to do the...
  • Commented on Normal service ....
    Yeah, the 500 MB drive was the bass in that ensemble....
  • Commented on Normal service ....
    Turns out that energy isn't conserved in General Relativity. And wormholes (in addition to whatever laws they follow at the Planck scale) are creatures of General Relativity. The discontinuity of temporal causation explains where Stasis got the wormhole technology in...
  • Commented on Normal service ....
    Just to prove that there are still politicians in the US with both some grasp on reality and a keen sense of humor, I'll point out that one Democratic state legislator (in Oklahoma of all places) introduced an amendment to...
  • Commented on Normal service ....
    Many, many hardware generations ago (in the mid-70s) I worked for a small company that had a NASA contract to build a hypercube computer out of Intel 8080-based microcomputers. We sent a hardware/software team to Texas, where they had the...
  • Commented on #shitsiskosays
    My take on Cat's post is that the issue isn't whether ST tried to accurately predict anything, but that it (in all of its incarnations) is looking backward at what was, rather than forward at what might be or even...
  • Commented on #shitsiskosays
    A couple of years ago I spent quite a bit of time thinking about what constant connection to the internet via direct connection to the speech centers of the brain and to muscle signals would be like. For one thing,...
  • Commented on #shitsiskosays
    I always wondered about the leather harnesses that John Carter and Deja Thoris wore. They were running around a desert for Ghu's sake; I'd certainly like to be wearing shorts, at least, to keep the sand out of my tender...
  • Commented on #shitsiskosays
    portraying a really futuristic society would be really hard Not quite. Portraying a really futuristic society photorealistically would be really hard. But to portray that society dramatically, without worrying too much about how realistic the CGI or the makeup looks,...
  • Commented on #shitsiskosays
    No, that's "reads Tom Clancy novels in paperback."...
  • Commented on #shitsiskosays
    I don't know who makes their shuttles Probably the lowest bidder....
  • Commented on How Do We Get There?
    It's a little bit more than a lack of redundancy and fail-safes. The US grid grew out of a number of regional grids that were connected together without a lot of thought about the possible interactions. To be fair, the...
  • Commented on #shitsiskosays
    All the Trek shows came from a Hollywood Liberal perspective of the universe, which is essentially early 20th Century (so it's primary values are 19th Century; the big stuff always takes longer to change). So the notion of therapy that...
  • Commented on How Do We Get There?
    My personal take is that gene modification will go the way cyborging has gone. A few people will try it, we'll figure out what it's useful for (and my guess is primarily getting rid of genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs...
  • Commented on How Do We Get There?
    What part of "moral" didn't you get? :-)...
  • Commented on How Do We Get There?
    Supplying sex for excess demand just requires either tactile interface VR, or well-designed sexbots....
  • Commented on How Do We Get There?
    Charlie @ 108: I don't think scarcity can be abolished without altering the human condition sufficiently to abolish Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In absolute terms this may be true; as several commenters have said, we're never going to completely abolish...
  • Commented on How Do We Get There?
    Haven't finished reading the comments, but if I try to do that I won't get to comment for a day or two, so here goes. @Nestor: The Maslow Hierarchy is probably crucial to the success of any transition to post-scarcity,...
  • Commented on Brief interruption
    You're right, you don't want to see the real thing. Austin is not a bad place to visit (good beer and music), and there are some interesting people who live there (Michael Moorcock and Boz Skaggs), but it's definitely Texas....
  • Commented on World building 404: The unknown unknowns
    Fabbing food is possible, using the same kind of fabber that's being used to fab organic tissues, and maybe someday organs. But it sure won't be very practical or less than horrendously expensive for a long time to come....
  • Commented on World building 404: The unknown unknowns
    SoV's point is that we're not going to be building extremely strong structures or supersonic turbine blades out of dark matter. QED gives us some ultimate material properties to shoot for based on the strengths of chemical bonds; we know...
  • Commented on Hello My Name Is The Problem of Memory
    Most white-collar jobs don't require either scientific knowledge or technical competence. They may require skill with a particular set of computer applications or knowledge of a set of policies, but that's usually just a matter of training; anyone with somewhat...
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