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...
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...
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...
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....
Commented on Schadenfreude
Ouch. Google images offers to narrow the search and the third narrowing choice is "... with guns". Maybe it's US-only....
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.)...
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.)...
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...
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.)...
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...
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....
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...
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.)...

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scentofviolets commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
The window in which an N-state logical base could be a reasonable contender was very small. It took a bit longer for designers to stop fiddling with word length and adopt the 8-bit byte. You can no doubt supply your own examples of technology lock-in. Waitaminute, you're sneaking in the assumption that trinary implementations are essentially no better than binary. Yeah, I'll grant you that the development 50 Hz vs 60 Hz networks demonstrates strong path dependencies -- because at the end of the day there are no strong reasons to prefer one over the other. And that's most definitely...
fatal.error commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
"gets you 256 terabytes. Just loading that much data from disk at 1000Mbit/sec would take almost a month. " i did that last night, so no, it doesn't. Why would you load it at 1000Mb/sec? Of course my system is a distributed cluster, but HP just announced this http://rt.com/news/166680-hp-silicon-photonics-computer/...
alan.braggins commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
"All pointers are the same" is a faulty assumption of many C programmers, not of C, just as "bytes are octets" is. (I've used a machine where it wasn't true, with char* being larger than int*; many programmers have had to deal with near and far pointers, though that's not standard C.) cf. "everything is a VAX", "everything is a Sun", "everything is an x86", "everything is a 32 bit machine" etc.. http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html C++ may be reducing the prevalence of this, as C++ programmers are generally aware that "pointer to function" and "pointer to member function" are not interchangeable....
Nojay commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
One serious problem with trinary is that it doesn't scale downwards very well. The difference between a plus and a zero and a minus voltage signal is easy to determine when the voltages are significant but as voltage levels drop to reduce power dissipation and increase switching speeds the guard bands around the various levels get eaten away. The time required to swing a signal line from + through 0 to - or vice-versa is another problem to be dealt with, in classical binary circuitry the time to switch between the only two legal states remains almost constant in either...
dmytryl commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
One thing about decreasing costs and power consumption - if such a thing happens - is that the personal computers and such that cost the same will be able to pack more processing power than they do now, exactly the same as if Moore's law continued. What I suspect is going to happen, though, that once Moore's law - presently the cheapest way to add more computing power - dies out, the decrease in costs of computation (both the capital costs and the power costs) is going to hit rapidly diminishing returns. There's a certain feedback here - now that...

Responses to Comments from bill.arnold

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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