t3knomanser

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• Commented on You Are What You Love: A Numerical List of Loosely-Connected Thoughts on Writing (Part 1)
  I love writing stories about inhumans. Like, I tried to write a story about a biofilm inventing sex. Unfortunately, since all the dialogue took the form of plasmids containing heritable traits, it wasn't terribly readable. Also, I'm not a biologist,...
• Commented on The one that got away
  I'm not good with "stuff", so I don't really have things that got away that I dwell on. I've passed up opportunities to buy vintage clothing that I'll never get back, but I've found other vintage clothing that I like...
• Commented on Tanenbaum's Law v. the Fermi Paradox
  Actually, I was thinking more about how we respond to attachments from unknown sources today. Your filter would be a high-powered point-defense laser, and your blacklist would be sending a planet-buster towards the message's origin....
• Commented on Tanenbaum's Law v. the Fermi Paradox
  Once you hit a certain distance threshold, the latency differences between laser and mail become less significant- especially because once your round-trip latency exceeds the lifetime of the originating entity, it ceases to matter. In our society, the half-life for...
• Commented on Tanenbaum's Law v. the Fermi Paradox
  The number of channels on the laser is irrelevant, since we're talking about bits per joule. All you're suggesting is making a laser that can transmit more photons at the same time- the cost per photon hasn't gone down. And...
• Commented on Tanenbaum's Law v. the Fermi Paradox
  Anyone who has ever needed to transmit 1TB of data in the states knows that the US Postal Service has the best bandwidth and packet sizes for sending data. The latency is a killer, though! Now I want to play...
• Commented on Rule 34
  Really? That cover was terrible in pretty much every way. It looked like something a self-proclaimed artist with no experience knocked off in Blender after importing a model from Poser. I'm not an artist, and I'm certain that I could...
• Commented on Car boot sale
  Now that is an interesting point. Even more-so when you take into account the rise of Netflix and subscription services. Then you also have things like Craigslist. So now I wonder- how long before these things go the way of...
• Commented on Car boot sale
  I'd argue the same things that are in current "boot sales":anything that depreciates in value very quickly or suddenly. Like your list for all of those five year trips- it's all the same thing. Electronics and pop-culture. So instead of...
• Commented on It's made out of meat.
  No, it mutated it. I have a friend who works in Internet marketing. She maintains a portfolio of online identities and uses them to promote her company's products. It's still spam- but like the most successful spam, it pretends to...
• Commented on It's made out of meat.
  I only know a handful of people who use dating sites. None of them use a pseudonym. Anecdotal, I know, but my experience is that people honestly don't give their identity a second thought. You're misunderstanding my comments on social...
• Commented on It's made out of meat.
  They're a small portion of the population. Most people don't fall into that category. The reality is that there are a large number of entities in the marketplace that would rather anonymity were hard: governments, businesses, charities, etc.- all of...
• Commented on It's made out of meat.
  To the contrary, I think few people actually think one iota about how anonymous they are. They only actively want to be anonymous after details they'd rather not reveal have been disclosed. It's a common reasoning problem that most people...
• Commented on It's made out of meat.
  Few people really desire to be anonymous on the Internet. Anonymity is a barrier to forming or maintaining many kinds of relationships. The success of social networks is a clear indicator that people, on average, don't desire anonymity....
• Commented on It's made out of meat.
  that is, our actual sense of conscious identity emerges from the internal use of our language faculty to bind together our stream of cognition and create an internal narrative Is the internal narrative the sense of conscious identity, or are...
• Commented on Invaders from Mars
  Which returns us to the need for some sort of a corporate "3/5ths compromise". There are good reasons to treat corporations as people- but there are also very vital limitations on the rights of a corporate "person". Starting with their...
• Commented on Invaders from Mars
  They don't? It may be very different in the UK, but in the states, your average politician is generally more loyal to their corporate sponsors than their own party. You don't get anywhere in politics without corporate money....
• Commented on Invaders from Mars
  I will say: the largest advantage corporations offer is their predictability. Predictably evil is better than unpredictable. At least you know what you're dealing with. /* Which is why Lawful Evil characters can fit in a Chaotic Good party, but...
• Commented on Invaders from Mars
  It is not entirely wrong to view corporations as legal people. It's been carried to ridiculous extents (especially when it's determined that money and speech are the same things). But it's not wrong. Corporations can enter into contracts. They can...
• Commented on Utopia
  You're missing the key point I was getting at, though: the lack of Utopian speculation is because things are pretty great, in the West. Which means that, if you want Utopian speculation, look in places where things aren't so great....
• Commented on Utopia
  You presuppose that self-harm is triggered by the environment, and not a genetic or neurological state. Regardless, even if we grant that it's environmental, it supports my argument: real challenges are so far and few between that people take to...
• Commented on Utopia
  The problem with that is that it seems that humans can only have a certain size of "in-group" before things start breaking down. There are ways around it- but they all seem to involve things like uniforms and military discipline,...
• Commented on Utopia
  There is no inherent "human nature", but our cognitive capacity is bounded by strict biological limitations. I would argue that those biological limitations are going to be the largest hurdle to any kind of utopian society. For all that we've...
• Commented on You say sin, I say disease
  Yay biology! Sure, I've got an extra loaf in the bread-basket, but I'm still pretty slim. I eat what I want, and the only exercise I get is the fact that my feet are my main mode of transportation. I...