sabik

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• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  It may not be genocide in the currently accepted legal sense of the term—the forcible extermination of a cultural group or of the people who are members of such a group—but it's certainly a comparable abomination. The current definition of...
• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  There's a passing comment in The Peripheral about using a human as some sort of boutique AI... the plot of the whole book kicks off with someone engaging a human to do a job that could've been automated...
• Commented on Abolish the monarchy!
  I have nothing against Liz personally—she's performed the monarch's duties diligently for 70 years—but she's 95 and probably doesn't have many more years to run in office. 3 more years to beat the French?...
• Commented on Obligatory Hugo eligibility post
  "Not eligible for a Hugo, alas." I would be deeply worried if a scientific paper was eligible for fiction Various government policies on climate change, on the other hand......
• Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
  we've never faced a non-simulated situation where the decision to launch a retaliatory strike got escalated to executive level I think one time a false alarm got escalated all the way up to Boris Yeltsin? Not sure whether that's an...
• Commented on Because I am bored ...
  Mikko Paviainen @ 148: So, there's really no way of knowing if somebody has that 50% of computing power for the blockchain, in one arranged as for example Bitcoin is. Actually we have a fairly good idea, and 75%...
• Commented on Because I am bored ...
  Local Exchange Trading Systems. ... A bit of googling turns up that some block chain-head already thought of it, but it hasn't caught on. Yet. The most prominent of these, the timeline goes the other way: he started with...
• Commented on Because I am bored ...
  BTW, how would people know that (a) the probe is actually in space, rather than in Taklamakan or something, and/or (b) that a copy of the private key doesn't also exist on Earth?...
• Commented on Because I am bored ...
  Another horrible part about Bitcoin is how it poisoned what was a burgeoning decentralized tech space a decade ago. There's useful exploration to be done, various proposals and projects; variants on digital LETS, Chaumian cash, etc. Now the whole space...
• Commented on Central Banking on Mars!
  Eh, no. Suppose you pay $1M to ship a canned primate to Mars. MCB will then sign a certificate to say you have one Elon. The Elon is redeemable on Mars, against a chunk of Mars. This sounds closer to...
• Commented on Dead plots
  I have a horrible feeling that Trump is going to try to force a 'short victorious war' with Iran before he is pushed out of office. The good news is, he doesn't have time. A bombing/cruise missile strike: maybe. A...
• Commented on Dead plots
  why did the EU feel it was necessary to have an exit clause? Given how one-sided the exit clause actually is, it was probably intended more as a no-exit clause?...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  To make the creepy use cases to be even creepier, there was a story that went around in May that Facebook can help advertisers target people who feel "insecure" or "worthless"; in a word, vulnerable....
• Commented on Excuses
  Or 4795 for a second hand Zoe. 828 quid for battery hire from Renault (which includes 24/7 roadside assist). So over 5 years that's 8935. You've paid over 10 000 pounds extra to drive around in an unsafe shit heap...
• Commented on Excuses
  The thing which will kill off petrol-driven cars is going to be the closure of petrol stations. Yes. And the thing which will kill off human-driven cars is going to be the closure of parking. They'll be well on their...
• Commented on Bread and Circuses (circumlunar version)
  Assuming that the whole idea is to lift net payloads into orbit, even with perfectly efficient conservation the system would lose energy by the amount of mass going up minus the mass coming back down. Therefore to work, we'd also...
• Commented on Bread and Circuses (circumlunar version)
  another crew landed up breathing some when the air vents to the outside opened before the hydrazine venting had finished. Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, IIRC....
• Commented on Bread and Circuses (circumlunar version)
  Ion drives are not magic, but the rocket equation is brutal; the ones on Dawn were apparently 3100s, so that would make vₑ ~30km/s. Transfer between earth and lunar low orbits is about 4km/s, which gives 10-15% of LEO mass...
• Commented on Bread and Circuses (circumlunar version)
  for every 24 hours spent en route, you need to budget for roughly 3Kg of drinking water, 1-2Kg of food, and 550 litres of oxygen [...] extra tonnes of provisions to lunar orbit, which in turn means tens of extra...
• Commented on Bread and Circuses (circumlunar version)
  What would be the minimum new tech needed in order to launch a space ship to the moon from the ISS assuming no particular speed limit in traversing between Earth and Moon orbits? That would let you use ion drives,...
• Commented on Bread and Circuses (circumlunar version)
  Still a lot of testing and systems integration work required, but starting with a proven design should greatly shorten the production curve. Probably not all that much — the expertise needed to implement that design no longer exists in any...
• Commented on Help Wanted at the Climate Policy Sausage Factory
  They've just built a bike shed at my local train station; it doesn't have any bike paths leading to it....
• Commented on Report on Seat 14C
  Yeah, on further thought it would be more complicated; the revised, non-tweet-sized version: Search planes and craft find their GPS glitching, and the search is quickly called off (and classified) when various searchers inexplicably miss hours or days of time......
• Commented on Report on Seat 14C
  One way to avoid a military response would be for the plane to never be off radar... just moving very very slowly? Or maybe the 20 years was spent sitting on the tarmac waiting for lemon-scented paper napkins....
• Commented on Catching Up
  The EU neither needs to stall (the UK is transparently quite capable of stalling ourselves at this point), nor does it have any desire to do so. All the wavering and uncertainty is bad for everyone; they'd like to know...
• Commented on Catching Up
  The worst outcome is a series of very large constittuional crises - up to and including a resumption of terrorism in Ireland and a complete failure of the Brexit talks. I would think that the EU strategy would be to...
• Commented on 2117 revisited
  2.) Car manufacturers will standardize on a particular battery size and an infrastructure which will allow batteries to be changed in charging stations by semi-skilled labor (in other words, the same people who currently pump your gas and check your...
• Commented on The internet of decay
  It does better than google at finding actual bike routes, except that it also includes as options routes along things like Parramatta Road and Rookwood Road (two/three lanes each way with centre divider) as preferred bicycle routes (those were options...
• Commented on The internet of decay
  Sadly, even when I go into settings and say "public transport, bike, walk" as my travel options it can't do mixed mode journeys. There's no "ride to the train station", in other words. I find TripGo plans reasonable mixed-mode journeys....
• Commented on The internet of decay
  I consider the trend of allowing people to use any kind of device with a screen while driving is misguided Especially high-information-density ones like maps. Most of them can be switched to a mode where the map is hidden, which...