Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Re: Getting cancer isn't even the worst part...

It is a sad fact of life that I know vegans who got cancer....

Cancer is the preferred failure mode of assemblies of self-reproducing, weakly error-checking von Neumann machines.

Re: Slow download speeds

The useful baud rate is 1kbps - or about 2Gbps of internet 'data'.

That doesn't make any sense.

Baud rate is always order of bps rate. The bps rate is not magically 6 orders of magnitude above (unless you are using millions of distinguishable values, which I rather doubt in this context)

Re: They should ask themselves, are all these transfers justifiable?

The World today is full of such questions...

Finally, there’s the most important aspect of IBM’s identical Big Data approaches to death and customer service: Both are extremely powerful systems that have escaped any kind of human, democratic control. As Ellsberg puts it, the drone study is “unintelligible to anyone who might ask, ‘to what end is all this?’ or ‘do we have the right to be doing this?’ or ‘is this making us more secure, in the mid- to long-term, or on balance less so?’ or ‘is this creating more people who hate us — including the families of EKIAs (unintended victims) — and wish to harm us, than it is eliminating?’”

Re: NASA should stick to what they are good at.

So if you feel a little pain in the left elbow, it might not only be artritis?

Re: More dodgy models

Today's news say that what is for dinner is pointless brinkmanship with Russia in Syria (I didn't get we have a manadate to unilaterally impose no-fly zones in Syria, but so a superpower has its rights), possibly followed by a fat nuclear exchange.

Better order a new "duck and cover" instruction set at amazon.

It's the US gummint trying to raise money.

I also have an Arc of the Covenant, slightly used, for a low price...

Re: Slapper?

the Greek government objects strenuously to the modern state of Macedonia on the grounds that ancient Macedonia was Greek

Implying that modern fubar appendage of europe has anything in common with "Magna Græcia" (also, the "Magna" is there for a reason, like in "Greater Germany". One could argue that Poles build the German Empire but better not ...)

Victor the Nubian Cleaner makes a house call

And now your latent suspicion that she was actually suicided has been awakened.

Re: Makes a mockery of any of that "Only machines read everthing and we don't use most of it" BS

John Brunner was a genius. One could do worse than re-read his "Shockwaver Rider" / "Stand on Zanzibar" / "The Sheep Look Up" trilogy. Though influenced somewhat by 68' hippiedom, he saw it coming.

Re: scary video

Cool. It's like Indiana Jones lighting his vintage flashlight and discovering that he's actually IN the pit with the flesh.eating roaches described in the papyrus.