Posts by lyngvi

Spherically symmetric

The phrase is "spherically symmetric" or "isotropic". "Spherically one-dimensional" sounds like a misguided PR attempt at simplifying an already simple concept while still sounding sciency.

[quote]Picture this dystopian scenario. A ... jet aeroplane takes off on a bombing mission. ... [O]nce the jet is in the air there's no way for human commanders to communicate with it.

The jet flies along at high speed for hours, hugging the ground and weaving through valleys to avoid being picked up on radar. It navigates using various different means. ...

The jet completes its journey and decides without any [external] human input at all whether it has in fact found its designated target. Assuming the [pilot] decides affirmatively, a massive warhead plummets out of the sky on that spot and colossal explosive destruction is unleashed.[/quote]

That's the plot of Dr. Strangelove. The key problem there is that the plane was launched at all. I don't really see how replacing the pilots with robots in that movie would change the storyline.

You could also take the reductio: ICBMs cannot be retracted once fired. Nor, in fact, can bullets. Or arrows. Or a thrown stone. Clearly, a ban on stone-throwing is called for. Monkeys at the zoo will be tried for war crimes post-haste.

Military tech is all about search and destroy. The frightening aspect of military automation is the "search" part, not the "destroy" part. Automatic targeting and decision making, such as is needed by the automatic turrets I've heard rumored to be deployed on the N/S Korean border, are far more terrifying than missile systems honing in on pre-selected targets. I question whether the UN discussion might dwell more on systems which perform automatic target selection, rather than systems merely capable of target tracking.

high fructose corn syrup...

The reason the US uses high fructose corn syrup is b/c it is cheaper, in the US, than sugar.

The reason it is cheaper than sugar is our large tax subsidies for corn.

The reason we need to subsidize corn is because sugar is because, otherwise, it is non-competitive with sugar imported from central America.

It is non-competitive with central American sugar because labor in central America is dirt cheap and they aren't inconvenienced by our environmental regulations (drinking water tastes better well-fertilized, after all.)

The normal solution to this would be to apply tariffs to central American sugar, but we can't do that b/c it would violate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

I would assert that perhaps, instead of taxing soda extra, we could just, and I know this sounds crazy, but: We could just *not* subsidize it. But that would require a large chain of policy changes that are just infeasible: Anyone who doesn't like NAFTA is a crazy hippie socialist, and anyone who wants to lift corn subsidies hates the American people. (Though I find it hilarious that I've found a way to blame a portion of the US obesity epidemic on NAFTA...)

Enjoy that soda, Pirate Dave. We're all paying good money to ensure that it's as cheap as it is.

.cmo, .ent, .ogr taken yet?

Any domain on one of those TLDs will make bank.

Particularly if they dress it up like the real thing and use it as a man in the middle. I could see amazon.cmo just raking it in....

Are there any provisions beyond "relatively easy" trademark protection to handle the damages from that kind of abuse? That kind of site need only run for a few days to allow its authors to retire.

percentages with no reference...

"But Dorner and his colleagues have managed to get the amount of methane produced down to 30 per cent or so, using special catalysts. The "sea water" bit comes from the fact that Dorner has also noted that there's a fair bit of CO2 in sea water, plus hydrogen too if you have even more energy to crack water molecules apart."

30 per cent of what? Hitting the vampire-lust novels a bit hard, are we?

desktops ftw

Still using a desktop here. I don't really see desktops as that great for Joe User anymore. But having multiple large screens, a RAID-1 array to protect against hard disk failure, and being able to operate multiple VMs simultaneously are helpful features for some of us. Good luck finding a laptop under 5 grand and 5 kilos that'll do that for you.

it's not the browsers, it's the DNS

The issue is *not* with browsers pulling ads out of the void. The problem is that people should be able to, and do, rely on NXDOMAIN. It can make determining the causes of network failures *much* easier. And of course there are already the stories of database corruption based on loading bad data from domains that previously bailed with nx.

Oh, and while they're at it, are they spoofing an SPF record too? Spammers would be very interested in this - you could wipe out SPF with a few careless strokes, though the big mail providers would likely find a way to opt out. I'd be curious to hear what someone's results are for a TXT record on a fake domain. Verizon is still honoring NXDOMAIN for me.

But hey, I'd gladly write you a browser plugin that not only would replace nxdomain, but would also replace all HTTP 4*, 5*, 3*, and hell, even 2* error codes with ad search pages. I mean, who cares about all those pesky error codes? HTTP, DNS, what's the difference, right?

marketing non-products

Same problem here as Henry. After reading this I am no more the wiser as to what Oslo is or could be, if anything. There's a large blob of buzzphrases in the middle of it (refering to ADO.NET et al). I've seen ADO.NET used for SQL queries and pretty, if rather rigid, tables, and XML has its obvious use as a data interchange format; neither of these are real applications in themselves.

.NET suffered the same PR problem when it was released, because it doesn't do anything by itself - but it does provide an excellent application development framework. Is Oslo another one? Do we really need another one? What are the potential or real applications of Oslo? What, in fact, is it? The article seemed to imply it might be some kind of programming language, but it buzzes too loudly to be penetrable.