jamesmcn

Given that the Voyager probes are pushing the absolute edge of humanity's reach into the cosmos, I'd love to see NASA publish the hardware specs and open up a competition to find the best possible solution.

With open specs, a simulator or emulator could be built, and anyone with interest could give it a try. A core team of NASA engineers might come up with some unit tests and acceptance tests. If these are passed, then the code is eligible for professional review.

Definitely going to check this out!

The day this happened was the day I stopped contributing to Quora.

I did not delete all my contributions, but almost did.

Hang on a moment, there's something about this use case that I don't really get.

Is it ever possible to send a murderer to the right address? I mean, shouldn't we be throwing a UserIsAMurderer exception and take some other kind of action?

I like to use the MDN re-introduction to JavaScript as a starting point:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/A_re-int...

I learned about Google a decade ago when "worse than satan himself" brought up either Bill Gates or Microsoft. I worked at Microsoft at the time. Everyone I knew thought it was hilarious, and it spread through the company like wildfire. Within a week or two, everyone was using Google as their default search engine.

(I may be mis-remembering the exact search string, but it was something like that. Keep in mind that Bill's philanthropy had not become public at that time.)

I'm not sure I agree completely with either of you.

Instead, I prefer to not attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Or too many people deploying features willy-nilly.

The parabolic sinks that started popping up all over Seattle around a decade ago are great. If I owned my own place, I'd rip out all the existing sinks and put in parabolic sinks.

I think it is easy to see the Sprawl books as being technology-oriented with cyberpunk window dressing. If that is your perspective going in to Blue Ant, then I can see how you might be disappointed. The Blue Ant series makes it clear that Gibson is interested in contemporary humans and their culture. Technology informs these topics, but isn't the primary focus.

Going back to Sprawl after reading Blue Ant, new layers of detail became apparent to me. There is a lot more than just an AI-driven singularity story going on. If anything, the [Spoiler!] Neuromancer-Wintermute union is a McGuffin made too explicit, distracting many readers from the rest of the interesting content. Like Space Rastas. How awesome are Space Rastas?!

I found it easy to follow the Cayce Pollard thread in Pattern Recognition. Everything seems to develop around her or eventually relate back to her. In some sense, Cayce is a hybrid of Case from Neuromancer and Marly Krushkova in Count Zero. Bigend is a hybrid of Josef Virek (Count Zero) and perhaps the physical aspects of Armitage (Neuromancer).

All of Gibson's books deal with characters that operate with relatively little wealth and power on the fringe of society and their interactions with figures of extraordinary wealth and power who have ambiguous locations within society. But these characters aren't just computer hackers / programmers. They can be marketing advisors, children, fashion designers, linguists, artists or mercenaries.

It is worth giving the Blue Ant* series a second change, there is more in common with Sprawl than first appears.

No, I got the point. And Osama was quite effective at terrorism. Though I think most of the credit goes to the US government and media. I don't believe it was an inside job, rather that similar motivations created similar outcomes: radicalizing war in the middle east.

If humans were rational, terrorism wouldn't work. Driving your car to work is more dangerous than taking the subway to the world trade center, even if the WTC was demolished every year. But we are afraid of what we fear, not what will actually kill us. There are a lot of people who are eager to exploit that cognitive defect.

Walter Jon Williams' The Green Leopard Plague, which is also part of an anthology of the same name. The anthology includes several other stories that build up the world that GLP takes place in. Some interesting ideas about identity and consciousness in a society with extremely advanced bioengineering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague

Umberto Eco's Prague Cemetery which expands greatly on a tiny section of Foucault's Pendulum. Eco's writing is extremely dense. Similar to Neal Stephenson, but with more of a literary flavor than a technogeek flavor. A nice way to balance out your reading if you find you are a bit too focused on modern technology.

I finally read Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy. Early Internet and web culture was so deeply infused with RAW's ideas that the trilogy felt like one long déjà vu session. Lots of fun. RAW + Eco are a great antidote to taking conspiracy theories seriously, while having a ton of fun at the same time.

Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. Wow. Since the release of the Blue Ant books, I've been telling people that Blue Ant is the place to start, as it updates a lot of the underlying themes of Sprawl for this decade. But Sprawl is still very current and relevant. If you read Sprawl during or before the dot-com bubble like I did, you probably focused on the prophetic internet stuff. If you read it again, you will find out that there is plenty more interesting stuff to feed your brain in Gibson's early novels.

Using war to cure terror is like using cyanide to cure a headache.

Osama bin Laden would have killed more Americans by investing in Ford and GM+. And after the bailout, he would have made a profit too!

+ I'm not picking on Ford or GM here, they make fine cars. But automobiles kill far more people every year than terrorism has in the last decade.

Looks great. Light UI, responsive, low prices.

and also vi > emacs

But seriously. Comments are useful. Don't over use them, don't under use them. If you are being dogmatic about your comments, you are probably doing it wrong. Autodoc comments can be nice, when done properly.

Any of a number of different wireless transmitters plugged into fiber.

There are laser transceivers for use in open air, but they don't work particularly well in rain or fog. So not great for Seattle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_optical_communicatio...

I'd like to meet someone who thinks you are an extremist zealot.

Wait, no I don't. I really don't.

(psst: might want to have your sarcasm detector recalibrated, it appears to be giving erroneous readings)

If you haven't committed a crime how could you possibly need privacy, comrade?

> Sure, though the same can be said for drug cartels too.

Perhaps. Nils Gilman argues that increasing the risk of a transaction increases the reward, and backs it up with drug-war data.

http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/may/03/deviant-globalizati...

The difference is that drugs are physical goods that require nontrivial infrastructure to produce. Digital media is essentially free to reproduce, and very cheap to distribute. Instituting the death penalty for trading Metallica's songs is unlikely to drive the price of a bootleg copy of the black album into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Bounties might reasonably be paid for help closing a deal, but only a fool pays for an introduction. Not that there is anything wrong with separating rich fools from their money.

Offering a cash bounty like that seems to demonstrate a profound lack of understanding of how to go about pitching your idea.

So, what if BMW kicked the BMWCCA a few bills to make a "parody" video of their own?

Devil's advocate: where do you draw the line?

MIT did a Gangnam style video, did they pay Psy for the right to do so?

If BMW were to do a Gangnam style video, surely Psy would expect to be paid, right?

Why BMW and why not MIT?

We are in a liminal period where copyright is sometimes enforced, and sometimes not. Social pressure and business inertia causes some people to play by the rules. Risk taking, greed, and ignorance causes other people to not do so. Where this ends up is anyone's guess, but it isn't likely to stay this way for long.

[That said, I'll reiterate my previous comment about record labels who bring hundred-million-dollar suits against their fans: fuck them.]

Can't tell which is a bigger time sink - the emerging IP debate here, or the hours I lost playing the original C&C back in the '90s.

I occasionally do, but some spam-happy sites will pop up all sorts of crap when you click on their page. So I'm fairly cautious about where I'm willing to click.

You can manipulate individual atoms with lasers, and 'cool' them down to nearly absolute zero. So I wonder how far we are from being able to grow a single crystal part via laser sintering?

Looks like we will need to do some dry cleaning.

The argument against w3schools is simple: Use Primary Sources Wherever Possible.

If you want to learn about the history of the Holy Roman Empire then Wikipedia is great. The relevant primary sources are numerous, and many of them are probably written in languages you can't even read. But if you want to learn about web development, the primary sources of documentation are few, easily found, and authoritative.

If you want canned solutions to your problem, look to StackOverflow. W3Schools can die in a fire.

The thing that is more annoying than w3schools is that if you tell Google to always exclude w3schools results from your searches, it won't. So I have to manually append "-w3schools" to every.webdev.search.I.do.

Most of the customer-facing stuff may be written in Mason, but more and more back-end services are written in Java. And there are a lot of back end services.

There was a time when Amazon was mostly C++, but it wasn't very recent.

This is precisely why I didn't locate my cloud storage company on Fatal Disk Error St.