asciilifeform

11 ms·

61.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
Aside from the traditional "NSACoin" hypothesis (massive transaction graph waiting to be de-anonymized), here's another one: the private keys for the massive hoard of coins mined in the earliest days of Bitcoin are on a bureaucrat's compute
62.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
Author of linked project speaking. The latter is not dead, but closed-source (for the time being.) And moving very slowly, given that I am involved in several commercial projects which eat most of my time.
63.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
> What does the PAL do when it detects unauthorized tampering? By some accounts, several incorrect passwords will set off the explosives. Asymmetrically, of course. No nuclear explosion, just a conventional one that kills the fool did
64.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
Some of the text might have been cribbed, but I have never seen photos of actual "PAL" equipment anywhere before.
65.
Permissive Action Links – how nuclear weapons are secured(cs.columbia.edu)
33 points by asciilifeform 14y ago|8 comments
66.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
There is an important difference. Zuckerberg doesn't try to hide his ownership of his massive stock holdings by parcelling the whole thing out to a million shills. And if he were to try, he could very well go to jail. The hoarders of the Gr
67.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
The only way you could actually take anyone's bitcoins against their will is by whacking them over the head and stealing their private keys. The solution I proposed is instead to create a "schism" Bitcoin network that refuses to trade with
68.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
Someone clearly doesn't get the point of decentralized cryptocurrencies. Don't worry, you're in good company (most of mankind.)
69.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
See also this: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=988
70.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
Exactly. The content racketeers like to tar their opponents as "spoiled children who want free w4r3z." But the fight is really about control over the means of distribution; which translates into control over culture in general.
71.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
Micropayments (one obvious implication) seem like a great idea until every click starts to cost you money. The problem with buying information in general is that evaluating a purchase has a mental cost. Do you want to think "should I?" befo
72.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
> I am not inclined to gloat about the death of the content industry until there's a viable replacement business model. Some things simply have to die, and the earth where they stood salted thoroughly, before any kind of viable replac
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by asciilifeform 14y ago
Emacs with SLIME ( http://common-lisp.net/project/slime ).
74.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
"Microsoft is a once-in-a-civilization disaster." (from http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3243717585684194@naggum.... )
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by asciilifeform 14y ago
Excellent question. See this thread on my site, the story of how I kicked the Mathematica habit: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42&cpage=1#comment-2746
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by asciilifeform 14y ago
Hunchentoot ( http://weitz.de/hunchentoot ) on SBCL ( http://sbcl.org ). It works. 100% free.
77.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
Author of linked article speaking. I dislike Clojure because it is a cheap knock-off of Common Lisp, with no upsides that I'm aware of - besides trendiness. The article mentions one serious flaw - Clojure barfs Java stack traces, instead
78.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
What would be the compressed air equivalent of a fuse? Without fuses, the electric grid as we know it would be quite impossible.
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by asciilifeform 14y ago
My experience with this: http://www.loper-os.org/wp-content/killed.png http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91 Anyone who sets the sheeple a-bleating is labeled a "troll."
80.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
The advantage, of course, is that a Beautiful Female Inventor (TM) is pushing it. And therefore you should invest immediately. Or something like that. In all seriousness, compressed air is a simply dreadful way to store energy. The necessit
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Legal Ponzi Scheme Opens in Russia(bloomberg.com)
3 points by asciilifeform 14y ago|1 comments
82.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
Details of the underlying computer architecture (say, x86) and the implementation of the emulator (say, C/C++) inevitably leak into the abstractions nominally above that level. One trivial example: let's say that I want to emulate a machine
83.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
> Future interaction will resemble pencil and paper, not a keyboard or iPad! Probably not. At least one generation of children has already grown up without proper penmanship training, and for them, the experience of handwriting at any
84.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
As far as I can tell, there is a simple and elegant explanation for the discrepancy: Rudolph (and Breivik, and most of the present crop of right-wing terrorists) is an intellectual zero while Kaczynski is not. If Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey
85.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
Emulators don't cut it, because the bottom-most complexity layer matters : http://www.loper-os.org/?p=448 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55 And the ground rules of computer system creation have changed. The reasonably-cheap, high-capacity
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by asciilifeform 14y ago
Quantity is not quality.
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by asciilifeform 14y ago
Piano keys have centimeters of travel distance. Chorded computer keyboards - not necessarily. One can "cheat" by requiring only the faintest movements from the fingers. The Microwriter arguably does this. Also: have you ever seen a court st
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by asciilifeform 14y ago
There is always my crackpot solution to software patents: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=309 Transparently offload the "patent sin" to a system's users. (With plausible deniability.)
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by asciilifeform 14y ago
But where, then, is the agitation for an end to the discrimination which must surely explain (as per Official Truth) the scarcity of female coal miners and infantry soldiers? Implicit in almost all discussions of unfair discrimination in th
90.
by asciilifeform 14y ago
> What you describe is a complaint about jobs, corporate culture and how market demands change over time, nothing unique to programming "Market demands"? What part of "non-monetizable calling" do you not understand? I'm not sure it

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