cstross

97 ms·

841.
by cstross 13y ago
WARNING This slideshow borked my browser -- it seems to use JS to pre-load about 20-30 web pages and screws up the browser history completely.
842.
by cstross 13y ago
Simple example: just compare IRS tax forms with HMRC here in the UK. It's as night and day. Even though they're both income tax agencies administering a complex tax code. (Yes, the hobbling of government is limited to certain func
843.
by cstross 13y ago
I think you over-egg the argument. Mass violence attackers who are part of an organized political movement are usually sane -- but they're not intelligent . The smart ones almost always find a way to participate in the mainstream po
844.
by cstross 13y ago
You're wilfully misinterpreting what I wrote. Yes, some government employees do bad things. And suspicion of government is widespread. But the response has not been to try and get better government , it's been to hamstring and
845.
by cstross 13y ago
Problem: queues are boring. Consequently, people in queues talk to one another and make jokes about the queues. If it's a security queue, some bored people joke about security. Unfortunately, TSA checkers have no discretion: they'
846.
Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient (1999)(ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu)
3 points by cstross 13y ago|0 comments
847.
by cstross 13y ago
That may be part of why he writes relatively slowly. (WordStar doesn't exactly provide support for refactoring huge, complex structured documents ...)
848.
by cstross 13y ago
It's a published format. Open, not so much: to parse .docx properly you've basically got to re-implement Word -- they carefully drafted the standard to make it hard for rival XML processors to work on their files.
849.
by cstross 13y ago
Publisher's workflow now insists on copy editors using Word with change tracking to mark up submitted manuscripts. The author then gets a copy of the marked-up MS to check. Which means having to use at least a tool compatible with MS c
850.
by cstross 13y ago
"And you can floss your tongue simultaneously" -- way to trigger my gag reflex. No, seriously. I'm sure this will work for some people, but for those of us with a strong gag reflex this is a nightmare device. (I know whereof
851.
by cstross 13y ago
Go back to the late 80s/early 90s and small System 7 UNIX clones like Mark Williams Company's Coherent 3.2 could install, complete with their entire userland, dev sys, docs, and formatters in around 10Mb of disk space and run on a
852.
by cstross 13y ago
Agreed. The real issue is that too many programmers apply their own cultural norms to the issue of naming, in ways which privilege their particular culture at the expense of others'. (You want to be able to identify people uniquely? Fi
853.
by cstross 13y ago
See also "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names": http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... (This falls under point #6)
854.
by cstross 13y ago
Adware. Forked from the Apache OpenOffice project. Dialogs and menus follow the desktop and are virtually unusable on a Galaxy Note II -- this might work on a 10" tablet, but that's about it. If you need MS Office productivity on
855.
by cstross 13y ago
If a driverless car goes wrong, it's very unlikely to kill more than a double-handful of people. A 5000-ton freight train capable of barreling along at 100km/h while carrying 50 tanks of propane or anhydrous ammonia or similar is
856.
by cstross 13y ago
... Which was pretty much won by the USSR.
857.
by cstross 13y ago
Cliches get to be cliches because they're a good idea that everyone wants to reuse . And recycle. Until they're familiar and then over-familiar. The top-rating issue is simply symptomatic of the lack of insight of many of the fol
858.
by cstross 13y ago
The famous 1933 debate at Oxford about whether that year's students at Oxford would defend "king and country" I think you misunderstand the historic context of that debate. Students at Oxford in 1933 would have been born be
859.
by cstross 13y ago
It's a development and expansion of my original argument, expressed here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/08/snowden-...
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by cstross 13y ago
That's a very interesting question, maybe better phrased as "why would a white-dominated psychiatric profession diagnose more mental problems among underprivileged non-white people than among white people?" (Also worth noti
861.
by cstross 13y ago
whatever the cause was, it happened The incarceration rate since the 1960s has remained virtually static; but the incarcerees are in prison, where previously they would have been detained in mental asylums: http://www.psycholog
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by cstross 13y ago
Yes, absolutely. And I note that these days Belgium is home to NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). They might not have worked it out after WW1, but after WW2 ...
863.
by cstross 13y ago
Also worth noting: Belgium was traditionally neutral, having been set up as effectively a buffer state in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. The bloody quagmire First World War was in no small part precipitated by Germany's violation of
864.
by cstross 13y ago
There is a spurious 'f' at the beginning of the last word in your comment. Hope this helps!
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by cstross 13y ago
Footnote: An author I'd read in some scifi story or something similar had suggested that the mark of our era was the relentless pursuit and shaming of hypocrisy. That was "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson. Lots of other
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by cstross 13y ago
What kind of world is this, where Bradley Manning gets a heavier jail sentence than Anders Breivik?
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by cstross 13y ago
The Guardian has been pioneering the wikileaks/NSA investigative stuff; they're also making a huge play to become the #1 left/liberal online news source of the English-speaking web (nipping at the heels of the much more sta
868.
by cstross 13y ago
Apposite reading right now: "The Execution Channel" by Ken Macleod. Yes, it's a work of science fiction -- by someone with a background in fringe political groups who were being actively infiltrated/used for disinformati
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The next moves in the developing Spooks v. News Cold War(antipope.org)
13 points by cstross 13y ago|2 comments
870.
by cstross 13y ago
Also note that this wasn't the US government; it was the British state, which for the past decade seems to have based its foreign policy obsessively on playing Mini-Me to the USA's Dr. Evil. Quite possibly the idea of detaining

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