OrganicMSG

I know a few of them, they are all game developers.

Technically, this would seem true for a lot of things.

Well, we have progressed to philosophers like John Gray (the author of Straw Dogs, not the relationship counselor who wrote that Mars/Venus thingy), though he would presumably argue that we haven't, given his views on progress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmRBHCclzZk

Make or commission an observational sculpture from nature, a bust being the most common example, carved in stone or cast in metal.

People are providing a useful service and getting paid, the madness, the madness!

Also true.

Not adjusting your overall rules to the actions of single bad actors can be fatal.

Single bad actors can sometimes wreak utter havoc.

I've been working a theory that what we are seeing in the last 10 years or so is the escape of these techniques from government into private industry.

With a single powerful player, you get a consistent, but slightly false narrative. If you have lots of players though, you get multiple competing narratives and the news stops making sense.

Is partly why I still think Gibson is one of the people who got it closest to the mark.

With the ones powered by sails, it sounded to me like something out of a Studio Ghibli film.

Each island house has its own wagon — some used to be wind-powered, using sails, but today they run on diesel.

Is that pretty standard?

It was a thoughtless mistake to bring the explosives on the plane

Certain thoughtless mistakes are worth fining a company into oblivion over and maybe jailing some people for a bit, just to make sure you have made the point.

Someone smuggling an experimental drone laden with explosives on a commercial flight, is one of those kind of mistakes.

the actual number of people attempting to zero the amount of oil they use? Much lower than claimed concern.

How do you know how many there are? Anyone doing that couldn't travel except by foot, buy any commercial products or use any available communication services.

edit - alternatively, there are loads of people attempting to zero the amount of oil they use. They are just using oil to get there.

"If people were deeply individually concerned about the risks vs. rewards of these technologies, they'd stop using them."

Why do you think that? It clearly doesn't apply to stuff like oil, for instance.

I could give up my phone, but I would be in deep shit if I did it tomorrow. It would take a lot of arrangement to do so and it would piss off my family and lose me work.

Mass surveillance is not really for investigating individuals.

The game being played is not '1984', it is 'Foundation'.

It is for steering entire societies, and this works far better on the boring people who think they have nothing to hide as they are the easiest to model

Don't use *.io anyway. The domains are being sold under a very morally dubious arrangement, given the UK kicked all the people off the island of Chagos and gave the domain registration to a private entity.

https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-...

The UK government's view of the Chagossians at the time they gave the island to the USA for a military base was apalling:

“Unfortunately along with the birds go some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure and who are hopefully being wished on to Mauritius.”

The cod wars between the UK and Iceland would suggest that fisheries policy is often not exactly the most calmly rational of human endeavours.

Rather than developing the more creative innovations which bring together disparate pieces from other areas into new ones.

Go buy a copy of the Three-Body trilogy by Liu Cixin.

induced demand, where adding capacity can actually create more demand.

The timeline on induced demand for number of houses required has to be pretty long. Also, if you are worrying about induced demand from housebuilding, then you are attempting population control with homelessness.

Did anyone sensible think automation was largely responsible for the job loss in the richer countries? Manufacturing has chased cheap wages globally since the 1960's.

I always thought the widely accepted narrative was that automation might bring some bulk manufacturing back to richer countries when it starts to compete with the cost of a skilled worker in a lower wage economy, after a decades long policy of outsourcing manufacturing chains, not that richer countries somehow automated away all the jobs at home.

I just looked on the news. Apparently none of that matters.

That was put well enough to make me wince on reading. Ever thought of going into politics?

Without that view, we wouldn't have most of the works by Kafka.

If the author changes his views, it wouldn't be acceptable for someone else to print new copies of the book.

That depends entirely on the publishing contract's rights reversion stipulations. An author deciding that they do not want their book to continue being printed, purely because they have changed their views, will often find that they have very little legal right to do so.

"so are these like a rogue group of MP's who actually take their job seriously and think government should return to its non-theatre basis?"

This brief fit of apparent competence is probably just a temporary aberration. Normal service should resume shortly.

It meshes well with reality though.

It is the right of all librarians.

Anything you have ever published is no longer entirely yours and the act of doing so is also a relinquishment of control. Only secrets can ever really be regarded as possessions. Archivists should not require permission to store that which has been put out into the world.

This is cool. Though as you take into account more of the detail of the shape of the surface, your straight line can get a lot longer. I would be interested to see one that takes into account the large scale ocean surface topography, to see if that can change it by much.

Code all long term business logic in magnetic core memory running on hardened valves with dixie tube displays.

Presumably one could simply work out the required degrees of freedom for eyes nose and mouth and assign each one a float and make something workable with metafont. I may put some time aside to have a play with this.