ibisum

The most controversial part of this for me is this:

    [NZ/CL/PE/VN/BN/MY/SG/CA4/MX5 propose; US/JP oppose: The objectives of this Chapter are:

Indeed, that is what has been being done now, by humans, for tens of thousands of years.

I think we don't acknowledge just how much of the Human Hive Mind we already have. I mean, there are individual humans: and then there is humanity. In between, many, many hives and collectives and corporations and aggregates, and so on.

This, I believe, points to a 'higher, greater good' which is the species itself. So to answer your question, no: its not strange at all to be perpetuating human DNA in spite of ownership. Its the species which owns you, not the other way around. None of us exist without others.

There were a couple of SGI Indy laptop prototypes in the works too, but I guess they didn't go anywhere. But .. just imagine this, all you althist'ers: what if SGI had been the one to release the tiBook, instead of Apple, and for a good price? Would we all be going into SGI stores and drooling these days? I bet that could've happened .. the spirit was there at SGI, even if the management wasn't. (It should also be noted that a lot of that spirit went elsewhere when SGI exploded: Transmeta, Nvidia, AMD, etc. Some good SGI talent even went to Apple! So .. there is a bit of SGI DNA all over the place these days, in fact ..)

I probably ratched up 100 hours or more on F-117 Steal Bomber, for DOS, back in the day. There is no reason not to play it even now, still today: consider the pixelation more of a consequence of "HUD"/"IFR" and be done with it. Fact is, those old games still run, and still work for simulating the death cult and its machines ..

Upon reading of RWR and its delights, at least one part of me, the techno-dweeb, goes "weeeh!" ..

Another part, more of a hippy tree-hugger, goes "wish we were using this to figure out where to drop the water/medicine/books instead of BOOMB devices" ..

I mean, seriously. Tell us where to drop the books, and BOOM there it is: how it should be.

It's a little bit of the spirit of The Well, and some USENET/BBS to boot. I think this is really missing from the modern web, so I cheer you on! It is a toast-worthy activity, your little blip on the horizon ..

>>Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac, Volkswagen, Ford, etc. already have that.

So? None of these manufacturers have a carbon-friendly drive train. The fact that Tesla added a software feature "late in the game" is no 'bonus' to the already-contenders. Actually, lets see Mercedes' obstacle-avoidance compete with the SpaceX/Tesla crowd. I'm willing to suffer the down-votes until such a point is reached that we all, conscientiously, acknowledge the docking maneuvers allowed by a SpaceX/Tesla co-operation. In the meantime I'd like to point out to you: software features as an "also-ran" is not really a dilemma.

I'm still yet to find an actual use for the thing, regardless of constraints/limitations. The fact is, until we have a use of the hardware which allows average-person to gain some advantage, we have little progress.

Can I check for Ebola with the thing?

.. or how about a Spectruino:

    http://myspectral.com/

MOAI - its a fantastic framework for all kinds of things, but it always needs more documentation: http://getmoai.com/

I'm willing to help you learn the framework so you can write the docs.

As long as you're white and healthy.

The Popcorn sound was as ubiquitous in 70's synth music as the DX Bass sound was in 80's music, as the Pizzo sound was in the 90's, and so on .. each generation has their favourite factory preset. ;)

Daft Punk are the new kids on the block. Why should they be mentioned in this article, in particular? They use factory presets (canned sounds) and derivative riffs - in fact, its difficult to see, as a seasoned synthesist, just why anyone would care what Daft Punk have done with synthesizers of any merit. Anyone can use factory presets to sell millions of albums - and many, many have. Why mention Daft Punk in particular?

On the flip side, you have DSP-based manufacturers of synthesizers who are selling their products for >$2.5k, whereas the true cost is really more like $300. The synthesizer world is just as prone to the economies of luxury and privilege as any other consumer, non-essential device.

(Disclaimer: worked in the synth business for decades.. its a truly heinous world if you peek beneath the covers for too long. Smoke, mirrors, deceit .. its all there, being applied, in the never-endless pursuit to 'market to the cool and gullible..')

Germany is #1. Austria is #4. USA is .. #5.

Pop quiz - what is the most litigious (i.e. liabilities issues) country in the western world?

Hint: they speak German.

I think Corvettes were used for some sort of on-runway operations involving planes and whatnot - maybe as a chase vehicle for some planes with landing-gear issues, or something like that.. I can't remember the details, but I do remember that there are Corvettes at some American bases for things like this.

Great work! Thanks for open sourcing this - its very educational.

At the moment I'm using it to process a few hundred gigs of song files that I've collected as a big furry hairball of a mess over the years - something about having multiple iPods and MP3 players over the years, and not really doing very good house-keeping in the move from one to the other (and avoiding things like iTunes where possible) has meant that I have a lot of files that may have duplicate songs in them - but the filenames and organization doesn't necessarily reflect that fact.

So I'm using dejavu right now to clean this up .. I'm assuming you'd be happy to have a "find_duplicates.py" script added - if so, I'll let you know as soon as I have one working .. ;)

Thanks again!

information on foreign intelligence operations

Just so its clear, the USA broke - and continues to break - many international laws regarding human rights. Snowden would be giving evidence on this fact, not trading information on intelligence operations.

I think the problem is more that there is a large segment of the British populace who actually want this policing to occur, and thats why its happening. To some segments of British society, there is nothing more abhorrent than someone trying to 'take down the state' or 'step out of their position in line' .. if it were not the case, it wouldn't be happening. The British people get the government they want ..

GoboLinux for the win!

http://gobolinux.org/

Oh .. wait. Its dead. What a shame. Well, maybe its time to revive it - or at least, its concept of packages - so that we can solve this problem.

This is one of the advantages gained by using a non-native toolkit to develop for these platforms. My platform of choice (MOAI) is Lua-based, and in my development environment I can treat all of the hosts that it runs on - Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, iOS, HTML5+javascript - the same. There is no walled garden in this technique - any time I want to test on a platform, I simply send the existing app a link to a new source bundle, and off we go.

The only time this doesn't work is of course the appstore-approval phase - things have to be precompiled and bundled properly into a signable package. Oh well, just a part of release engineering. But other than that, its just a push-button away to get new versions of my apps installed on all the test devices in the lab..

Europe is a big place, which is why its disappointing that Stripe doesn't cover a majority of the EU region .. yet .. but you are mistaken in thinking that credit card use is as common as it in the US - in fact, its not the case. Direct-deposit is far more common, even still today - Europeans' don't have such a dependency on personal credit as the American market demonstrates, alas ..

The problem is the 'accepting payments' that you refer to is 'paying by credit card' - where this is usually universally possible - but if you don't have a credit card and want instead to pay with cash by linking your bank account, Stripe doesn't have the mechanism in place to do that yet, in all banking markets in Europe.

Since America is run by its credit cards, I can understand why this is difficult to understand, but a majority of folks in Europe simply don't use credit cards, preferring always to pay cold hard cash. It's just different. And existing payment infrastructures - such as paypal and so on - already solved this problem as well as they can, decades ago, so to be honest its sort of lame to have to be explaining this already about Stripe. Stripe currently has a lot of hype, and as a service it is good for us merchants where our markets are limited to those regions also bound by Stripes' investment into its infrastructure, but outside of that: Stripe is quite a bit mediocre in this market.

Not supported all over Europe, so its a pretty nasty dissection of my market. Not everyone uses credit cards these days, and fewer and fewer folks are as willing to just hand over such details as they used to .. Paypal has better European-market support and just plain works for a lot of my customers, which is why I asked.

I'm in Europe, where Stripe support is quite spotty, and also I don't want to expose my credit card/customer credit cards to yet another 3rd party. Paypal is the #1 payment method chosen by my customers, so that is important to me.

For you Americans - Stripe may seem 'global' but in fact its far from it. At the moment only 5 western nations are officially supported, with 12 more in beta - well thats not going to be very good for those of us with a bigger market share than the 17 countries where Stripe is currently able to operate. Its a start - but its too much of a limit.

Hi! Nice product, I'd like to upgrade. But I don't want to use Stripe. Any plans to use something else - btc/paypal - as a payment method in the future?

I really like the idea - put the LuaVM to great use handling this and make things really simple with a hosted namespace. I'll be using my free account in the next few days ..

A nice treatise on a well-charted ocean.

Another great article along these lines for those interested in assembly and execution environments and so on .. is of course the famous muppetlabs exploration to build the smallest linux executable:

http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm...

a narrow necked container?

You mean, like .. a pencil you can turn upside down, attach a lens to, and it'll make a steamy cup of tea for you?

Sign me up!

I bet they can solve the salt problem with some kind of pulp-based filter wrapping around the graphite-corn solar layer which, when it too dries out, allows salt crystals to fall .. or at least, there's gotta be a third cheap material to add to the mix which would assist salt extraction by osmosis, or whatever ..