Viewing profile — nishonia

That is an interesting line of thinking. At some point we'll likely break from the invisible hand of the greedy gene, but I'd be surprised if we're there yet.

You know that "responsible whistleblowing" has failed multiple times in the past right? Anybody who is upset with Snowden for not repeating the same pattern that failed to change a…

Retinal scans are out, iris scans are in. If I remember correctly, beyond the age of 5 the iris banding pattern remains the same. Retinal scans get tripped up by things like pregna…

> values, which are cultural. It only takes one exception to disprove a rule, and in the interest of not inviting debate - I'll pick an obvious example: biological imperatives have…

> Because come on, if we don't have culture, what do we have? Well reasoned and logical action?

Terrorism is pretty well defined, only recently has the the term been corrupted. If you were to do a survey of material on the subject you'd find that the vast majority of literatu…

Ok, so what makes a threat credible enough to instill terror? Seriously, terror. I'm not talking about a level of concern that causes people to modify their behavior around media c…

That is far too broad a definition - and still not completely correct. Terrorism falls within the spectrum of warfare, it isn't as simple as "Well I feel terrorized, so my tormento…

This whole thing has made for some interesting people watching opportunities. I think the only people who were completely unsurprised by all this are those who: 1) Understood the t…

> I suppose most of the NSA's work is the result of our own base, human natures... It is in the best interest of the state to cripple the internet as much as possible. This isn't t…

I used IMDB several years ago, but now see that their usage policy is restricted to "personal" use. Who is going to download 1.11 GB of compressed text for personal use? http://www…

A couple of years ago, I was an operations analyst - my employer used USPS to deliver millions of DVDs... USPS completely depends on bulk shipping and they'll happily provide produ…

> all of them are mutually incompatible in most situations. I haven't compiled against every implementation, but I did just recently rerun a report I create 4 years ago under a dif…

Folks are going to have to suck it up and accept the fact that the human experience is always changing. Cursive writing and the Dewey Decimal system were once important, and we may…

The flip side of that is, you can't refuse the USPS. Everything I care about comes to me electronically or through a parcel service, I only need USPS a couple of times a year (USG …

TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX... there are a lot of engines that can properly render a *.tex file.

Have they contracted PR out to Ocean Marketing?

The last bit concerning the flexibility of foreign word adoption is key, I think. I heard a radio story a long time ago on the topic of word mutation in the English language (I thi…

What you are describing might be true of other countries, but that isn't the way it works in the US. You aren't too far off on the military training issue, immediate obedience to o…

That isn't even close to being true. SNCOs and WOs need to be pretty clever, and they start off as E-1s. It works for the military, but then they aren't taking the short sighted po…

The CEO of Overstock, Patrick Byrne, is an outspoken libertarian. It is just as likely that a political move as it is a 'marketing ploy'.

Flow ratio balance will fall apart for whoever has the shortest route to Netflix, so it is certainly a very interesting problem. Verizon has demonstrated that it isn't interested i…

> after all, they're both ISPs No, Level 3 is not an ISP. So the argument doesn't work the other way around. Also, you've framed things to make it sound as if Level 3 is initiating…

ISPs pay for transit, tier 1 networks do not (by definition). Level 3 is definitely a tier 1 network, but Verizon is acting as both a tier 1 and an ISP. It isn't a very complex pro…

> ...it is true that when you have a peering point with unbalanced traffic flows, the side sending more traffic is supposed to pay the side receiving more traffic. Up until very re…