Archive for May 2003

Measures for Bank Efficiency

Each currency has to have a single dedicated bank to handle transactions. It requires a database containing an entry for every transaction that’s taken place. Each transaction needs to do a single element lookup from that database, and there shouldn’t be any locality of reference. Your storage requirements are O(T), and your transaction overhead is […]

WMD in Iraq

Movable bioweapons labs in Iraq have been tested and confirmed.

Transition

An obvious problem is how to transition from charging nothing for all your mail to charging something, without having everyone else do the same thing at the same time, or not getting any email ever again. There are a few ways we can ease this in. The first and biggest problem is mailing lists. Coping […]

Updates

I think what would be nice is having blosxom see the files, -rw-r–r– 1 aj aj 323 May 25 20:29 foo.txt -rw-r–r– 1 aj aj 80 May 26 13:10 foo.txt-1 -rw-r–r– 1 aj aj 103 May 26 14:40 foo.txt-2 and magically translate that into an original entry, with two dated updates. You could then mark […]

The Spam Market

The biggest difficulty in running an experiment like that is to make sure that it’s possible to get involved in the market. That’s a wildly difficult undertaking: it essentially requires everyone who might ever want to send you email to obtain the tools and understanding to operate in the market. That can be made fairly […]

The Spam Theory

Thomas Sowell makes a very convincing argument for markets in his book Basic Economics. In principle, the idea is that markets allow people to redistribute scarce goods (food, labour, materials, land, etc) according to where it’s most useful to society. The more creative you are, the more and better work you do, the more other […]

Affirmative Action, cont’d

So, let’s just ignore the problem of working out what sort of sliding scale should be used. We’ll propose that (a) it should be non-decreasing, and (b) it’s set by colleges in response to market forces. It can be linear, flat, exponential, polynomial, logarithmic, whatever. But what it does have to be is set, and […]

Affirmative Action

Apparently affirmative action is done in the US, at least in places, by reserving places at colleges for minority students; which has the effect of letting underqualified students take the place of qualified students. That’s the first point. The second is the thesis that currently intrigues me: that prices and markets are the best way […]

Why I’m a fascist

Nonsense on the debian-devel mailing list: From: Adam Majer <adamm@galacticasoftware.com> On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 07:46:53PM -0400, Geordie Birch wrote: […] > May 20, 2003. French reporters covering Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) > arrested, forcibly repatriated: > http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9609 > http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=6909 […] PS. Personally, I would prefer to travel for a DebConf in Cuba than […]

Secret Projects

Hrm, I wonder if blosxom has any way of handling accounts, so I could setup blog entries that only I could view… I wonder too if that’s a monumentally self-contradictory idea. The theory would be that I could add musings that I didn’t want to share with anyone to my blog in a password-only directory/category, […]

My new blog

So, I created a blog. It uses blosxom. It has links. It’s not the horrible ugly default, but the marginally less ugly sample customisation. It has links! It has a paypal button! Donate! In theory this should be easier than advogato to hax0r on; we’ll see. One thing I notice, is that blosxom doesn’t seem […]