Media Watch on Mike Carlton: We’re pleased to report Sydney radio, 2UE host and Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton has also corrected the record after lately being full of praise for the ancient and eloquent Democrat Senator – of course were talking America here – Robert C. Byrd. In spite of Robert Byrd’s background […]
Hrm, blosxom is affected by timezones — dates are whatever day it would’ve been in the timezone specified by $TZ or /etc/timezone, not necessarily when you wrote it, or where you are. That screws up permalinks, too if you ever change timezones. I wonder if there’s anything sensible you could do about it.
It wouldn’t make sense anywhere but slashdot: “As reported by NTK, …” NTK: sarcasm and investigative journalism.
So, this site is now running on a new host. How exciting. In other news, Apache’s SUexec sucks.
One of the fashionable things about ecash is (or at least was back in the mid 90’s when ecash was fashionable, and pre-September 11) that it can provide anonymity: neither the bank, or the merchant, or the government can track how you spend your money. Lucre provides anonymity to the degree that you can’t do […]
Raph Levien points to a comment by Tim Bray that says, among other things: Those fables were taken to the UN Security Council and ended doing severe damage to America relationships with pretty well everybody, because pretty well everybody refused to sign up for war on the basis that they were scared of Saddams WMDs, […]
There’s an interesting paper on millicents (digital cash worth about a thousandth of a cent) from a guy who seems to be involved in Microsoft’s Penny Black project. A decade hence, assuming that computers (and their components) continue on the price and performance curves of the last two decades, the minimum transaction grain will be […]
Oh, the double entendres. Anyway, this Infoworld article quotes Ryan Hamlin, the general manager of Microsoft’s antispam technology and strategy: “It won’t surprise me at all if we spend close to $18 billion a year next year to deal with spam,” he said. This cost includes the price of filtering software and storage hardware and […]
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 […]
Movable bioweapons labs in Iraq have been tested and confirmed.
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]