asciilifeform: with subtle bug...

asciilifeform: seriously, where are the true masters of the satanic arts. any day now there ought to appear, out of nowhere, an 'alt' genuinely better in every way. written in 50kB of nice, clean whatever. with shiny and apparently flawless, Shor-resistant crypto

asciilifeform: cyprtocurrency.

asciilifeform: *on par

asciilifeform: this is almost on part with the chinese 'ipnohe'.

asciilifeform: 'you read it here first'

asciilifeform: subtle mathematical boojum in the signing, or, more cleverly, a mining shortcut

asciilifeform: i dare to predict: there will come a slick charlatan who will 'improve! the crypto!'

asciilifeform: not a physical impossibility, by any means

asciilifeform: once we get an 'alt-artist' who is actually conversant in basic c

asciilifeform: more likely than borked crypto is 'underhanded c contest' shenanigans.

asciilifeform: (it won't be ECC, it'll be some very spiffy looking lattice work or the like.)

asciilifeform: i can easily picture, for example, a 'revolutionary! amazing! genuinely Alt' coin, with subtly pre-broken crypto.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the doge folly makes me wonder, what the 'greater fleas' that must surely come, will look like.

asciilifeform: emacs, 'artist mode.'

asciilifeform: or rather, >= 2^65

asciilifeform: what qualifies as 'bigint casino'? All bets must be >= 2^64 + 1 ?

asciilifeform: what next, the floating, then orbiting casinos?

asciilifeform: the beauty of btc is that lusers mix their own cement.

asciilifeform: meat in the sun, plenty of little users! wings a-buzzing.

asciilifeform: 'patience is to sit on a river bank and wait for the corpse of your enemy to come floating by'

asciilifeform: Mats_cd03: because the 'grandpas' (conscripts close to getting their walking papers) ate yer dinner, and the red army conveniently provided you with a dog.

asciilifeform: people tell me guard dogs still end up on the rotisserie now and again.

asciilifeform: afaik every man who came of age in the post-soviet lands has eaten dog (army)

asciilifeform: korean driver?

asciilifeform: nubbins`: this would explain the fact that everybody loved a good impalement, etc. in times gone by. but hanging? seems boring.

asciilifeform: but there it was.

asciilifeform: no gore as such, even. never having attended a hanging, i've no idea why the audience creams its pants along with the fellow dancing the hempen jig

asciilifeform: hangings in the 19th c. were apparently quite stimulating to the audience.

asciilifeform: 'Edison and the Electric Chair', Mark Essig

asciilifeform: it was 'moralists.' too much fun

asciilifeform: decimation: it's worth your time to read about how and why public hangings went away

asciilifeform: for that matter,winblows itself is a good cultural portrait of the civilization that shat it forth

asciilifeform: that, it is.

asciilifeform: '1000 off for good behaviour'

asciilifeform: 'yer paroled but got 3000 yrs to go'

asciilifeform: they eliminate parole in jurisdictions where the judge cannot (or for political/historical reasons) won't do so.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the 'geological time' sentences, if i recall, serve a mundane bureaucratic purpose

asciilifeform: 'might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb'

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: u.s. judges can select concurrent vs. consecutive

asciilifeform: decimation: public hangings were, afaik, always and unambiguously 'cash-positive' and in-demand

asciilifeform: in the old days, you could have your breaking on the wheel 'commuted' to mere beheading, if there were 'extenuating circumstances'

asciilifeform: they're stuck with the monotony of allowed punishments

asciilifeform: the string was acquitted, but woe be unto anyone caught with an original 'ak' sear

asciilifeform: this doesn't fly today

asciilifeform: during 'prohibition', there were folks who sold stills in parts, with detailed instructions for 'what not do to' with them

asciilifeform: decimation: these folks will probably end in the gasenwagen. see the infamous 'shoelace machine gun' precedent.

asciilifeform: CRT banned in australia?!

asciilifeform: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Land_fire

asciilifeform: i still don't get the preoccupation with 'postals.' biggest postal body count to date still belongs to the fellow with the jerry can

asciilifeform: Mats_cd03: used to be that you could pop those open with an unspent round, but the regulations were changed, if i recall

asciilifeform: Mats_cd03: afaik, in most u.s. states nobody has to register anything short of machine gun

asciilifeform: because you'd still like to move around with it

asciilifeform: but note that DE, rather than Maxim

asciilifeform: 'what can two planes do, that no single plane, regardless of cost, can do? be in two places.'

asciilifeform: the 'two airplanes' theorem applies

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: for some reason no one is in a hurry to dispense with man-portable arms

asciilifeform: bought an 'eeepc' once, threw it out in disgust

asciilifeform: it's like someone held a contest, 'make something even more dubious than an intel box'

asciilifeform: running a weird undocumented instr set (!) blob at all times

asciilifeform: raspi cpu has a whole separate core

asciilifeform: gets better

asciilifeform: 486?

asciilifeform: ibm 701C? the one with the folding kbd?

asciilifeform: Vexual: if your idea of a portable computer is a briefcase with a tv and raspi, more power to you

asciilifeform: Vexual: keyboard, battery, display

asciilifeform: (zap the google crap)

asciilifeform: nubbins`: chromebook can be diddled into some semblance of general-purpose usefulness, with some sweat

asciilifeform: if i recall, there was even an Alpha laptop once.

asciilifeform: (even if this is approximately true, the devil lies in the remaining cases)

asciilifeform: to say that laptop is unnecessary is like supposing that nothing smaller than a squad machine gun is of any use in war

asciilifeform: this isn't really an issue with full-scale machines, where you can mix&match hw

asciilifeform: if you don't feel like taking the box down, there are clever ways

asciilifeform: decimation: what's wrong with dd=/dev/yerdisk of=/mnt/somewhere

asciilifeform: sad fact is, if you want, for one reason or another, a portable unix box with a metal chassis and working suspend mode & peripherals, you're stuck with apple.

asciilifeform: the information they receive?'

asciilifeform: really want a less cluttered office and ease of storage and retrieval of

asciilifeform: them organize their papers and take whatever is available? or do they

asciilifeform: number of holes they come with? or do they want something that can help

asciilifeform: and Europeans four-ring binders? or do they want binders and take whatever

asciilifeform: 'do Americans want three-ring binders,

asciilifeform: http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3071492123502329@naggum.no.html

asciilifeform: re: 'what market wants':

asciilifeform: decimation: and with virtually-identical internals

asciilifeform: nubbins`: i prefer pigs without lipstick, and turds unpolished

asciilifeform: linux noobs are using various graphics-candy oddities, some probably based on gnome/kde, yes

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: can't speak for others, but i'm partial to http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/

asciilifeform: but this is not how mass industry works

asciilifeform: i, for instance, would like an aluminum (or hell, if we're dreaming, titanium) kbd and chassis

asciilifeform: on cheap keyboards (all of them, today) the letters are silkscreened on.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: most recent portables have 'apple' style 'dollar store calculator' keyboards.

asciilifeform: 'geological' time.

asciilifeform: on old (proper) keyboards, the letters physically cannot come off (they're injection molded, the bottom of the key is black) they just get fatter over time.

asciilifeform: no such luck now

asciilifeform: '90s laptops still had more-or-less usable ones

asciilifeform: the keyboard is one of the first mass hardware items to go to shit

asciilifeform: you use a kbd with 3d-printed keys, i'll pass.

asciilifeform: *blog

asciilifeform: and network card, etc

asciilifeform: where, say, 'suspend mode' actually works