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Bioshock

By preordering the sequel on Steam I got the original free. As I already owned the original via Steam, I have one license too many. As Steam is actually fair, it gives me the option to give away the surplus license. Who wants Bioshock?

2010 01 27 geekspeak Comments (3)

Robot Cleaners

At my last apartment I had a cleaning lady come by every week. It wasn’t very expensive (an Alabama advantage: cheap labor!), and it kept the place looking and smelling nice. Unfortunately, that’s just not an option here. I prefer living in a clean place, but I don’t actually sweep and mop myself nearly as [...]

2010 01 27 geekspeak
life things Comments (4)

processor load

I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: starting Firefox takes two cores less than a second. When I shut Firefox down, though, it sends three cores to 50% for ten to fifteen seconds. Anyone have any idea what’s causing that?

2010 01 16 geekspeak Comments (4)

Ideal Language and the Possibility of Deceit

Should an ideal human language allow deception? I say yes. What’s the point of language? To allow a speaker to induce a mental state in a listener. At its most basic level, this allows communication of basic concepts, plans, and facts. At more advanced levels, it can be used to induce emotions or to persuade. [...]

2009 12 16 brain flotsam Comments (5)

Now I have a choice to make

In more news: I just got an opportunity. I can keep the UH-60, which was my second choice of helicopter–or I can switch to the OH-58, which was my first. I have 24 hours to make the decision. Pros of switching: I get guns. I get a more interesting mission. Cons of switching: I class [...]

2008 08 26 flight school Comments (1)

Site Lines

I finally got around to tinkering a little bit more with this site. Real-time translations are back for a variety of languages; right now 30% of my traffic comes from outside the US, so it seems like a good service to provide. The buttons are at the bottom left, under the tag cloud. The other [...]

2008 08 07 geekspeak
meta Comments (0)

c++

I check out of the Basic Combat Skills phase of flight training this Thursday, and have an expected wait of several months before I start training in whichever advanced aircraft I end up with. Naturally, a project was spontaneously created to fill the anticipated upcoming free time. In this case, the project is to learn [...]

2008 06 08 programming Comments (2)

delegated democracy

Explodicle‘s been pondering implementations of a computer-assisted delegated democracy. As of his last post, he’s hit a stumbling block: login-based implementations are a pain. They start you thinking along the lines of centralized servers polling remote servers, and things just start to get cumbersome. What if, during normal voter registration, you are free to register [...]

2008 05 27 geekspeak
politics Comments (5)

your input is important

2008 05 04 Comments (3)

Hypothetical Question Time

Say that you are buddies with a top computer scientist. He has been working for DARPA on an AI project. He succeeds! True AI! Over the period of a few months of shakedown trials and training of the new AI, you befriend it. This time ends when your buddy announces to DARPA project success, so [...]

2008 04 10 brain flotsam
geekspeak
reflection Comments (9)