Neat idea: trade permission to use your computer for free gaming.  While you play, your CPU is used to compute tasks orchestrated by Plura Processing.  In turn, the game developer is paid for making the connection between the game player and the person or company that wants to hire out computational tasks.

I think I like the idea because I love gaming and don’t like to pay for it.  I wonder how many others there are out there who feel the same way…

Posted by email from Duane’s Quick Posts (posterous)

Posted by email from Duane’s Quick Posts (posterous)

Posted by email from Duane’s Quick Posts (posterous)

I was thinking about conspiracies the other day and kinda stumbled into the realization that the idea of a devil is probably the most widely adopted conspiracy theory in the history of the world.  Of course, not everyone is Christian, but the idea of personified evil was, as far as I understand it, first taught by the ancient Persian, Zoroaster (the father of Zoroastrianism) and later adopted by Christianity.

Update: I apologize if I offended anyone. This was an exercise in looking in at my own culture “from the outside” and I didn’t mean to be confrontational.

Kelty and I are going to the Singularity Summit in San Jose next weekend.  I’m so excited to go!  I feel like I will be among giants, just kind of observing and learning from their ways of thinking.  Who knows, maybe we’ll start a new DNA club, or talk about the next steps to combining biological and robotic components.  Or maybe we’ll stick to the basics and try to estimate when artificial intelligence will be strong enough to convince most human beings that it is sentient.  Fun times!

Posted by email from Duane’s Quick Posts (posterous)

Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne has led a campaign to reveal some dangers in the practice of “naked short” selling. In his view, it was a part of the cause of the failure of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and Lehman Brothers. Now, a very interesting article has been published at The Register that ties pieces of the story together: it seems that one Mr. Gary Weiss—who has deep connections with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (the institution that would be in a position to know how bad the naked shorting situation is)—has been actively keeping Byrne’s view of naked shorts out of the picture on Wikipedia. Sounds rotten to me. Here’s the full Register article.

Related: My article a little over a year ago on Fractional Reserve Brokeraging