Normati

I wonder if perhaps it's a good thing that rich people can pay to use handicapped spots. We could just think of them as "priority parking", and the regular priority parking ticket costs $x while handicapped people get a coupon entitling them to free access. After all, the intention isn't to prevent healthy people using them, it's to prevent them becoming unavailable - a gaggle of handicap convention attendees would cause more trouble than an occasional CEO buying his own groceries.

You don't get to keep waiting for a prediction to finally come true when it doesn't come with a deadline. It already didn't happen despite all our labor saving technology so far (we don't even weave cloth by hand anymore!). Sure it might happen in another 100 years, or another 1000. But that's almost a given for most predictions.

They're not great on paper. They ignore some powerful personal human motivation that we know exists. Perhaps you should say "They're great for robots that can be programmed to think in whatever way is convenient for the academic imagining them".

I don't understand what is being optimized by minimizing the product rw. Reducing w reduces the number of digits, but how does reducing the radix r help with component count? Surely a memory cell that could store 1,000,000 different values in a base-1-million system is just one component, even if it is quite difficult to make. Are they talking about the components needed to perform calculations?

windows also comes with the well-hidden "Problem Steps Recorder" that takes a sequence of screen shots whenever you click something. Doesn't do the text overlay but it's already installed with Windows which makes some things easier.

Next, I hope somebody hacks the Tesla Model S low-battery-capacity model to provide full battery capacity without having to pay for it. After all Tesla is using evil DRM to force people to pay a premium to use what they already have.

Edit: I see they don't offer that option anymore. Problem solved :)

It's hard to understand why spoofing would be illegal. If it fools traders who are relying on buy orders to judge the price, then why don't those traders just accept spoofing exists and not rely so heavily on the unfilled buy orders?

If it's illegal to cancel a buy order immediately after placing it, then perhaps exchanges shouldn't provide that facility? Perhaps there's some legal reason you would immediately cancel an order, and this action somehow doesn't destabilize the market or screw over other traders?

"The text files were created by manually keying the full text of each work, based on millions of digital facsimile page images"

!!! This is not silicon valley. I wonder how they ensure accuracy.

Link to the books http://ota.ox.ac.uk/tcp/

It's quite tractable, stop voting for the same two parties that keep causing the problems over and over again. The trouble is, most of your voting neighbors don't mind so they perpetuate the problem - there's the downside of democracy, two wolves and a sheep.

Use of force against people who commit such crimes as selecting their own sexual partners, being seen in public with members of the opposite sex, texting members of the opposite sex, being homosexual, etc.

This happens but you tolerate it because it's consistent with your arbitrary local culture. Consider pedophilia (having "wrong" sexual feelings) which comes with chemical castration and an attempt to "cure" it along with imprisonment of course. You don't even have to abuse anyone to suffer some of these consequences. Sound familiar? Have you ever met any self-confessed pedophile who hadn't been arrested for a related crime? Until they're outed, they're forced to keep their feelings secret from everyone because it's a kind of western thought crime. This leads us to imagine that all pedophiles rape children. They don't any more than 60 years ago all homosexuals raped children.

No, the solution would be to get insurance against high insurance costs. This already happens with medical insurance. If you're already sick your insurance costs more. But if you get insurance in advance, before you know you'll be sick, it's cheaper. The same could happen with driving. Get insurance before you've driven, before you know you'll be risky.

It's unfortunate that languages are so monolithic. You want to make a language that does concurrency differently and you end up having to design date format strings! Sad that we still don't have any kind of common libraries or whatever it might take to just do this a couple of times and let language designers pick and choose the preexisting components they want.

It's not just autocracy. The US government is quite aggressive in shutting down websites that spread information it doesn't like. They also sometimes go further and arrest and imprison the operators. Examples include gambling, piracy and drug trading sites.

It might not be practical to send information as light. You'd need a powerful transmitter so your signal can be detected among the noise from stars. It might turn out that sending a spaceship is actually cheaper and just about as fast. The spaceship can steer itself and doesn't spread out the further it goes.

It's because most scientists and the organizations funding them are not interested in advancing our knowledge of nature so much as looking like they're advancing our knowledge of nature. If we want to be less wrong, we need more replication. Scientists don't want to do replication because it advances our knowledge of nature without looking like it is. So instead they keep trying to find fainter and more obscure effects, so faint that they exceed their own abilities to recognize statistical significance. It fools reviewers, journal editors and employers though, so they keep it up.

When you're making the decision yes, I agree it's risky and perhaps arrogant, but with the benefit of hindsight it's clear that it was successful in this case. Not in other cases, sure.

Not every case was bad. It was extremely successful in New Zealand with hardly anyone killed (relatively speaking), a peace treaty quickly signed and the quality of life brought up to modern standards, ending 1000 years of murderous tribal warfare. The natives didn't have their own country before it was colonized because they were fractured into tribes. So it was absolutely a good thing to save them from themselves.

Works great in Chrome 39. I can see the noise but it looks like part of the style and not distracting at all. I love how it creates fear! They come at you when your back is turned. Though I found you can just run backwards in a circle to consistently dodge them, at least got 88.9 seconds that way.

No need to be melancholy. That glorifies killing. Do you have the same sad feelings for the Paris gunmen that were killed? There's no fundamental difference between them. Remember of course what the purpose of the allies in WWII was - "to preserve our way of life" or so we won't "all be speaking German". It's not clear that tens of millions had to be be killed for that aim - only to end up with more tens of millions killed by the communist states that became successful as a result.

If they really had no great alternative, and the chain of reasoning was that clear, then traders would have anticipated it and it wouldn't have caused any major problems.

Since it was widely unexpected and people did lose piles of money, I expect there were other likely alternatives and perhaps your analysis may be suffering from a bit of post-hoc rationalization.

It sounds like the intention is actually much better than net neutrality - it claims to be trying to encourage a more competitive market. Proper competition would make net neutrality irrelevant, and would actually serve people better. For example, speeds would go up as providers actually compete for customers instead of having local monopolies.

If the only problem with abolishing time zones is having to look up a table to know when to call someone, then perhaps it's better to abolish them. Most of the uses we make of international times don't have anything to do with timing phone calls.

To make a decision on what's best obviously needs a comprehensive look at all the pros and cons, not just one word-gamey one like this.

Perhaps the current set of time zones are not optimal. Maybe the best solution turns out to be just rearranging them. I would hope making them wider but perhaps there are biological reasons to refine them even further and make daylight savings even more complicated. If that somehow extends out lives, makes us more productive, or saves enough power (money), it might be worth the added cost to programmers (money).

The recent European cookie law was close to that and got laughed at by tech people. Poor Europeans are constantly being asked for permission "Can we store a cookie on your computer?" whenever they visit a major website.

Also, how do you stop people tracking you by IP? Every web server's log does this by default. How do you allow sessions even? It's not easy to define tracking so it's different from essential operation.

I doubt most people care. This isn't going to drive customers away. The only way it'll be stopped is if they're legally forced to. For example, see the history of cookies themselves and how most people never cared about them.

You might have missed the instructions - "Imagine it's 1994".

Another useful one is to ask him to explain his reasoning.

If he can't justify his decisions, then he's probably using instinct which is unreliable in the case of rare diseases, or he doesn't know how to diagnose known diseases which means he's incompetent.

Some people are offended when you challenge them for reasons for their advice, but I think that's because they aren't confident in it themselves or feel superior. Doctors shouldn't be in either of those positions and should be willing to tell you how they came to their conclusions.

I always wonder why you can't just add a library to another language to get most of the features of somebody else's favorite language. If not a library, couldn't any other language add matlab style matrices and end up being as good as it, fortran, etc? Do we really need a whole different language with a whole different set of arbitrary rules just so a few features are easier or faster?

That won't be wire transfers, that'll be some kind of local interbank transfer. A wire transfer is still complicated (paper forms), slow and expensive to send to other countries.

You also have to give your name and address to the recipient bank to somehow prove you're not laundering money or funding terrorism.

The time to make these complaints was years ago, possibly on the way up a big boom just to show that you're confident in yourself despite the apparent evidence to the contrary. Now that it's going down doesn't mean it was caused by people realizing it wastes power, doesn't scale or doesn't pay interest. These are age old criticisms that haven't stopped the price from still being 10 times higher than it was when I first heard about bitcoins.

And then what? If you do 3 scissors and a rock, what would a human typically do next? By making use of the pattern you have to break it.