dodo53

...That Emacs Users Don't Want You To Know!

So has Ryan North @ Dinosaur Comics! http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=...

More readable on boingboing link http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/04/15/time-travel-cheatsh...

like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units ?

Appropriate to do an orbital mechanics thing for a company called La Grange (=> Lagrange) :oP

Well to be cynical - if most people are blithering idiots and most people don't amount to much, it could be true that most smart people don't amount to much and most people in charge are idiots while still true that being smart makes you much more likely to be in charge :o)

I wonder if there's a way you could help this with software. I remember reading a long time ago about singing pitch training by realtime headphone feedback (like - if you're singing flat, you are feed back your voice distorted even more flat[1]). I wonder if you could detect and exaggerate differences in prononciation.

[1] - closest I could google now was http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8173617 which makes it look pretty ineffective actually :o/

Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun

Or supposedly most of the cost to end world hunger http://borgenproject.org/the-cost-to-end-world-hunger/

you could have a ring of people, with their own loyalty cards, use them for a bit, rotate around, offset any loyalty points differences with a bitcoin transfer.

If you have a perfect mirror, can you store energy in lasers indefinitely?

I guess you'd still lose energy to the air

well its energy has increased, so yes, but probably not measurably.

By implanting a small magnet normally in a finger, moving your finger through an electric field causes small movement of the magnet, so you can 'feel' electric fields. e.g. http://gizmodo.com/5895555/i-have-a-magnet-implant-in-my-fin... But there's been a number of people who've done it.

this would be a cool school science lab experiment

Checked because I remember hearing about the somewhat horrific forced swim test. Idea is mice are trapped in a container fall of water; depression is when they give up and let themselves drown.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_models_of_depression#Des...

That's interesting! I wonder if a charitable company decide to make say AIDS drugs and give them away without breaching patent law?

It's a bit more surreal when it's general knowledge what to do with the hammer but you have to license your placement-of-hammer IP.

Wouldn't it be pretty toxic (especially if it's a vapour?) In a sealed component in a datacentre that problem doesn't matter, but they're speculating about home use also.

Yes, there's an interesting thing on that here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/ I haven't looked at enough philosophy to be able to figure out what I'd place myself as, average-utilarianism also seems to lead to morally-counter-intuitive stuff.

That's essentially average-utilitarian (has the happiness of a random person in the population gone up?); I guess many people are closer to total-utilitarian (ie. the total number of happy/surviving people is also important).

Relabelling is the marketing game; to get your businessy-idea-book in the best-sellers list you need everyone to replace "practice makes perfect" with "10000 hours".

Maybe they could follow the rhinos with UAVs to cut down on patrol-space? (or spend the money flooding the market with fake-rhino-horn?)

I really should get around to reading that. His info theory book/lectures was/were very good. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html

If you haven't seen already you might be interested in http://lightsailenergy.com/tech.html; they're working on compressed-air-and-water-vapour storage (also DaniFong posts on HN sometimes)

and would you stay home and look after the kids if your wife earned more than you?

I got the political vocab wrong I think - for me socialism is essentially capitalism with strong welfare state (ie basic income guarantee or whatever) vs communism with no differences in pay and no private ownership. But wikipedia disagrees with my definition, so I don't know where I got that from.

Yes this is totally my attitude that eventually we need a socialist system. But how do you convince winners in capitalist system that's a good idea (or the future robot owners)?

People will pay for robots/AI if it replaces a larger amount of salary paid to humans. This is already happening. The question is whether once all the 'easy' stuff has been automated whether we'll be able to automate the 'hard' stuff that we'd currently call intelligent work; but there will definitely be strong economic incentives for it under normal capitalist system. And if/when AI catches up with human intelligence, there will still be economic incentives to create greater than human intelligence. Killer robots comes from whether the AI designers will be smart enough to create AI powerful enough to be economically advantageous but with 'values' that are close enough to those of the human race.

I think it could be really valuable if you can link (with permission) to some form of real identity (ie. probably Facebook/LinkedIn profile) - makes customer testimonials more believable.

Yes, while it's low-valued it's not much of a deterrent to big players which is a disadvantage (depending on how often small players realistically can afford to challenge the big players legally under current system).

But by defensive usage I mean then at least you know someone else isn't going to patent your key stuff. And once you've got funding/get acquired, the patent could be declared as higher value (and additional fees paid/validation done), and then future litigation to anyone who infringed after that date could be for higher amount.

In my mind, the little guy would patent with a small declared value - so on the downside they wouldn't be able to litigate for large amounts. But they would have a defensive patent, and that patent would also have value for larger acquiring companies because if they believed in the validity of the patent they could apply for revaluing at higher price (at which point there would be extra funding to make sure it is valid).