qwertyboy

Absolutely. A century has around 36500 days. If you compose a list of 100 people who died on that century, your chances of hitting the same day more than once are estimated at almost 13%. As a matter of fact, even 28 people will get you over the 1%.

The article contains several examples for the different interpretations. CISC vs. RISC is an example of "worse is better than incompatible". Unix vs. lisp-machine is an example of "worse is better than complex". But the bottom line, for this specific author, is that worse is better than nothing.

"Worse is better" is an incomplete sentence.

Different folks complete it in different ways. Some say that worse is better than complex. Others claim it's better than slow. Others still that it's better than incompatible. The point of the posted link is that worse is better than nothing. One can hardly argue with that.

You guys do realize that most `find` implementations support both the `-ls` and the `-name` flags, right?

    find ~/Documents -name somefile -ls

Egads! It was so obvious that I kept calling it GNUSpeak in my head, enjoying the cleverness of it all, and only now, following your comment, noticed it's actually GNUSpeech...

The existence of "finance tech entrepreneurs", as you politely call them, and the fact that they are indeed very noisy, does not mean there isn't a community of programmers who actually write code and try to design new decentralized technology.

From reading the article (and not enjoying it very much - see msravi's comment about its handwavyness), the question it's failing to answer isn't "why is light faster than X" but rather "why is the speed of light as it is".

I think Feynman's point is that to be a good scientist, you must keep in mind the difference between the map and the territory.

You preform observations. You think of explanations ("why"s) and try to fit them in a model. You make testable predictions using your model. You test them. If the experiments support your model, then it's a good and useful model. People will use it to achieve cool and terrible things. But it's still just a model. And you have to be ready at a moment's notice, as soon as the empirical data demands it, to drop your model like a hot potato and start looking for a better one.

To do otherwise - to believe that you already know the "why" - is to abandon the scientific method. "Knowing" is the opposite of "learning", and the antonym of scientific progress.

Boy, do I have good news for you: http://conkeror.org/PDFViewer

Conkeror is so much Firefox, that you can easily fit the former with most things that work with the latter, including the built-in PDF extension. As a matter of fact, the Conkeror "binary" is just a shell script that launches Firefox or xul-runner with the proper config (something like: firefox -app /usr/share/conkeror/application.ini).

Also worth noting is that Conkeror was the original inspiration for vimperator (and thus for uzbl, dwb, luakit and the likes - all very splendid and worthwhile projects), and that this message is written on an editor spawned by conkeror (which, surprisingly enough, happens to be vim).

It is trivial today to sample audio in a rate and sensitivity which greatly surpass both the density of the pherromagnetic material in the tapes and the fidelity of the original recording equipment.

Even "analogue" sound depends on the resolution of the underlying technology, so no, there doesn't have to be any data loss.

And that's just on the philosophical level, about which our limited ears care very little :)

First of all, if your business wants me to memorize stuff that has nothing to do with my job so that we can both engage in a game of pretend, I don't want to work there. Who knows what other stupid shit you'll make me do.

But what really alarmed me was the following sentence:

Don't complain about a system when you can game that system to your advantage!

This is not only morally dubious, it can be downright dangerous. A broken system is unstable, and can quickly turn against you. If you see a fire in your neighbours yard you should do something about it, even if he is a total asshole.

At 60,000 to 90,000 ft.? Yeah, it's gonna be challenging.

This is actually a pretty common misconception amongst muggles. A magician's trade is to lie with action, not with words, and most magicians I know have a very strong sense of honor in this regard.

Magicians do not often reveal their secrets, and I suppose some would even lie outright if you try to out them in public (although a good magician would find a way to ask you to stop ruining everyone's fun), but when a magician voluntarily tells you how something was not done, you can usually trust him. That's doubly true for respected magicians. I think it's a big part of what makes them respected.

Also, in the case of the bottles, cutting the bottom would not only be extremely easy to detect, it would also make the whole thing worthless. A cheap scam. Magician's consider themselves artists, not scammers.

we don't have a GitHub or anything user's can download yet, but stay tuned for more updates.

Crying shame.

They are actually not using proof of burn. Counterparty is a decentralized exchange that sits on top of bitcoin. As such, I don't think it should be minable, not with proof of work and not with proof of anything.

Proof of burn was used during an initialization phase (let's call it distributed minting) which is over. Should really check it out more thoroughly, it looks like a pretty neat idea.

While the usage of the word "Yoga" to describe spiritual practices is certainly quite old (the Yoga Sutras were apparently compiled a bit before Jesus), Hatha Yoga is only a few centuries old, and the gymnastic practice that is common today (asanas) is pretty modern (~150 years).

Doesn't make patents any less ridiculous, of course.

It looks like TextSecure encrypts your actual texts, for which you still pay, while Telegram also takes care of delivery, for free, and does it faster and better than SMS (which should be pretty darn easy, what with SMS doing such a very bad job indeed).

Homepage at linode.com lists 2GB Linode at $40 a month. Am I missing something?

Well, before I open an account, can you please explain how this is better than using jslint?

I don't know. I'm an artist, and while I enjoy getting paid to create and preform, taking money for reproductions that do not require further effort on my part always feels weird.

I don't feel I have the right to tell anyone not to reproduce my art at their own expanse. If I play you a song, it's your right to record it and play it to your friends - just like it's your right to whistle it. Just like it's your right to remember it.

To me, intellectual property feels like a diversion. Instead of having an audience that pays me for my work, I have a middleman that makes me work for free so that he can overcharge my audience while I wait for my percentage.

I don't need to restrict anyone's freedom to make a living. The middleman does. And if grooveshark hurts his income - he had it coming. He's been hurting both our incomes (artist and audience) for years.

This is the opposite of what Tesla is for cars. It's taking the single most energy efficient vehicle I know - 99% mechanical efficiency, incredibly low carbon footprint, and an amazing calorie-per-kilometer ratio (miles-per-apple?) - and it makes it worse in every single aspect. It is probably fun to ride, and it's better for the environment than cars, but it is certainly not a "greener" bicycle.

Douglas Adams had a brilliant definition (used originally for "nerd"): a hacker is a person who uses the telephone to talk about telephones.

Displeasure aside, having access to the source directly benefits people who can read and edit the source.

In the long run this benefits everyone, of course, but it's only the techies who can actually use the source, and that's why it's mostly the techies who care about it being open.

RTFA - this link appears in the first paragraph.

Back in 2008, FF was on a downward spiral. It was getting bloated, slow, annoying... And then Google came out with Chrome.

It took FF less than a year to get their st together and fix their browser. Today it's great, but the harm was done. Most of the people who moved to Chrome never looked back, and still remember FF as a slow, annoying browser.

Actually, fossil fuel power plants release more radioactive waste than nuclear ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Comparing_radioac...

Nuclear power really is a darn good solution to our energy problems, and is more feasible and entirely more humane than using less energy. Our growing energy demands are not just a result of us being spoiled, they are a direct result of our need to sustain more and more people. Cut down on the energy, and you quickly fund yourself cutting down on progress and on the welfare of the poor.

Progress has created a lot of problems, but we can't really slow down in any significant way. Our only hope is to use our momentum to find solutions.

Looks very cool, but seems to require both wine AND mono :(

Actually, I'd love to read those sources, since - I have to admit - I read it the same way. At first it felt like total pseudo-science, and then I saw the app and "realized" that this has to be app-spam. So please, if you have actual scientific sources (mostly for the distinct functions of different phases of sleep), do share.

monsterwm is even smaller than dwm, with 700k of memory (grep Rss /proc/`pidof monsterwm`/smaps | awk '{t=t+$2}END{print t}')

TL;DR The Mercator projection is a solution to a problem that does not exist in Google Earth.

Projections, Mercator included, are ways to map a 3D shape (the globe) onto a static 2D surface (a map). Google Earth uses a dynamic 2D surface (a screen) to display a changing view of a 3D object. See TL;DR.