brmj

6 ms·

1.
by brmj 15y ago
From what we've seen in the movies, the entire planet seems to have landing pads and such throughout the upper levels. If they've got a sizable fraction of the planet's surface area usable as a spaceport, distributed throughout essentially
2.
by brmj 15y ago
This strikes me as extraordinarily foolish. It's not that hard to have a hard shutdown mode in which most of those parasitic loads are gone and trigger it if the battery charge drops bellow a certain level. We've had that technology in lapt
3.
by brmj 15y ago
I suspect that any truly adequate automated essay grader would imply strong AI or at the very least some optimization process good enough that it might as well be strong AI.
4.
by brmj 15y ago
I doubt it. Very little annoys users more than taking away something they are used to and trying to sell it back to them.
5.
by brmj 15y ago
No, armed cops were called over a prank call. That's different.
6.
by brmj 15y ago
Can we please get a link to the actual thread, rather than an article in the Daily Fail reporting on it without even linking to it?
7.
by brmj 15y ago
Is that a real photo? The atmosphere is thicker than I'd expect and something about it looks subtly wrong.
8.
by brmj 15y ago
Yeah, but there are plenty of cases where that isn't feasible. Imagine one of these being used to collect passwords, credit card numbers and so on at a coffee shop's wifi network, for example. Also, people are stupid and leave networks unse
9.
by brmj 15y ago
Perhaps it's because most people aren't purely self interested.
10.
by brmj 15y ago
Here's a heuristic: Questions of the form "I'm 17. Should I drop school for X?" should be answered in the negative for essentially all plausible values of X.
11.
by brmj 15y ago
On the surface, this appears profoundly stupid. We don't need a unified interdisciplinary theory of life, beyond the one inherent in a proper understanding of physics since life exists within and is made of physics . We need postulate noth
12.
by brmj 15y ago
There's been a class war here for a long time. The difference is that it isn't one-sided any more.
13.
by brmj 15y ago
I see nothing wrong with this. If desktop 3D printing, 3D scanners, amateur friendly CAD software and so on get good enough that this can "destroy capitalism" (at least as it pertains to certain kinds of manufactured goods), then I find it
14.
by brmj 15y ago
At the risk of being blatantly trollish, let me state for the benefit of the commenters apparently still caught up in it that Ayn Rand's works are to Philosophy what Twilight is to literature.
15.
by brmj 15y ago
I take issue with the viewpoint that behavior is best understood by treating all involved minds as if they were perfect Bayesian reasoners motivated only by increasing the frequency of their alleles in the gene pool. Evolution doesn't work
16.
by brmj 15y ago
I reject as false the idea that copyright is desirable. Assuming that it is desirable, I reject as false the idea that copyright infringement on the internet is a special problem in need of an individual solution. Assuming that copyright in
17.
by brmj 15y ago
Wait, when did DVI become obsolete?
18.
by brmj 15y ago
I'm of the opinion that asking that question is almost akin to asking what technological solution should be used to give Russian organized crime your credit card numbers, if malware with a keylogger in it is bad. I don't think the problem S
19.
by brmj 15y ago
This may inspire massive overreaction, not just /b/tards calling their congresspeople. Back when AT&T blocked access to 4chan for a few hours due to a DDoS attack, some of them assumed it was censorship and started crafting plans to ret
20.
by brmj 15y ago
This is stupid. High quality, memorable passwords are easy once you throw away the conventional wisdom that they ought to look like 10 characters of line noise and move to a non-obvious phrase. Also, I suspect technology of this sort would
21.
by brmj 15y ago
As far as I can tell K&R is still the best. Its reputation is entirely deserved.
22.
by brmj 15y ago
In other news, drywall isn't particularly nutritious, water is wet and ferrets engage in comical antics.
23.
by brmj 15y ago
Well, in all fairness the claim that we can't have either would also be consistent with his statement, sort of.
24.
by brmj 15y ago
"tormenting"? I suspect auto-correct had something to do with this.
25.
by brmj 15y ago
Here's a thought I've had in the past after encountering a document of this type: Stealth in space is trivial is what you are trying to keep hidden doesn't need to accelerate, support human life or do anything much that generates significan
26.
by brmj 15y ago
Not really. At this point unions don't have enough money or membership to do much more than try to maintain their own existence.
27.
by brmj 15y ago
Presumably the plan is to keep breading them in captivity and releasing them, such that those genes are constantly being reintroduced.
28.
by brmj 15y ago
I'm actually pretty excited about this. This will make my life less miserable any time I am forced to solve certain types of problems in Java.
29.
by brmj 15y ago
X should be exempted from the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA for all values of X.
30.
by brmj 15y ago
He consistently states that he views this as a moral imperative. He's not exactly telling everyone that they have to, but he is saying it is fundamentally morally wrong not to.

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