gyom

There were also 1.4M floppies with barebone Linux that booted and ran completely in 8M of RAM on a 386. You could remove the floppy after it booted and continue using Linux.

I think you've hit it right on the nail here. Countries are also fictitious, in a way. Your mind expands when you realize this, and it gives you a set of tools to think about "cyberspace" in a more accurate way than by waving your arms around saying that cyberspace isn't a geographical location.

> Sending somebody to jail unfairly is a crime, and should be treated as such.

Very interesting take on things. I'm not sure if it would create a huge legal mess when a federal prosecutor is doing his or her job at prosecuting someone who's probably innocent.

I don't know whether it's a good a idea or not, but my original thinking that you'd have enough water mass to diffuse the heat sufficiently fast so that the coating would not be be subject to very high temperatures at a given location.

Obviously the heat would have to transfer to the exterior environment in some way (e.g. through the floor) so this wouldn't work with smartphones.

Spray this inside your computer everywhere except at key places requiring cooling (like on the top of the CPU). Flood the computer with water. Passive silent cooling !

The insight here is that everybody takes t-shirts as alternative payment method for situations where paying real money would be a social faux-pas. T-shirts are more like letters of gratitude.

You can give your friends funny t-shirts to thank them helping you move, but you can't give them $20 instead without insulting them by implying that their time is worth so little.

Thanks a lot for the reference !

To me, the main point has to do with the unseen consequences / victims. It's similar to situations where the government creates winners in an industry, where people applaud the act of job creations, but nobody sees the lost opportunities elsewhere because they are not easily identifiable.

>In reality, she was not qualified for the job. Literally hundreds of other women had applied, many of whom would have been more competent. The real injustice was not hiring one of them in the first place.

I'm glad someone pointed out that reasoning flaw right away.

I hear you. As a Quebec resident, I've been getting screwed all my life by these restrictions on contests. I don't even know why we're listed there alongside Kim Jong-il, Ahmadinejad and Castro. There's probably some law somewhere that the government of Quebec voted, but I don't know what it is.

"A Competitor is not eligible for this Competition if he/she is a resident of the Quebec province of Canada, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan or Syria."

One could argue that Carmack's request was relevant more than a decade ago, and maybe it would be fine with Carmack if the person who inherited the drives released the data in 20 or 50 years (for historical purposes).

I don't make that much compared to many of the other people posting in this thread, but having an automatic deduction of some significant-but-manageable amount going to a separate account is definitely a nice trick to play on oneself.

It almost sounds like sexual selection in the way that the natural logic is turned on its head. A male bird with such a cumbersome and visible plumage could only survive if its genes were awesome in all other respects, so it gets more favor from the female birds.

A company that had many remote workers would crash and burn if it didn't have many other qualities (good management, processes and developers) to support the remote workers.

I think it was meant to be applicable only a few times.

He has a point, though, about how unthinkable a 100% raise seems, but if you get another job it's entirely possible.

I agree about the debatable status of the stupid advertisements running without my permission. As you're pointing out, the worse aspect of them is that they're involved in a large-scale tracking scheme. It wouldn't be as bad if you got your ads and nothing else (no tracking on top of the ads).

The "Tor == CP" reasoning is as absurd as saying "Free Speech == Rampant Nazi Propaganda". =)

I agree with you about how awesome Jacob Appelbaum makes Tor sound, but you could still make a case about not wanting your computer to be used without your consent for stuff like that.

For example, as much as cancer research can benefit from extra computing power, I wouldn't want web sites to start including secret javascript code meant to "reap the spare cpu cycles" available when I visit their site.

Especially given that there was a link about the self-driving cars right following that link on Google Drive.

My brain just cognitively squished the two of them together and went "whoaa ... they're opening the SDK for the car stuff already !"

Just think about how George Lucas clearly wasn't the best person to write the Star Wars prequels.

I would gladly pay for a well-written IP-infringing new version of Matrix 2-3 instead of the official crap that the rights owners put out.

Since you're giving your solution, might as well spell out the message.

"when angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred" -thomas jefferson

"when angry, count four; when very angry, swear." -mark twain

Do you have any reason to assume that programming competence is a "natural phenomenon" ?

We're not talking about the statistical central limit theorem here, we're talking about people who are passionate about programming and spend years working on their craft.

You can only invoke the normal distribution thing when you're talking about an outcome that is the average of many independent quantities.

Many would have ethical objections, but I think a lot of sane people would volunteer to be the first person on Mars even if it was understood to be a one-way mission.

Which is why it'd be nice if filesystems supported labels. I'd keep the directory structure, but I want to be able to apply the "2004 vacations" label on a all files in a given directory. Then you can add other particular labels to some files.

I don't want to have to manage labels separately for iPhoto, for Picasa and for all the possible image viewers that I'll use in the future.

I find it interesting that this article puts forward the idea that people who are having problems right now (ex : those with autism and addiction problems) might turn out to be ideal candidates for some future technology. Maybe they'll just sync more easily with the brain interfaces.

With that kind of logic, though, someone could make a case about how having a low percentage of psychopaths could be a good thing for times that call for that kind of behavior (probably in some war situations). And I'm not talking about their psychopathy being beneficial to them, but them being beneficial to their tribe / village in those situations.

Anyhow, I don't have a particular example in mind and I'll refrain from giving a bad example instead.

What kind of tools are on the VM ? Do I get gcc and some python installation, for example ?

I would imagine that I would have to reinstall my tools whenever a new instance starts.

Yes, but that feature is unreliable and I've never managed to get it working. =)

Yeah but you can opt to only use encrypted volumes for certain files that don't have to be accessed daily.

You don't take advantage of Dropbox fully, but it's still pretty convenient to be able to sync that small encrypted volume containing tax reports etc.

I'm not sure if you just implicitly suggested that we (humans) will be mistreated by the general AI (and its offsprings) just like the natives were mistreated by people who followed after Columbus.

I haven't followed the drama from the WakeMate product. I just used it to wake up at the right times and it did a fine job at that.

I'm guessing it probably comes from the app on your iPhone just like WakeMate interfaces through a mobile phone for setup and the rest.

It makes the wrist thingy kinda irrelevant, but maybe they correlate your heart rhythm with the food that you ate or something.

Fun to watch even without knowing anything about their studio or what they do.

Their fines are getting kinda draconic when they double at every infraction, but I bet they get a kick out of saying that someone could be fined $2000 for forgetting for the 10th time failing to have a notebook and pen in hand when needed.