jimworm

Interesting "stupid" idea there. Is there enough incentive on either side for a small nation to offer its entire population to scientific research for a large one that cannot afford the failure of a similar experiment on itself?

It'd be fair to assume that a successful experiment would eventually become self-funding and discontinued if unsuccessful. Your $13B number puts the budget in the same ballpark as ITER; smaller than half of the foreign aid donated by the US in 2013, an order of magnitude smaller than Project Apollo, and less than 10% the size of the Marshall plan.

However such a project will not be able to avoid wide publicity which would attract many "confounding factors" trying to ensure its success, or more likely its failure.

"Stop using paper", says chief of a company that treats modified copies as if they were originals, "if we all carved our work on to this big stone in the middle of the courtyard then we'd be rid of our paper problems".

People sign contracts for terrible work conditions all the time, is that a reason to make one specific industry criminal? And this is before mentioning that a contract that specifies "everything" as the job description renders the industry irrelevant - if an accountant signs an employment contract that includes "everything" in the job description then technically that also includes prostitution, coal mining, deep-sea diving, assassinations etc.

Even if the roads are deemed sufficiently safe not to warrant increased enforcement, it seems that the public purse could benefit from it, at least in the short term.

The tracking position - face-down, straight legs, arms by your side - lets you move head-first at very high speeds. There are claims of achieving a 1:1 glide ratio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(skydiving)

As a student I've mistakenly jumped out of a plane quite far from the DZ and managed to track most of the way back during freefall (and flew the rest under canopy).

Once at the railway station in Dunkerque. I started by asking the ticket officer in French if she spoke English, but after she said no she refused to listen. Fortunately there were two booths open and my bad French was better received by the kind girl working there. Good thing too, she was our only way out of town.

Without knowing exactly what is required for making su filindeu, the video of Paola Abraini looks to me a lot like a la mian maker in training. I wouldn't be too surprised if a la mian chef picks it up right away and starts making su filindeu ten times faster than she does, instantly turning the "rarest pasta in the world" into "a pasta from Sardinia".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHGZLjJ1CAk&t=40s

A several-gram spacecraft travelling at relativistic speeds would pack quite a punch. Definitely the most dangerous piece of space junk ever created. It's interesting to imagine making our first contact with intelligent extra-terrestrials by causing a small Tunguska-like event.

Out of the several uses of 品, one is the verb "taste" which makes slightly more sense.

Slightly off topic: Do trees wake up? Philosophically speaking "growing, reproducing and consuming resources" is a better definition of life than "gathering/making resources for growth and reproduction". Animals started waking up as part of their life cycle, trees didn't.

Imagine if all gyms were replaced with cocktail bars. Has science fiction done this yet?

You're talking about reasonable doubt on an order to murder, I'm talking about reasonable doubt on the possession of encrypted data. Strongly encrypted data looks random and the only way to tell the difference is to have the decryption key. So is withholding the key sufficient for reasonable doubt? If it is, the law is useless; if it isn't, any random data is evidence of guilt.

Good one: brakes make it possible for bank robbers to travel faster than 80mph in a car, therefore the police must have a way to remotely disable brakes to catch escaping bank robbers. Oh you can trust the police the keep the brake-disabler safe from terrorists, don't worry.

One of the problems with outlawing encryption is that it takes nothing to prove the crime, and therefore it is impossible to prove one's innocence.

Would it be possible to outlaw the possession or transfer of data that appears random? Nearly all data is random data, and nearly all processes randomize data. All data could be "proven" to contain information under at least one encryption scheme. It is the ultimate guilty until proven innocent argument.

If your credit card were erased with a magnet, could you now be prosecuted for the possession of encrypted data, because it could be proven that using a certain one-time pad it could be transformed into something meaningful to humans?

It doesn't end there. All things could be interpreted as information. We would have to start explaining the arrangement of books on a shelf, of spices in a rack, colours of stitching in clothing. If encryption were illegal, we would all be guilty all the time.

Fine, some would argue that random data isn't proof of guilt. What about the means of encryption? Now all random data are one-time pad keys. Prepare to rot in jail.

Having received feedback in various channels, do you think you can devise a strategy to deal with "what women have to deal with" in an effective manner? What advice do you have for other female entrepreneurs in similar situations?

...especially if it's the only language one speaks fluently.

I'm currently on a month-long crusade against what initially was a single small poor code choice (a denormalized model in Rails) from 4 years ago.

As it stands, over 5% of the codebase has been deleted so far without reducing functionality. One could argue that a significant part of the application were just hacks to get around the original hack, and hacks to get around those etc.

Not sure how to break that down into the categories provided, but given that the problems add up to proportions unimaginable to anybody but IRS, debt as an analogy works well enough for me.

If nobody sends them money they could just print more. There is only one power company and it's owned by the state.

Of course they can - if you're talking about tapping submarine cables or other attacks from the "outside".

I was asking more about the legal situation, whether they have enough independence to enact laws to prevent the authorities making "inside" attacks such as:

* Forcing operators to identify customers

* Forbid the operator from telling their customers about anything

* Take hardware without allowing it to be destroyed beforehand

These things could still happen illegally of course.

Speaking of havens, does Jersey have enough independence to become a data haven?

Wow, this site is blocked in the UK.

It has been known for millennia that confessions obtained under torture are very effective at reducing the workload of the courts. So much so, that a billion-dollar industry can grow its own market at will with a minimum increase in judicial expenses.

What's the next "disruption" in the industry? Automated guilt-finding? Mass surveillance, check. Self-running prisons? Automated jail management, check. Automated lawyers? Watson, check.

The system is turning into a predator that seeks out the slow and weak as prey; unfortunately, unlike a predator in nature, it decreases the health of the entire herd.

To naively take the predator analogy to the extreme, it would be more beneficial for a nation to randomly select poor people and summarily execute them than maintain a justice system that deals almost exclusively in injustice.

You can disable mediasource extensions in your browser to get the old download-it-all html5 video.

Ruby is a super-readable language with a powerful syntax, and Rails (3+) used in Rails-like ways gives the user a similar amount of power over db and web delivery. Just because clarity of thought cannot be measured it doesn't mean the tools that enable it are worthless, or worth less.

A "faster" language only gives a linear improvement in performance. It's only worth it if a 5-10x increase in hardware cost crosses the line between profit and failure. If it doesn't, I'll choose the tools that get the job done with half the team size and lets them get home early every time.

It's important to remember that this test only focuses on the pitch of the notes. Some of the tunes cut off before the phrase finishes, which feel weird and wrong but isn't part of the test.

It's possible that some advertising will merge in with regular content and become covertly invasive over the long term. Publishers become credibility farms, where credibility is built using real articles and sold via "propaganda" pieces. One possible example is the Wired tennis physics link posted recently [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210808

Misleading title - the article asserts that spin wins matches without describing the physics at all. It's a barely-veiled advertisement for Wilson's rackets.

In tennis, the spin that "wins matches" is the topspin. In a topspin, the Magnus effect generates downwards lift, allowing the ball to be hit forwards faster and still land in the court than if downwards acceleration was provided by gravity alone. Without spin, unlimited-speed shots can only be hit at heights where the ball has near line-of-sight with the opposite court. Since hitting the ball faster than your opponent can get to it is what wins points, that's why spin wins matches.

But tennis is hardly the poster-boy for the Magnus effect. Table tennis has a small and raised court, and a high speed/mass ratio, which makes it apply the Magnus effect more completely than any other sport. Spin is used to to generate lift for long slow defensive shots, to attack from far below table level, and to alter ball direction in flight. Table tennis players require a good "feel" for all aspects of the Magnus effect in order to improve much more beyond beginner level, and no mid-level amateur player can ever get away with not thinking about it.

From personal experience in target sports, strength and fitness plays a surprisingly big part in weapons use. Being able to handle a weapon with the least of effort while maintaining a low heart rate makes aiming a lot easier.

Pointing out a lie does little when it can't be punished with consequences; you were relying on the freelancer's conscience for a favourable outcome.

Border agents have the law, manpower, firepower, and territory on their side and are ready to use it at a moment's notice.

Seems plausible on the surface, but not supported by research. The average elite female athlete is only as strong as an average male. Quote: The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17186303