Viewing profile — bld

Reminds me of a post I saw on Get Rich Slowly awhile back on ditching a dream job for a boring one. Interesting perspective. Emotional investment can be taxing in its own way. I st…

Indeed. The growing free software & hardware communities, and the numerous companies they spin off, are an existence proof that patents aren't a requirement of a working economy. T…

This is one of the most clear & succinct - and more importantly high exposure - statements on the value of open source that I've seen to date. The same message from other sectors l…

"...limited demand for its products"? Not in Orange County, CA.

We can keep FPTP without the pathologies of plurality voting with something like Approval or Condorcet voting.

One of the most comprehensive guides to diplomatic critiques I've seen was written for the Critters science fiction & fantasy writing workshop. It serves a critical need in that ve…

Washington DC's one of the few places in the US I've seen with that same escalator etiquette in the Metro. I love it. Unfortunately, it doesn't usually apply at shopping malls.

For an overdose of information on this topic, see: http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/

Using LyX, you can't even type extraneous space without extra effort.

Difference being that police don't make their livelihood from the people they go after; rather, the people the "parasites" prey on. There are a few exceptions, like seizures from d…

The US patent office has the Peer to Patent project for public comment on pending patent applications: http://www.peertopatent.org/ Looks like it's voluntary and applies to a limit…

Physics also identifies the dynamics, which are a special type of constraint. Engineers also consider economics, which usually limits you to far less than physics allows.

I think the problem arises when a physicist is asked to speculate on an engineering problem.

The Dragon capsule's deorbit burn completed and it's headed back down to Earth. [EDIT] and splashdown!

Here's the press conference in three ~10 minute parts: Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu5dXnCUs7I Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LsihAsX4z8 Part 3: http://www.yout…

My controls lab in college (University of Washington, Aeronautics & Astronautics) had an inverted pendulum. I designed a controller to balance it and maintain position along the tr…

Also see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891316

The system from Jurassic park actually exists. It's the 3D File System Navigator made by SGI for IRIX. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

I was thinking it's too odd to be fake.