Viewing profile — gasbag

Their FAQ seems to disagree with you: Is Dynamicland open source? Dynamicland shares many core values with the open source movement and in some ways goes beyond them. A primary des…

Aren't Nest Protect alarms also linked? This harrowing video leads me to believe they are. It's a couple years old at this point though. (Turn your sound down, video is a poor soul…

I drive a Scion xB, which has the aerodynamic efficiency of a toaster. When I bought it in 2005, the huge amount of bugs that the windshield caught was one of the few things I didn…

This seems like something we ought to be able to do electronically. I should be able to encrypt a message with recipient's pubkey and a verified timestamp from NIST (for example) i…

Awesome! I'm curious to try out your implementation. When I first stumbled upon Lucid early this year it seemed fascinating, but hard to wrap my head around by just reading the exa…

Your last sentence also sounds a lot like Economics 2.0 (and some other things) from Charles Stross's magnificent book Accelerando.

Violence always shapes political discussion. When someone commits a terrorist act, there must always be a decision made on how to respond to it. Understanding what drives a terrori…

User acjohnson55 mentions below a Radiolab episode in which a debate team does exactly what you suggest. They had a lot of success with their strategy, but ultimately even as the c…

I don't think the US would stop trading with Puerto Rico, so I suppose the question is if the increased trade with Caribbean nations would offset however much trade with the US mai…

The act says that anytime a non-US ship carries goods that are from a US port, including Puerto Rico, it cannot take those goods to any other US port. So instead of being able to d…

> The Puerto Rican economy, at least on the coasts, is highly intermingled with the US economy In large part due to the Jones act, which discourages trade between PR and its Caribb…

> The Senate wasn’t designed to represent “the people” anyway, it was designed to represent the interests of the sovereign states — of which DC is not. The House of Representatives…

State is the wrong entity here. A population tends to create a culture, and a culture's interplay of ideas runs on its human network. Which is not to say that a culture is consciou…

This is tangential to the article, but one of the more interesting and less-discussed aspects of Seveneves is the ubiquitous surveillance that everyone is living under. Most charac…

I haven't heard anything since the announcement. IMDB's last update was in January. It's not just Ron Howard though--it's also a bunch of the people who worked on the Apollo 13 fil…

Less useful to most people, sure, but most people also use their desktop computers for only those same things. I make music, and for the past several years, I've been pretty much e…

The reason for the phenomenon is that some large percentage of how you hear your own voice comes from bone conduction. In addition, the higher harmonics of your voice are more dire…

If you're going to play the weighing game of pleasure versus suffering of domesticated animals, I would bet that factory farming far outweighs pets/animal helpers/more humane farms…

> no matter how effective you can implement your tax measures, at the end of the day people can move to other countries and your own country starts to suffer more than it benefits …

It's probably worth mentioning that Manna represents the dystopian path of development. The second half of the story is devoted to The Australia Project, a technologically-advanced…

> At a far more macro level, perhaps one of our biggest forms of "progress" in human history has simply been our shift away from the need to constantly spend all day, every day, hu…

If you don't think the risk is much higher for a woman to walk alone, especially at night, you are not paying attention. There are several videos of women walking alone in city str…

You might be interested in the Luna programming language/dev environment. It's designed to have a 1:1 correspondence between the visual, node-based environment and the written form…

That's a lot of accounts and a lot of passwords. You'd probably want to use a password manager. These kinds of passwords still have the advantage of being easy to hold in short-ter…

There is a Radiolab episode about this too. They talk about all of the things that we don't know about that happen between days 14 and ~30 (working from memory), and also how the p…