Viewing profile — mark-t

It was on the live video feed.

I've never come across a keypad lock that would be vulnerable to this. You either have to press # at the end of the code, or the codes are significantly longer than 4 digits. Of co…

Why don't they just increase their margins on the thing that people actually want?

I use Google Gears, so I can still access all of my mail. I'm sending e-mails from a mail server on my laptop, but I could just as easily use a different e-mail service while gmail…

Nope. I'm well aware that people still study analysis. I just meant that one doesn't necessarily need to learn calculus before taking the plunge into serious mathematics. Even in a…

That post does not contain any advice. It contains facts, none of which were contradicted by your post (a typical property of facts). I never told him not to study calculus. Given …

I'm aware of their applications; by "practically", I meant "almost". There are certainly compelling uses for number theory and combinatorics (though I'm not convinced the study of …

No. Many pure math classes require no (or very little) calculus. Abstract algebra, number theory, combinatorics, and graph theory certainly fall into this category. Topology does, …

Putnam problems are not considerably harder than AIME problems, and AIME is definitely the next step from AMC12. Anybody who can solve a few AIME problems can certainly solve A1 on…

To be honest, calculus isn't that important for mathematicians, but if you want to study mathematics seriously, I'd suggest picking up a rigorous text like Rudin's or Apostol's. It…

No, x = -1/4 is correct. Perhaps you should look up the order of operations.

I'm not willing to concede his point yet, but even if he's right, this should be implemented by the browser, not the website. And if you consider taking his advice, I suggest maski…

Me too, but I use more like 20 minutes per month. (Seriously, who needs a phone? That's what the internet is for.) The great part is that I can buy $10 worth of minutes at the end …

I agree, up to perhaps a log-log scale. My grammar isn't likely to be significantly better in 30 years. However, when comparing among groups with similar English experience, gramma…

> ah right, judging someone from grammar is a very rational thing to do I think you just turned "rational" into a label. Apart from your attempt at sarcasm, this statement is proba…

Read the notes: http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html [15] By this I mean you'd have to become a professional controversialist, not that Noam Chomsky's opinions = what you can't …

Downtown San Diego is a long trip for nightlife. Most students probably won't have a car (parking is ~$600), so it'll be over an hour on the 30 each way (150 doesn't run at night).…

Full disclosure: I'm a math PhD student at UCSD. UCLA is probably better overall for math, but UCSD is better for graph theory and combinatorics in general, the most likely kind of…

It is spelled correctly. It's just not a word.

> Fourth, if web crawlers get hold of any URLs which exhibit side effects on GET, they will wreak havoc on your site. Web accelerators, too, and those will not be controlled by rob…

I showed this article to a friend of mine who did a PhD in physics at Cambridge. Here's what he had to say: The entanglement arguments against relativity are fairly silly. From tha…

Agreed. Some of Coding Horror's material is certainly worthwhile. For example, I know I found out about the HttpOnly flag in cookies from him, and I'm pretty sure I've learned of s…

Judging by the comments, I'm not missing much, but I refuse to read this until the author gets a spelling checker.

I upvote things that I think are more important for other people to read -- that is, if I think it should be displayed higher on the page. I downvote things that I don't think othe…

I did. mplayer will play them.