Viewing profile — saintgimp

The article uses the word "organic" in a highly technical manner, meaning chemical compounds that contain carbon, and of course we already know that space is filled with that sort …

Although to be fair, dust is definitely a problem if you want to see into the center of the galaxy which is why most of the observations of Sagittarius A* are done in the infrared …

It really is that empty. Science fiction movies mess up our perception, but reality is way more mind-boggling that we realize. Check this out: if you want to build a model galaxy t…

The "lump of labor fallacy" isn't really relevant here because we're not talking about work going away. We're talking about the usefulness of human labor as a means of production g…

The word "job" as used here is a technical term. It doesn't mean "anything that needs doing". It doesn't mean "anything I find enjoyable or worthwhile". It actually means "activiti…

Actually, a lot of California is going to turn into some sort of desert. There are several borderline ecosystems that used to support mature trees but once we lost them to disease …

No, he's saying that "merit" is an incredibly easily-gamed metric. We can measure results all right, and we can measure ability rather less so, but "merit" implies a casual link be…

Um - in this case we're saving the internet (well, really radio spectrum that people use to access the internet) from private corporations, not the government. A totally free marke…

Dr. Pamela Gay wrote an article about the difficult state of non-tenure jobs in research and academia: http://www.starstryder.com/2015/11/12/dreaming-of-success-in... It's the same…

As far as I know, no one (not even the investors) has claimed to have seen a working prototype deliver significant power to a cell phone.

That's the point. It's likely that at the time, she honestly didn't know the difference (or didn't understand the difference well enough to realize that it would be obvious to othe…

Seems like they need to do the hardware equivalent of a "git bisect" here. Instead of fiddling around with the current version of the device, trying to figure out if the observed e…

And I think at some point the customers are going to figure out that the startup merry-go-round is and never was intended for their benefit. Over time it's going to get harder for …

I've lived in Seattle for 20 years and the only earthquake I've ever actually felt here was the Nisqually quake in 2001. Contrast that with some parts of Japan where you feel quake…

There will be significant damage from water all around inland Puget Sound, though I agree not on the scale of the full-blown tsunami on the coast. Everything is going to shift 30 t…

Yes, this, a thousand times yes. The transparently-malicious abuse of ads on SourceForge is a tragedy and it's been that way for years and years. It is a honeypot for lazy people (…

That's a very unreasonable point of view. Sure, it's true that in the past 200 years we've had an explosion of technological progress but there's absolutely no reason to assume tha…

Relativity kind of messes with our notions of time. Any event that happens outside of our lightcone ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone ) cannot have any casual effect on us,…

I completely agree with the capitalism problem, but the most likely hands to end up holding the web of trust would be the browser makers, not the banks.

A couple of problems: The average internet user has no idea who's trustworthy and who isn't. If they have to personally grant trust in order to get at some content they're looking …

As computers/robots get better and more versatile, they inevitably "compete" for jobs and provide downward wage pressure the same as if the skilled human labor pool (but not the hu…

The problem of standardized testing has a direct analogue in software engineering that makes the situation crystal clear to any programmer - remember when our industry thought it w…

Really? You must be on a rare and exceptional org, then. I left Microsoft because the stack rank system most often worked exactly as described in the article and it was just as cor…

Have you tried it? I have. It's quite startling the first time you put a bunch of helium balloons in your car, accelerate away from a stoplight, and have them all crowd up against …