Viewing profile — selven

> saving under your pillow, especially if you had a non-inflating currency, isn't good for the economy. It actually is. It you earn $100, by producing $100 worth of goods for the e…

Philosophical question - why do people with disabilities have the right to higher priority than everyone else? Let's say you've calculated that there are 4000 blind people who migh…

I agree. If I got an email with "lawyer pomposity" in it, I would likely pretend I never got it and deliberately push back any accessibility plans out of spite. You don't have to s…

Isn't the fact that entropy increases over time itself just a result of a priori statistical laws and the condition of zero entropy at the Big Bang 13 billion years ago, rather tha…

The apps are all moving onto the web these days anyway - Ubuntu can run anything Chrome OS can.

"/.../Desktop/project_name" contains all the files for that project. Every project has its own directory.

Stalinism has two widely known parts to it. One part is starving millions of people. This is not happening. Another part is killing enemies of the state. This, and some other high-…

The University of Waterloo ( http://uwaterloo.ca/ ) is in Ontario, Canada.

Bias your comment ordering system in favor of new comments so that every comment gets its 5 minutes of fame before staying around with a good score or floating to the bottom with a…

For the website, I would recommend putting some of the non-content bits (links, buttons, login, etc.) on the side, not on the top. Studies have shown that reading is faster and mor…

I have written very many games using Python and Pygame. Very nice language (I like the syntax much better than the C-like languages) and tools. If you're going to do this, there is…

It may be true that it is a company's legal responsibility to serve its shareholders first, but that's not the way it should be. With this mentality, corporations will minimally fo…

And what is wrong with commoditizing the complement? Google's working hard to make operating systems free and we'll probably see Microsoft working hard to open up search engines. E…

We don't just kick them out without basic economic support. Especially for some classes of criminals, like sex offenders, we put a large sign on their back saying "I'M DANGEROUS". …

Or have non-engineering people willing to listen to their employees.

I don't mean the big missile, I mean the payload that InclinedPlane's strategy described - a missile shooting out a few thousand mininukes a short distance away. Such small payload…

You could put some water or other substance and have it swimming around the ship and when you use weapons or engines send it through them and fire it out the back of the ship. It's…

I would imagine that depends a lot on what the distance is. Release too close and you get blown up by a laser before you can release. Release too far and by the time they get there…

Don't think of changing direction, think of changing velocity. Space is a Newtonian movement system, so accelerating 20 meters per second in some direction is just as easy at 0 km/…

Anything that doesn't travel at 299792458 meters per second will not be a viable weapon in space. Two spaceships coming toward each other will be hundreds of thousands of kilometer…

The second time I went in I got to the New Scientist article as well. It's probably fixed now.

I got redirected to a site that "scanned" my C drive, found 431 viruses and trojans including some MS Word vulnerabilities and offered (once every 5 seconds or so) to download a .e…

And this is why captcha's aren't that effective. They don't slow organized malicious hackers who can simply hire a third world worker to solve them for $1/hour, make a botnet make …

Launching orion from the ground would be extremely unfeasible. The best space-colonizing strategies all involve setting up a base in Earth orbit, with some space elevators attached…

It still has many improvements over C. Compare: void func(x) { if (a == b) { do(c); do(d); } else{ do(e); } } vs: def func(x): if a == b: do(c) do(d) else: do(e)