Viewing profile — shader

Thou/thee/thy/thine are singular forms, whereas you/ye/your are plural. Just as we and our became royal pronouns, where a monarch would emphasize that they spoke for a whole countr…

They would still probably be trapped under parts of the plane, and if it's floatable, it can be punctured/crushed.

I'm guessing that as many people as are probably trying to log into his account, he probably doesn't answer his phone any more, or even use that email account. How would he know if…

Sell it to as many customers as you can find first, and then go to them for the extra $10,000. You get more money than you would have otherwise, and you also save innocent people f…

And there is the essence of the need for captchas ;) You need to scale, so you employ computers instead of people. Now you have to have computers run a reverse turing test. Otherwi…

Generally it's "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

I think this is one of the major reasons that Americans have so many divorces. They marry for the "feelings", and as soon as those change they want out. The Indians marry for more …

This works really well. For some cool examples, check out http://tineye.com/cool_searches Also, I recommend that you click the "compare images link" under each result image after y…

You're right, I forgot about the radiosity - but couldn't that still be split up to multiple cores per frame? i.e. simulate one "bundle" of photons per core, and then presuming tha…

Why stop at one frame per core? Once you have easily scalable renderfarms, you could switch the the somewhat slower (though currently less heavily optimized) raytracing approach, a…

I should also have stated that in the reverse: What if he had patented the thing, when I have also independently created the idea? Looking over his curriculum vitae, it looks like …

Most game replay systems work this way - they store the chain of user inputs, and then just resimulate it in order, with the same random seed. Thats the main reason they don't give…

WOW. Just WOW. I have always believed that you can't have a good idea without someone else having it at about the same time, but this is the most uncanny experience I have had yet.…

Not always. My uncle's real estate page for Wake County in North Carolina shows similar figures: http://kengramley.com/city.php That's calculated directly from the county's tax dat…

I think this article explains the idea much better: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/35391/title/Do_su...

Also, even court enforcement of contracts has its limits - you just go outside the borders of a country, and they can't (easily) make you fulfill your contract. That said, I am all…

I don't think that the project can be 'subverted' from bringing freedom to users. A fork of it might be made "un-free", as in your Microsoft example. But Microsoft did a lot of the…

I like freedom. Freedom is good. The only question in this instance is - freedom for whom? Freedom for the developer to write code without comments, so that you can't hack it? Or f…

Certainly excessive usury is wrong, but being able to walk away from debts causes it's own problems. Because of the ability for people to just walk away from debt, they acquire mor…

Why - are you writing an essay on the topic? ;)

Certainly. The two things are rather related: if you remove the appearance of danger, people will get themselves into more tight spots. It's amazing how many more people with four …

Indeed. I didn't say that risk was bad, necessarily. Rather, encouraging risk to avoid a non-existent paradox of thrift is a dangerous thing. Personally, I think that the news abou…

Unfortunately, I don't think that stimulating production or innovation is a good idea either. When you just stimulate production, it is true that production will increase but not i…

Certainly. But by saving you allow someone else to consume what you have produced, and you refrain from consuming things yourself. This permits businesses to invest in future produ…

Unfortunately, the reason that we are in this recession is that people took too much risk. We have been living with a net negative national savings rate for a while now. That consu…