Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket
I wonder if perhaps it's a good thing that rich people can pay to use handicapped spots. We could just think of them as "priority parking", and the regular priority parking ticket costs $x while handicapped people get a coupon entitling them to free access. After all, the intention isn't to prevent healthy people using them, it's to prevent them becoming unavailable - a gaggle of handicap convention attendees would cause more trouble than an occasional CEO buying his own groceries.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Replacing Middle Management with APIs
You don't get to keep waiting for a prediction to finally come true when it doesn't come with a deadline. It already didn't happen despite all our labor saving technology so far (we don't even weave cloth by hand anymore!). Sure it might happen in another 100 years, or another 1000. But that's almost a given for most predictions.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Replacing Middle Management with APIs
They're not great on paper. They ignore some powerful personal human motivation that we know exists. Perhaps you should say "They're great for robots that can be programmed to think in whatever way is convenient for the academic imagining them".
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Third Base – Ternary Notation (2001)
I don't understand what is being optimized by minimizing the product rw. Reducing w reduces the number of digits, but how does reducing the radix r help with component count? Surely a memory cell that could store 1,000,000 different values in a base-1-million system is just one component, even if it is quite difficult to make. Are they talking about the components needed to perform calculations?
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Mkcast – GIF terminal screencasts with key presses overlaid
windows also comes with the well-hidden "Problem Steps Recorder" that takes a sequence of screen shots whenever you click something. Doesn't do the text overlay but it's already installed with Windows which makes some things easier.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Keurig 2.0 DRM Freedom Clip
Next, I hope somebody hacks the Tesla Model S low-battery-capacity model to provide full battery capacity without having to pay for it. After all Tesla is using evil DRM to force people to pay a premium to use what they already have.
Edit: I see they don't offer that option anymore. Problem solved :)
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Spoofers Keep Markets Honest
It's hard to understand why spoofing would be illegal. If it fools traders who are relying on buy orders to judge the price, then why don't those traders just accept spoofing exists and not rely so heavily on the unfilled buy orders?
If it's illegal to cancel a buy order immediately after placing it, then perhaps exchanges shouldn't provide that facility? Perhaps there's some legal reason you would immediately cancel an order, and this action somehow doesn't destabilize the market or screw over other traders?
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Thousands of early English books released online to public by Bodleian Library
"The text files were created by manually keying the full text of each work, based on millions of digital facsimile page images"
!!! This is not silicon valley. I wonder how they ensure accuracy.
Link to the books
http://ota.ox.ac.uk/tcp/
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: EFF Wins Battle Over Secret Legal Opinions on Government Spying
It's quite tractable, stop voting for the same two parties that keep causing the problems over and over again. The trouble is, most of your voting neighbors don't mind so they perpetuate the problem - there's the downside of democracy, two wolves and a sheep.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars
> Use of force against people who commit such crimes as selecting their own sexual partners, being seen in public with members of the opposite sex, texting members of the opposite sex, being homosexual, etc.
This happens but you tolerate it because it's consistent with your arbitrary local culture. Consider pedophilia (having "wrong" sexual feelings) which comes with chemical castration and an attempt to "cure" it along with imprisonment of course. You don't even have to abuse anyone to suffer some of these consequences. Sound familiar? Have you ever met any self-confessed pedophile who hadn't been arrested for a related crime? Until they're outed, they're forced to keep their feelings secret from everyone because it's a kind of western thought crime. This leads us to imagine that all pedophiles rape children. They don't any more than 60 years ago all homosexuals raped children.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars
No, the solution would be to get insurance against high insurance costs. This already happens with medical insurance. If you're already sick your insurance costs more. But if you get insurance in advance, before you know you'll be sick, it's cheaper. The same could happen with driving. Get insurance before you've driven, before you know you'll be risky.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Go Date Format
It's unfortunate that languages are so monolithic. You want to make a language that does concurrency differently and you end up having to design date format strings! Sad that we still don't have any kind of common libraries or whatever it might take to just do this a couple of times and let language designers pick and choose the preexisting components they want.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
It's not just autocracy. The US government is quite aggressive in shutting down websites that spread information it doesn't like. They also sometimes go further and arrest and imprison the operators. Examples include gambling, piracy and drug trading sites.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]
It might not be practical to send information as light. You'd need a powerful transmitter so your signal can be detected among the noise from stars. It might turn out that sending a spaceship is actually cheaper and just about as fast. The spaceship can steer itself and doesn't spread out the further it goes.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Brain Hackers Beware: Scientist Says tDCS Has No Effect
It's because most scientists and the organizations funding them are not interested in advancing our knowledge of nature so much as looking like they're advancing our knowledge of nature. If we want to be less wrong, we need more replication. Scientists don't want to do replication because it advances our knowledge of nature without looking like it is. So instead they keep trying to find fainter and more obscure effects, so faint that they exceed their own abilities to recognize statistical significance. It fools reviewers, journal editors and employers though, so they keep it up.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Ethel Lang, the last Victorian, has died
When you're making the decision yes, I agree it's risky and perhaps arrogant, but with the benefit of hindsight it's clear that it was successful in this case. Not in other cases, sure.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Ethel Lang, the last Victorian, has died
Not every case was bad. It was extremely successful in New Zealand with hardly anyone killed (relatively speaking), a peace treaty quickly signed and the quality of life brought up to modern standards, ending 1000 years of murderous tribal warfare. The natives didn't have their own country before it was colonized because they were fractured into tribes. So it was absolutely a good thing to save them from themselves.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: WebGL Path Tracing
Works great in Chrome 39. I can see the noise but it looks like part of the style and not distracting at all. I love how it creates fear! They come at you when your back is turned. Though I found you can just run backwards in a circle to consistently dodge them, at least got 88.9 seconds that way.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Undeveloped Film from a Soldier in WWII Discovered and Processed
No need to be melancholy. That glorifies killing. Do you have the same sad feelings for the Paris gunmen that were killed? There's no fundamental difference between them. Remember of course what the purpose of the allies in WWII was - "to preserve our way of life" or so we won't "all be speaking German". It's not clear that tens of millions had to be be killed for that aim - only to end up with more tens of millions killed by the communist states that became successful as a result.
Normati
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11 years ago
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on: Brokerage Hit by Swiss Shock Gets $300M from Jefferies Owner Leucadia
If they really had no great alternative, and the chain of reasoning was that clear, then traders would have anticipated it and it wouldn't have caused any major problems.
Since it was widely unexpected and people did lose piles of money, I expect there were other likely alternatives and perhaps your analysis may be suffering from a bit of post-hoc rationalization.
