daraul's comments

Cosine can be approximated by rotating the sine phase 90 degrees.

I can't find the article anywhere, but there was a similar idea done a while back where you would wear a 'dome' that was air-conditioned, keeping your head and shoulders cool. It worked wonderfully for keeping you feeling cool and as a result you didn't sweat.

Also as a result, you didn't notice when your body temperature was rising too high, so it did absolutely nothing to prevent heat stroke or any other forms of heat exhaustion. I'd be concerned about this wristband doing roughly the same thing.

They are almost definitely going to use some sort of streaming similar to OnLive. If OnLive can beam playable game streams across the internet and all its attendant issues, then they definitely can manage to stream it across your in-home wireless/wired network.

We're definitely American first, but we do generally have a somewhat strong sense of state identity as well.

I was disappointed this wasn't a Newsmax link.

Who reads signatures anyways?

I feel like this article is close but slightly off the mark. Just noticing from casual observation, it seems like the point can be summed up even more succinctly:

Great software engineers are (something else).

When you elect anarchists, it's hardly surprising that the government stops functioning.

I'm far from being a professional programmer, and until the last year of my life I'd never written anything work-quality. However, you've pretty much nailed it on the tools needed for a beginning programmer: They'll learn anything to do whatever it takes, if it's for a game or something else they're equally passionate about.

That's exactly how I started programming, with QBASIC gorillas, savegame hex editing, and Robot Battle AI programming. I eventually muddled my way through QuakeC, because it was for fun. It was only really at this point that I was ready for proper training materials.

The article does also point out that 'specific' games aren't apt to increase your brain function, which I took to imply that the idea that any one type of game is not the key.

In that regard, it would also be similar to the exercise comparison in that any single exercise is likely to have very limited impact, but a rounded exercise routine provides much stronger benefits.

I included the bit about the keys/ignition not because it's in an odd place, but because it's a mistake I make fairly often due to carelessness. Most people blindly reach for the ignition and that's fine; most people also don't immediately quit when they miss the hole on their first try.

The car analogy falls apart though, when you consider the complexity of the tasks that he's complaining about.

We would rightly laugh at anyone who complained that their car wouldn't 'turn on' when they jammed their key into the gap between the ignition and the steering column, or because the car was out of fuel. We'd laugh if they complained that they can't see at night because they didn't turn the lights on, and needed reminders every time they drove at night to find the light switch.

We'd laugh at someone who burned the car's engine and transmission up because they stomped on the gas pedal while the car was in park, because "when I press it the car usually goes forward but this time it didn't." Repeat, so on and so forth with every 'common' function in a car.

The problem is that people aren't learning about these basic functions that are required in day-to-day operation of a computer, like they do with a car. The wifi is a good example: Someone who owns a laptop should have a cursory familiarity with the wireless networking functionality and be able to find and connect to networks, because a laptop is made to be portable and will therefore be expected to use unfamiliar networks. Granted, the proxy settings are somewhat more forgivable as that's a non-standard setting, but it still doesn't excuse the person's total inability to find the network.

And the main point of the article stands as a rebuttal of the truism "Kids are better at computers", because they significantly aren't. They're only slightly less clueless than their parents.

They've done it in the past, to the auditing firm involved in the Enron scandal. They actually indicted and convicted them of destroying audit records according to their standard procedures prior to them being investigated by the SEC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen_LLP_v._United_S...

Yeah, I'm not making that argument at all. It's only a problem with antifreeze because it's something very harmful to consume, yet it has a somewhat attractive, food-like odor and taste.

Dangerous things to eat should taste bad to indicate you shouldn't eat them, but that's not always practical and this isn't a perfect world.

Propylene glycol is indeed a major component of antifreeze, such as what is used to de-ice airplanes. It's also a major component of automobile antifreeze.

It's also true that automotive antifreeze is generally toxic to humans and animals. It's especially concerning because the propylene glycol helps make them sweet, which makes them attractive for kids and animals to drink.

However, the toxicity of these liquids has more to do with the methanol and ethanol glycol in them than the propylene glycol. The first two are generally known to be toxic: The third is generally recognized as a safe food additive, and is indeed used as coolant/antifreeze around food processing where the potential for leaks and ingestion exist.

I just about lost my shit during a break here, when at the end of the video the AI actually ragequits during a game of Tetris.

You can, but you can also make the value calculations in your head and decide that instead of learning how to properly cultivate it, keeping bad plants out, and the time/money consumed in a quality growing op, you'd rather just throw a bit of cash at someone else and use all that time for other things.

There are only so many hours in a day, and outsourcing those hours for a little money is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how a real industry will pop up around this.

Calling Bitcoin a currency, and therefore allowing that it can be regulated, is an important factor in whether the government can care about it at all.

If they decided that it wasn't a currency and had no value, the case against the Bitcoin Savings and Trust founder would go nowhere. This decision cuts both ways. Without recognizing it as having value, there'd be no fraud to charge and if you were defrauded, no remedy available.

Augmented Reality. For a good example of current projects representing each field:

Virtual Reality - Oculus Rift

Augmented Reality - Google Glass

AR sits on top of/alongside the real world, where VR tries to replace it.

It's not just a weaker dollar causing manufacturing to return to the US, though (especially relative to China) that is definitely part of the cause.

Rising fuel costs threaten global supply chains. Especially in areas that have a less-than-cordial relationship with the US such as China, there is some uncertainty that things will stay as they are.

Another powerful trend that is reinvigorating the US manufacturing industry is the re-evaluation of the spoils of offshoring. Companies such as GE are discovering that there are many side benefits to bringing production back to the US: Shorter supply chains from manufacturing to retail, better quality from production, and greater feedback from shop floor to engineering.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-inso...

One of the biggest unaccounted costs of offshoring was the effects it had on the lifecycle of a product. That article points out how GE was able to take a $1600 water-heater from China and sell it for a profit $1300, just by manufacturing it from the US. It turns out that in off-shoring the production, they lost most of the feedback in the product's lifecycle that enabled them to refine the design far beyond what they thought was 'final'.