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hadronzoo | 12 years ago | on: Meet the Private Companies Helping Cops Spy on Protesters

Except that the government has a monopoly on force. If a private company harms you, there are often civil and potentially criminal concequences. If the government uses your private data against you and violates your rights, who do you turn to?

hadronzoo | 13 years ago | on: Building a Better Bitcoin

Just to clarify, Austrians define monetary deflation as a contraction in the total supply of a given money. In this case, it would mean a decrease in the total number of Bitcoins.

hadronzoo | 13 years ago | on: Texas Declares War on Drones

> Law enforcement officers could only use drones while executing a search warrant or if they had probable cause to believe someone is committing a felony, and firefighters can only use drones for fighting fire or to rescue a person whose life is “in imminent danger.” Texas’ border-patrolling Predator drones are exempt within 25 miles of the Mexican border. There are additional penalties for possession, display or distribution of data captured by an illegally flown drone. Gooden said the goal is to protect Texans’ privacy.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-02/privacy-and...

hadronzoo | 13 years ago | on: I Google everything

“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” —Plato, Phaedrus

hadronzoo | 13 years ago | on: Sanskrit As A Language Of Science

From my father (who can read/write Sanskrit):

I'll add that at the University of Chicago, someone noted that modern linguistics really had its launch when German philologists in the 19th century encountered Sanskrit and the Sanskrit grammarians. Not just in grammar itself, but in phonemics as well.

Wikipedia appears to verify in part:

"This body of work became known in 19th century Europe, where it influenced modern linguistics initially through Franz Bopp, who mainly looked at Pāṇini [most famous Sanskrit grammarian]. Subsequently, a wider body of work influenced Sanskrit scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson. Frits Staal discussed the possible European impact of Indian ideas on language. After outlining the various aspects of the contact, Staal posits the theory that the idea of formal rules in language, first proposed by de Saussure in 1894, and finally developed by Chomsky in 1957, based on which formal rules were also introduced in computational languages, may indeed lie in the European exposure to the formal rules of Paninian grammar. In particular, de Saussure, who lectured on Sanskrit for three decades, may have been influenced by Pāṇini and Bhartrihari; his idea of the unity of signifier-signified in the sign is somewhat similar to the notion of Sphoṭa. More importantly, the very idea that formal rules can be applied to areas outside of logic or mathematics, may itself have been catalyzed by Europe's contact with the work of Sanskrit grammarians." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistics#India

hadronzoo | 14 years ago | on: Damn Cool Algorithms: Fountain Codes

With large enough blocks and efficient coding, the noisy-channel coding theorem guarantees nearly error-free transmission rates up to the maximum possible channel capacity. Modern LDPC, Raptor, and Turbo codes can get very close (to within 0.0045dB) of this Shannon limit, meaning that far from being less efficient, FEC allows for maximal bandwidth efficiency.
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