harshpotatoes's comments

Of course, assuming they allow supersonic flights over the continental united states. I imagine it would probably be severely restricted due to the noise concerns from the sonic boom.

My understanding is that when using the xor cipher, even if the key is truely random, the file could still be trivially completely decrypted for a repeating key. It seems like a rather unwieldy cipher if you need to download a key which is nearly the same size as the video file.

It's interesting to me that Kerr cells were invented so early. I wonder what they were first used for? I know in the '60's and later they were used in lasers for Q-switching, but I'm trying to think what else they would have been used for in the 1940's...

Also, I wonder if it is more difficult to create a nanosecond pulse using only vacuum tubes...

Mostly I watch TV at night, after 7pm or so. So I suppose it's possible that the local ads are played during an earlier block like the local news.

I have a feeling though, that the presidential campaigns are buying a significant portion of the available air time.

Living in an "important swing state" at the moment, the last thing I need is more factoids about the presidential race. Every form of media is completely saturated with the same talking points, and it is quite exhausting. It would be nice to hear more about the senate, house and state elections. I don't think I've seen any media coverage/ads for any election besides the presidential race.

It's interesting that camera quality is so important for people, yet I find it difficult to find information on image quality beyond how many megapixels the sesnor has. The least they could do is tell me the sensor size/aperture size too.

You really have to search the specialized review sites to find good comparisons on image quality.

It's interesting that Apple's competitors prioritize adding more features to their phones while Apple is apparently prioritizing compactness and minimizing weight.

A few years ago it would have been obvious to me that a compact, light weight smartphone with a very fast processor would be highly desirable. But, every day I see people walking around with tablets in their arms, using them as cameras or extensions to their smartphones. So, I guess that shows how little I know about people.

It'll be interesting to see which direction the market prefers in the long run.

My understanding of bitcoins is that there is some maximum limit of 21million and that there are currently 9.7million mined. So there are a little less than half of the bitcoins mined.

http://blockexplorer.com/q/totalbc

It's unclear to me how this was calculated. But the Obama campaign estimates were based on some assumptions: 1) That Romney's ultimate budget would not increase the deficit 2) That the base tax rate would not be raised under Romney 3) Finding the necessary cuts to tax deductions* to satisfy the previous two conditions. (basically, estimating the tax changes necessary to satisfy all campaign promises made by Romney).

So it's unclear to me if the data being presented on this website is only comparing how the base rate would change without considering how the overall rate would change when including the various deductions.

Secondly, another reason for this difference, is that the Obama campaign usually talks about the middle class (married family with income ~$50,000) while the default settings for this website are for a single person making $100,000 (i.e. typical young professional in computer science).

*I don't know if this is the right word, but if you are married with children, or bought a home within a certain time frame you would normally get a small refund or deduction to your tax rate for having met these criteria. So cuts would be made to the various refunds/deductions, ultimately increasing your overall rate.

Well, it appears that episodes are no longer visible through thedailyshow website. But... http://www.hulu.com/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart Seems to work fine.

On the other end of the spectrum, I work with lab equipment that are more than 15 years old but still work great. The software which interfaces with it is old, but still works with Windows. Would such a thing be possible with Apple, or would Apple's insistence on upgrading every few years force the lab equipment to be replaced at significantly greater cost?

All images have some amount of random noise in them due to the thermal fluctuations of the sensor. With some clever techniques, I wonder if it could be possible to hide the pseudorandom encrypted message in the image to make it appear slightly noisier? Or maybe hide the message in images with already low SNR?

Not true. While some of the radio spectrum has been reserved specifically because of the lack of absorption in the atmosphere, the 1420MHz line is the famous 21cm line frequenctly measured by cosmologists to look at the epoch of reionization. It is due to the hyperfine structure of hydrogen, and would not be of unique importance to our civilization.

However, we don't broadcast anything. Any broadcasts from earth would hugely overshadow any small signal we're trying to read.

There are some disturbing thoughts that arise from this. For example, what if in a thousand years from now, all information about this century is forgotten, because it was written in a digital format which can no longer be read. Or some sort of technological apocalypse occurs, and there are no non-digital sources to be read.

I don't think it is appropriate to have the smartphones and tablets as a %market share competing against desktop platforms such as mac/pc. For one, while in general people either own a mac xor a pc, people in general don't own a smartphone xor a desktop (I assume).

The graphs at the beginning showing sales seem to be the least misleading in this case, and don't show the sudden drop in sales which existed for other older systems such as Amiga, atari, etc. In this sense it seems pcs are still going steady with a nearly saturated market, and people are now adopting both a smartphone and a desktop.

At least, that is my interpretation from a single graph, presumably other opinions exist.

I don't see how this and Kepler's laws fit together. The moon's mass is significantly different from the earth. How could the moon have the same orbit as the earth if the earth wasn't there?

I can't speak for the ugliness, but as for the slow to react...

I think the reason it feels sluggish are two reasons: The screen technology has a slow response time. This is alittle difficult to fix, due to the nature of the technology: an electic field turns on or off causing tiny balls to be pulled to the top or bottom of the screen causing light to be reflected/absorbed. Due to the size of these balls (microns), it can take much longer to reorient these balls then the molecules in liquid crystal (nanometers).

The other reason it probably feels sluggish is that the processor is a little slow. Fortunately, amazon has been able to work around this a bit by caching the next few pages. (But if you go backwards it can sometimes take a bit longer to load).

I assumed he was referring to the large recession in the early 80's. Which would be about 20 years after the 60's.

In his section talking about the brute force method of solving the puzzle, he seriously overestimates the number of possibilities for the whole puzzle.

Example: For grid2, he lists square A2 as having 4 possibilities (1679) and A3 as having 5 possibilities (12679). Which is true, if you ignore the rules of sudoku. Specifically, not all of those combinations are worth trying. If you choose a 1 for square A2, you would not choose a 1 for square A3.

Wikipedia lists there as being 10^21 unique sudoku puzzles, which is many orders of magnitude smaller than his listed 10^38 different combinations for grid2.

In short, I think a proper brute force method would be significantly faster than what he initially thought it would be.

Basically, there are some knowns: The universe expands according to the fried,am equation. Different percentages of matter, energy give rise to different expansion rates. Expansion history of the universe is known via looking at supernova (which are equally bright at the source). Knowing matter is mostly hydrogen/helium and energ is mostly photons allows us to calculate the density of matter/energy in the universe. These don't match the terms found from measuring supernova leading the differences to be called dark matter/dark energy. Additionally, gravitational lensing is seen by objects which can't be seen. Meaning, they have mass, but don't appear to absorb/reflect light. Additional additionlly, similar effects are seen affecting the formation of galaxies: extra matter is needed to give the structure we see, but we apparently can't see that matter. So it was originally dark because we knew nothing about it, but the name stuck once it appeared we could not see it. It is definitely matter.