thewisedude's comments

I find it hard to believe that there over 125 people who read this website and who are over 90!

I think what happened here is, some guys read this and decided to be naughty and decided to pick the max age. If lets say we provided another choice saying over 150 yrs old, I am sure it would have been picked and we could have safely ignored the whole set data points without affecting our interpretation of the different ages of people.

I think I can come up with a simpler explanation of one way function to start with. Lets say the word I want to apply one way function is 'america'. Lets say I assign a number to each character in the password and the number that I assign is equal to the position of that character in English alphabet. For eg: 'a' would get the value 1, 'b' would get 2, 'c' would get '3' and so on.

My one way function adds the values of each character, in case I apply it to 'america', it would be 1+13+5+18+9+3+1 => 50.

So, if somebody had to find the word from only from resultant sum or value, it would take time to come up with all the possible words.

Some of the possible candidates also include aameric, cmeriaa etc. Clearly in this case there are many possible words that map to a particular value or sum, in the good one way function there are not going to be as many words that map to one value, also a good one way function is more complicated(for a computer too or computer takes non polynomial time) than the one I chose!

Another way to think about this is- Who is the real you? Because you are changing! When you are 21 years old, you might be one person, when you are 30 years old you might have evolved for better or for worse!

Is the real you when you are 1 year old, or 1 day old?

If somebody were to love you for exactly who you were say when you were 10 years old, the moment you change, you become unlovable is it?

I think this quote shouldn't be a guiding principle or be given as much importance!

I concur, what is done is a step in the right direction. Once its digitized even scanned copies can be transcribed via some technology(may be OCR?) in the future if not now.

Yes. If they do, what might happen is you might choose a different ISP. Its simply not in their business interest to censor content, hence they dont!

Typically, if they have to censor, it would have to be based on an agreement with the customer before hand, else it would be a violation of consumer rights!

Just to be clear- The university that you study has the right to censor certain websites because they are providing you internet and hence they can stipulate the rules(for the service they are providing). However, the argument here is that the government should not block URLs because they are not providing the service and they are just regulators of this service. The argument here is that as regulators, they are going out of their purview by curbing on freedom of expression (guaranteed by the constitution).

Fantastic! I learnt something new today. I did not know that the world was projected using Mercator projection and the how that played a role in distortion of the land size.

I dont want to discredit the whole article based on a few things. There were some things that he says either didn't impress me or seemed inaccurate <Quote>These are huge obstacles, and is probably why there hasn’t been a new major auto maker in the United States for 90 years </Quote>

Kia - Founded in 1940s.

Also its not clear why US is the only country that is being considered?

<Quote> Tesla’s strategy for overcoming these obstacles is ingenious; Start at the top and work our way down. </Quote>

Thats how its been for many businesses. Cars in general had a similar history. It was only available for rich people initially!

<Quote> If I was General Motors I would be afraid. Very afraid. </Quote>

Statements like this are too generic. What time frame? No quantification? General Motors was about to be bankrupt a few years back. Their business is already being threatened by many things, I dont know if Telsa is their biggest concern!

I see this as exploitation or price fixing in some way! Let me elaborate. Lets say Steve Jobs was paying an Engineer $100K at Apple. That skill set might have been worth atleast $120K to Palm. So Palm decides to hire him giving him a decent raise to join ( a good incentive to join). Lets say Palm gives him $120K. Now Apple which secretly knows that the engineer is worth a lot more to Apple will have to throw in more than Palm, say they will have to offer 150K$ to draw him back. Palm might again counter offer and this kind of bidding might go on until the Engineer get his true value(In a way market is deciding the engineer's worth) - But what is happening here is that Steve Jobs is kind of colluding with Palm to "fix the price" of the Engineer without market deciding so! There by saving/making a boatload of cash (money saved is money earned)! Sure, what I am saying is probably not the book definition of price fixing, but I would think that the motive/sentiment is very similar!

I usually dont like to talk in sound bites. But I can't help but say this famous quote from Gandhi.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

This article has a very judging tone. People are doing whatever they think matters for whatever reason - Its their choice. If you think Physics/Chem/Bio research is more important than dating, please be the guest of the world.... learn it and do it!

If you improve dating (to sufficient levels) and people are having better marriages and in turn healthy family structure that could possibly be more effective(in some measureable way) than say finding cure for some disease. So I dont buy that doing a dating service is worser!

Many countries and even developed countries take aid. Sure if India accepts even 2 cents as aid from some other country, it is technically getting foreign aid. But I guess the important question is, how much percent of the government expense is in part due to aid from other countries and as far as I understand its not much these days. I think that is the point the other OP was also trying to make.

Information is Power==Money!

One thing I always believe helps is having information about the thing that you want to buy. For eg:- If you know that the car that they are trying to sell has been sitting in the lot for more than 2 months, then you know they are desperate to get rid of it, so you can come up an appropriate(much lower) ask price!

In all fairness, adding in the nibbles may annoy or piss of the person you are dealing with(in some cases). In a way, you are sort of pushing them into a corner.

However, expanding the pie and looking out of your tunnel vision is a useful hint!

Also, in the case of FBI negotiator, not everybody will let you sleep over their offer when they have matched your ask price without you giving them any wiggle-room.

There are multiple levels in which I agree with the above sentiment. Some of my teachers had these quotations to encourage questions!

1) If you say you dont understand, you may appear to be a fool for a few minutes, if you pretend to understand (while you dont)... you are a fool for life.

2) To learn something knew, you have to set your ego(pretending to know lest you appear ignorant) aside and start humbly with basics.

I concur with most of your arguments, I do concur with you that there seems to be over importance given to Job's personal-life than it should. But, your last paragraph about Job's life seems to be out of line with your philosophy. You are claiming that Job's death was unnecessary. Unnecessary in whose terms? Is the purpose of life living the longest possible life? Here, by saying that his death was unnecessary or untimely, you are implying there is a time for a person of his stature to die. Now, its no more about making decisions that make you happy or not worrying about the shortness of life, or the lack of meaningfulness of life, but rather you are now preaching how somebody should live their life(or make certain decisions) just like the author or the article is trying to do.

P.S- I do think Steve Jobs contributed greatly to his field and I admire him & his products. The arguments made above are purely for discourse

I for one think that if the law was drafted "properly", there is very little police can do about it even if the ministers (who supposedly use them) are pissed off and want the police to do something about it.

Such cases happen even in USA, where certain people are charged for misdemeanor's which are not uniformly enforced across the population. An example I can think of is the Eliot Spitzer-Call Girl in DC scandal.

The thing is, I would say the cost of production of Coke is less in India too. In other words, even though I believe price arbitrage happens, I dont think that would be the main culprit.

I would say the lower standard of living in a particular country puts the country in a good vantage position to export more goods (or services). For eg:- A person from a developing world might be in a good position(financially) when he decides to return to his home country for good, even if he has saved what an American would call "not much".

Now, I think true globalization which means (tariff free import and export of all goods including groceries) might eventually solve this problem. But before that happens- that might eventually mean a hard life for people currently living in the developed world.

The author suggests to not get caught up on a programming language and use that as just a tool. I think I agree. I also want to add that people get caught up on using some other tools like vi or emacs or things like that. I think they should not be taken too seriously either. Creativity and building a useful product are the most important things of all.

I am told that a similar argument can be made between TV's that display at 120 Hz as opposed to 240 Hz. i.e there is no discernible difference!

My guess is in the future...you will have to walk through both metal detectors and body scanners! I am not sure, if they will dump the body scanners based on this video!

For the sake of honest debate... how do you know what exactly it is Osama wanted? Maybe all he wanted was to kill people and didn't care about liberty because he does not know what it is! or he wanted to send some kind of a message to westerners or something else... we will not know. Sure, liberty seems to be lesser in airports...but connecting that to what Osama wanted is a big stretch!