Daniel_Newby

10 ms·

31.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
The lesson from the Space Shuttle is that contractors lose big time from an unflyable abortion with a low operational tempo. If Morton Thiokol had sacrificed short-term profits to rethink the boosters, they'd have sold them 10 times fa
32.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> Cops usually have a very specific set of people they are targeting ... Red cars, teenagers, people posessing this week's prohibited victimless drug, people failing to stop while under quota, skateboarders, etc.
33.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
I do not know the historical details of this Florida law, but gun control laws are generally a way to get votes from blacks who are afraid of drug gangs. (It is an exercise for the reader to figure out which demographic group bears the brun
34.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
It makes no sense in that it has no physical meaning. As you say, even without deeper meaning it is a fine tool for handling Gaussian distributions.
35.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> MAD, however is nicer for reporting data since it is more intuitive. I have a hard time fathoming how anyone could think such a thing. This is math: we should be using things because they map to reality in some way, not because they ar
36.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
Why should ISP 's be stopped from discriminating? A company that blocked Google would find its competitor's saturation bombing ads for "Google compatible" Internet service. Followed by the tort lawyers saturation bombing
37.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
The first amendment confers no rights; it restricts congress. The second amendment confers absolute rights; the restrictions on, say, youths and felons are blatantly unconstitutional.
38.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
Hint: when a thing is deflating, it costs more to buy.
39.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> From the point of view of production: deflation would get priced into the value of the currency ... The discount rate cannot be negative. That is, lenders will never pay people to borrow money from them. The natural interest rate since
40.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> Currently we exist in a "low unemployment present" ... By historical metrics, unemployment in the U.S. is over 50%.
41.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> So the buyers of the product have extra money to spend ... Until they get spooked and cut back discretionary spending just in case. So-called service economies are not stable.
42.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> ... the general consensus is that those 'B' candidates can't survive the break-neck pace of innovation ... Judging by the stream of Kindle regressions, Amazon could use a bunch of slow, reliable engineers grinding out th
43.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
You forget that each subcontractor writes the specs for its modules. So Subcontractor X specs theirs as being grossly overweight and overpower. The system integrator bitches them out but budgets for overages. After a reasonable amount of ti
44.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
I think the change was that people gradually forgot Pearl Harbor or were never educated about it in the first place. Bin Laden had many virtues as a tactician but was poor at strategy and historical perspective. Now that the lesson has been
45.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
Smaller size -> lower capacitance -> lower power consumption during state changes. But smaller size -> larger leakage current -> higher baseline power consumption. For several years we have been at the point where the curves cro
46.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
Look at it from the other side. Even with the lax security before, about 999,999,999,999 per billion people were deterred. That is a stupendously high success rate. We cannot make spacecraft with that high a quality level. > If it takes
47.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
Have you tried putting a test in your CV web page? For example, "I welcome inquiries from prospective students. I get a lot of advertising email, so include the phrase 'brown M&Ms' in the subject line so I will know you a
48.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
Telecom is not a natural monopoly. My little flyover city has three wired telcos, and who knows how many wireless ones. If San Francisco does not have hundreds of telcos, it is because somebody rigged the game. Another disproof of natural
49.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> Fact of the matter is compulsory schooling originated to instill obedience in the context of the Prussian militarist regime, later becoming adopted by industrial moguls in the USA during the late 19th century, due to the necessity of c
50.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
Chinese-patronized opium dens were banned. Tincture of laudanum (opium rum) was still available at every drug store. The history of drug prohibition is a process of cracking down on one minority group after another in order to get votes. Op
51.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
Probably mass hysteria. It seems unlikely that the captain blithley ignored basic safety measures, and the symptoms reported in the article are not typical for radiation sickness.
52.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
It was. The Reagan is nuclear-powered and is capable of carrying nuclear missiles (and quite possibly was at the time). Unless Navy planning has entirely rotted away, that ship was plastered with radiation detectors, crewed with people tr
53.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
This is not a well-funded industry with an engineering staff, it is a single lunatic. Subpoena a list of IP addresses from hosting companies, then subpoena the ISPs responsible for those addresses, then have the local police put the kibosh
54.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
It is rarely discussed, but a major factor contributing to the Airbus crash was that the software did not derive airspeed from engine parameters and use it to verify the pitot tubes. The common mode failure of the pitot tubes could have bee
55.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
But you are not competing against competitors who might steal them away for -24%. You are competing against Walmart: -75% salary, -100% fringe benefits.
56.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
Especially because the police are not professional soldiers. They might think that that APC of theirs makes them invulnerable and pull some crazy shit. Actual soldiers with one APC would live in dread of rednecks with hunting rifles.
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by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> They rely on the static scheduling ... Or run-time profiling.
58.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
The other comment is not quite right. Suppose I break your iPad without permission. This creates a debt for the cost of replacing it and the incidental losses arising from its absence. If I offer the appropriate number of dollars in repayme
59.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
ADHD is a much larger threat than all other mental illnesses combined. For every schizo with a rifle in a clock tower, there are 10,000 people with poor impulse control crashing cars. As usual, FedGov is oblivious to statistics.
60.
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
There is another source of demand: debtors can force creditors to accept currency as repayment.

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