Steuard

66 ms·

601.
by Steuard 13y ago
(If you were just aiming for humor here, my apologies for missing the point. I blame the usual issues of unemotional text.) Whether or not any given woman is fond of looking at pictures of naked women isn't the point. The issue is that
602.
by Steuard 13y ago
Your comment is hard for me to interpret. I would normally take it as a given that the culture and male/female dynamic in computer science research is (or at least ought to be) different than the culture in the modelling industry (and
603.
by Steuard 13y ago
Free with data contract, mind you. That's a big price bump, and it's ongoing.
604.
by Steuard 13y ago
Not at all a safe assumption. Most importantly, it's not that uncommon for even less experienced Mac users to copy and paste Terminal commands to solve one problem or another. A lot of those "Just type this!" solutions I&#x27
605.
by Steuard 13y ago
The explicit example in the article was "Creating formulas in a spreadsheet" (paraphrasing a bit). Is that really a task that will never be required of non-supervisory workers? I'm really not sure where you're going with
606.
by Steuard 13y ago
The sentence you're objecting to isn't claiming that US healthcare is a completely free market (which, as you note, would be an unbelievably ignorant view to hold... literally unbelievably). It's claiming that certain fai
607.
by Steuard 13y ago
One reference is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_condition These conditions are widely believed to apply to all realistic matter configurations (to the extent that the less-restrictive ones get used as postul
608.
by Steuard 13y ago
I haven't studied this in detail, but my understanding is that dark energy (whether from a cosmological constant or other sources) does not violate the "null energy condition" (roughly speaking, the condition that a light ray
609.
by Steuard 13y ago
Large theoretical difficulties, too! To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever been able to write down a complete mathematical description where an Alcubierre bubble "turns on" or "turns off": instead, the math always
610.
by Steuard 13y ago
White claims to have calculated a way to substantially reduce the energy requirements to form a warp bubble, and without reading his papers I suppose I should provisionally believe him. But the required energy has to be negative (as he co
611.
by Steuard 13y ago
One per hour (or per half-hour, at first), not one per day. But yeah.
612.
by Steuard 13y ago
1. This is neat information: it's worth sharing. (I'm glad I ran into a discussion of it not long ago, because it helped me understand the sort of thing in this comic. Come to think of it... was it mentioned in a what-if?) 2. This
613.
by Steuard 13y ago
I had stopped in to catch up on Time occasionally, and it always seemed neat but pretty low-key. But wow, near the end it got progressively more interesting and fast-paced, and I was really caught up in the finale. Well done and my thanks
614.
by Steuard 13y ago
Observations after installing on 10.6.8: * GPG2 seems to be up and running very nicely, and it was an easy switch to get Enigmail set up to recognize it. (My previous MacGPG installation evidently installed GPG1. That seems to be orphaned n
615.
by Steuard 13y ago
There is a "Customize" option in the installer that seems to provide an option to not install MacGPG, but I haven't tried that to make sure.
616.
by Steuard 13y ago
It's a typical crypto add-on for a mail client, yes: you can only exchange encrypted mail with other folks who can use PGP. That's pretty much how crypto works. But to be clear, this is just an interface to the MacGPG backend, so
617.
by Steuard 13y ago
> I did some research for NASA looking into such "negative mass solutions" in M-Theory that arise as a result of hep-th/9507022. Cool! The most informative thing about that to me is simply the knowledge that NASA has a his
618.
by Steuard 13y ago
Skepticism in science is the right approach. Not blind, dogmatic skepticism of any idea that disagrees with orthodoxy, but informed skepticism that demands compelling evidence for surprising claims. Maybe a computer analogy would be usefu
619.
by Steuard 13y ago
Oh, I certainly won't argue that such progress must be absolutely impossible! The fact that Alcubierre's solution exists at all illustrates how unwise that would be. (I've also heard someone suggest that you might be able to
620.
by Steuard 13y ago
Here's a nice blog post by a scientist giving a bit more quantitative discussion of why this proposal doesn't seem plausible: http://excursionset.com/blog/2013/7/23/dump-the-warp-core
621.
by Steuard 13y ago
I hate to put a damper on the enthusiasm about this awesome topic, but this article doesn't even contain a hint of any reason to believe that the NASA scientist in question is making progress on any sort of FTL technology. Alcubierre&#
622.
by Steuard 13y ago
The research here is based on the interesting premise that "the masses of electrons and protons were smaller" in the early universe, leading to different emission spectra that we have thus far interpreted as an expanding universe.
623.
by Steuard 13y ago
This is a bit off topic for this thread but given that you brought it up: It is hard for me to look at, say, Steubenville[1] (to take just the most publicized of several examples that I've seen in the news lately) and understand how a
624.
by Steuard 13y ago
I agree: that jumped out at me enough that I came here to make the same comment. I can hardly think of a case where I'd want to use a 98 quality setting on a JPEG. Maybe it would be a good choice if I wanted to preserve an almost-prist
625.
by Steuard 13y ago
As long as you're here, any comment on the (current) top-rated comment by lukejduncan? How can we trust that our private information today won't be similarly exposed by a settings change tomorrow? (I hope that nothing I've
626.
by Steuard 13y ago
> This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens' right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that protect their
627.
by Steuard 13y ago
How? Hotlinking of images on someone else's site has been viewed as inappropriate as long as I can remember (was it okay before 1995?). It's not wise design in any case: what if they remove it or reorganize their site? (Hyperlinks to other
628.
by Steuard 13y ago
You can't directly compare numerical values of "idea" to "idea * execution": the two are conceptually different things. To abuse physics terminology, the units are different. In physics, a mass of "12 kg" is not in some sense greater than a
629.
by Steuard 13y ago
I felt a bit bad about that: I didn't want to "take sides" in the negotiation, since I think either side getting all that it wanted would be bad for the consumer. But we were upset about the lack of warning, and upset that the two sides h
630.
by Steuard 13y ago
"Don't, don't, don't bite your friends!" Yeah, Yo Gabba Gabba and Backyardigans were two of our "backup" shows for times when our daughter wanted something other than Dora. We were really scrambling once we realized they were all gone ove

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