T-hawk

67 ms·

601.
by T-hawk 14y ago
You don't have to do a latitude adjustment if you anchor your expected position of the sun to time rather than sunrise/sunset. The mean sun is always due east at 6 AM, due south at 12 noon, due west at 6 PM, due north at midnight (usually
602.
by T-hawk 14y ago
I am proud if $0.00043 of my taxpayer dollars went to this. It gave me more value than I get from the vast majority of $0.00043 increments of my taxes. ($50k/$2.9 trillion government taxation revenue * my approximate tax paid yearly = $0.0
603.
by T-hawk 14y ago
There are two very different types of cards and transactions (in the US) that both go by the name of "debit". 1. As you describe, a card branded with Visa/MC, where the transaction goes through Visa/MC processing. The money is deducted fro
604.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Only until 1940. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Su...
605.
by T-hawk 14y ago
how close you can get to edges This is an incredibly deep and fascinating topic in the context of the original Super Mario Bros. The answer to how close you can get to a wall edge is one or two pixels inside it. This is actually very
606.
by T-hawk 14y ago
The password is JUSTIN BAILEY ------ ------ . Metroid has been disassembled to prove that there's nothing special about those words in the code. The password is a coincidence, that the bit pattern happens to pass the checksum and produces
607.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Many NES games have had their password systems cracked: Mega Man 3: http://www.mmhp.net/Passwords/MM3/ Metroid: http://www.gdward.plus.com/site/flash/metroid/ Kid Icarus: http://www.geocities.ws/passgens/pages/Kid_Icarus.htm Castlevan
608.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Catch 22. The gerrymandering itself creates the predestined elections that keep the gerrymanders in power.
609.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Here's a first-order approximation. I'll assume the angle is perfect and work out the speed range. The first ball decelerated to maybe 8 m/s given its altitude at collision and some loss to air friction. If the ball is 25 cm wide, it cro
610.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Well, it's a question of total value, weighted by frequency. If the autocorrection gets ten syntactic errors fixed for every one semantic error it introduces, it's probably a net gain for the writer.
611.
by T-hawk 14y ago
The other example was in civilization they showed percentage chances of winning a battle. ... This means actually weighting the percentages differently from what the player is told This is a (persistent) myth. None of the Civilization ga
612.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Here's a fantastic detailed explanation of the geometry and what's going on with each visual element of the picture, from Slate: http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/12/20/satur...
613.
by T-hawk 14y ago
No. Juggling 3 balls but throwing them higher is still 333. It's just that the beats are slower and so each beat represents more hangtime and therefore height. Another possibility is to throw all three balls very high, so that all three a
614.
by T-hawk 14y ago
How could a Game of Life grid possibly have more state or require more storage than the ruleset for generating it! Gasp! It can't have more state. The initial conditions have just as much state as any later generation. The initial state
615.
by T-hawk 14y ago
The problem is that the model was fantastically far off from reality. (For whatever reason - incompetence, bad inputs, willful deception, religion - doesn't matter for this discussion.) I could construct a prediction that the high air temp
616.
by T-hawk 14y ago
I found Power Grid to be significantly improved by keeping a calculator on hand for all that addition. How much of my hundred can I bid on this power plant? Well I need four oil this turn at what might be seven cost each, and I want to buy
617.
by T-hawk 14y ago
The polygons overlap with transparency, so 50 polygons could in theory create up to 2^50 unique regions. Think Venn diagram with every possible combination of overlapping areas, any combination of the 50 sets of points. (This is possible
618.
by T-hawk 14y ago
* Tipping baseline is very high. Although I'm a capitalist, I consider this practice to have nothing to do with capitalism.* Tipping IS about capitalism. It provides the incentive for the server to do their job well, providing the best ser
619.
by T-hawk 14y ago
This is correct. Planetary gravitational slingshots work with respect to Sun-relative velocities. Trying to use the Sun to slingshot out of the solar system is like trying to use Earth's gravity to sling into Earth orbit. Being at the bo
620.
by T-hawk 14y ago
We've shifted to orbiters instead of one-shot flybys. Galileo at Jupiter, Cassini at Saturn, Messenger at Mercury, Juno on the way to Jupiter now. A ten year spacecraft mission can deliver a lot more science when it's orbiting a planet (o
621.
by T-hawk 14y ago
No, the NES Zapper does both. It detects light level changes frame-to-frame as you describe, but it also uses the CRT beam timing to determine _where_ on the screen a target was hit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Zapper Also, even if
622.
by T-hawk 14y ago
You could do that, but it would be a terrible idea and experience in practice. 1. Your system is unusable from anything that doesn't provide an accurate and usable caller ID number. Such as any office where outgoing calls route through a t
623.
by T-hawk 14y ago
More generally, that the chance of each dog X failing to detect each mine Y is independent. If it is independent, then you get the (1-P)^3 chance of failure, meaning 0.1% for all three failures if each dog has a 90% chance of succeeding. B
624.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Hawking's point, though, was that it only takes one renegade to start on the track of deliberate genetic improvement, then they'll outcompete and displace the unimproved humans. That may well happen, especially among countries with looser
625.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Opera had tabbed browsing way before anyone else, in 2000. And actually even before that by handling pages as MDI document windows in its early versions. I used Opera all through the long night of IE6 hegemony, although always ready to swi
626.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Water is heavy. For spaceflight, what almost always counts is the performance of something per unit of weight/mass. It's not so efficient to launch a large mass of water that contributes nothing to the mission besides boiling off on reent
627.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Well, specifically only Voyager 2 did to reach Neptune. Voyager 1 slingshot only Jupiter-to-Saturn, which is available much more often in a much larger set of planetary positions. Pioneer 11 was essentially rerouted on the fly to do that,
628.
by T-hawk 14y ago
And all this "willing to live in the right place in New Jersey" so you can have a 30 minute commute is propaganda. What it really means is, ghetto-living with an hour and a half commute No, it's really true. The right place is Jersey Cit
629.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Dust does not resolve the paradox. Dust occludes by absorbing the light, which means that the dust would eventually heat up enough to glow itself. Dust can't reduce the amount of radiation and energy in the universe, just shift it in time
630.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Greenspun's Rule basically covers that. Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. Although nowadays the art of programming is matur

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