blahblahblah

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31.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
No. I'm saying that you put a hefty tax on the drug so that when the crackhead buys it most of the money paid for the drug goes toward: 1) Funding programs to educate people with factual information about the dangers of substance abuse to
32.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
"There is no reason legal cocaine would cost more than say, coffee. Now, what would cocaine at that price level do to a population, families and to society?" It seems to me the most reasonable approach to legalization is to deliberately set
33.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
I'd bet that if you were to ask a group of the scientists who are currently working on fusion technology what activity consumes most of their time and effort, the #1 answer would be "pursuing grant money". Ask an academic in any field that
34.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
The Manhattan Project started as something purely theoretical and produced a working, practical technology in less than a decade. Apollo 11 put men on the moon 8 years after JFK committed the country to that goal. Both projects succeeded b
35.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
"Saying you're fat because you eat too much is like saying you're an alcoholic because you drink too much. It's true but it doesn't say anything about how to solve the problem and it mixes up cause and effect" I think you're really close t
36.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
Forget thorium. Work on getting hydrogen fusion technology far enough past the break-even point to be practical and profitable instead.
37.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
"Of course, in other areas such as law and medicine, there is probably no hope. Things will remain the way they are." Perhaps in law that will remain the case, but medicine is already ahead of other fields in the area of open access because
38.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
Apparently, this guy skipped "Intro to the Theory of Computation" class on the day they covered the concept of Turing completeness. The notion that there is any program that can be written in any other Turing complete language that cannot
39.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
And, in the 1970s & 80s, if you were together in a room with your 10 real friends, odds are that at least 9 of them were actively engaged in some form of meaningful social interaction. In 2011, 4 of them would be checking email, textin
40.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
The statement that "the risk of recriticality is not zero" in the fuel pond of reactor 4 means that a Chernobyl-like event is still on the table with very small but nonzero probability.
41.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
You don't have to wait for a 9.5 earthquake to come along to test a design. That's what computer models are for. How do you think they came up with the estimate of what magnitude of a quake the existing design could withstand (assuming th
42.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
The point is that the consequences of a disaster like Chernobyl are so nasty and so long-lived that, if we are to continue building and operating nuclear power plants, we have a responsibility to ensure that such "outliers" never happen u
43.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
You can't accurately assess the total impact of the Chernobyl accident yet because the damage is still on-going and the exclusion zone will still be hazardous to human health long after you and I are in our graves. The presumption that kno
44.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
To those who insist that the Chernobyl accident was not a big deal, please feel free to go build a home in Pripyat, live there for a few years, and let us know how that works out for you.
45.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
To generate a list of tone frequencies, start with A=440Hz and multiply by 2^(1/12) to get the frequency of the next higher tone or divide by 2^(1/12) to go down to the next lower tone in the chromatic scale. Notice that the octave is 12 o
46.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
I'd suspect that TeX is mostly used in academic departments where UNIX has been the de facto operating environment for a long time (e.g. engineering, computer science, mathematics, physics) and there is a well-established "command line" cul
47.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
They might not care all that much about the "arable" part, but I don't think the "permanently uninhabitable" part is too intellectual for the average person to grok.
48.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
Chicken mcnuggets, tobacco smoke, and sedentery lifestyles are not members of the set of "things that can cause arable land to become permanently uninhabitable". Nuclear accidents are in that set and that is why the public is (rightly) con
49.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
So, basically, MSNBC did a crappy job of writing their article -- it should have explicitly stated that a shutdown happened...
50.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
It sounds like the strict building codes served them well for residential housing and commercial spaces. However, it looks like the engineering standards for their nuclear reactors could stand to be a little more strict ( http://www.msnbc.
51.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
It seems to me that Angry Birds is essentially a modernized re-imagining of the classic DOS game, Scorched Earth. Perhaps that's what you're remembering? I don't recall if there was a Mac release of Scorched Earth though.
52.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
Actually, piracy is theft. Specifically, it's a form of robbery that takes place at sea. The attempt to equate the crime of copyright infringement with piracy is a gross misuse of the English language. When a ship of Somali bandits with
53.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
What NIH did for biomedical research is the solution that needs to implemented elsewhere. The funding agencies have all the power that is needed to change the behavior of the journals and professional societies. Virtually everyone involve
54.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
The one that requires high-level cognitive functions. Any idiot with a prescription for Viagra or Cialis can do the other one.
55.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
This metaphor needs to die, stat (and hopefully take the ninja and rock star metaphors with it into the dustbin of history). It adds nothing useful to the discourse about programming and, worse, is demeaning to the profession.
56.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
Is there any programmer on the planet who has trouble justifying the ROI of a $35 expenditure for a useful tool? This is a total non-issue.
57.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
So there’s no such thing as "red with a little green" -- there’s just a less intense red. The brain physically cannot see "greenish-red" because the filter removes that information. Under ordinary circumstances this is true. However, it
58.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
It's not just the publishing process that's broken. The funding process is problematic as well. Among the competitors for grant money, it is the investigators that promise to do a lot with the minimal amount of funding that can reasonably
59.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
Very good point. This article fits quite well in the category of "nostalgia for a simpler age that never really existed."
60.
by blahblahblah 16y ago
Engineering school makes even the most dedicated student wonder why they're even bothering at times. And now you'll take away commiserating with your friends about how none of you are getting laid because of the school's abysmal male-to-

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