cmsmith

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241.
by cmsmith 13y ago
Casino chips are not a 'real' currency either, but pieces of plastic which can be bought and sold for money.
242.
by cmsmith 13y ago
This is an excellent point that people miss when talking about the 'sharing economy' The difference in price between equivalent quality airBnBs and traditional hotels can be attributed to a few things: 1) Difference in demand due
243.
by cmsmith 13y ago
Possible reasons for this move: 1) People only care about election handicapping every 4 (or 2) years in the US. 2) Nate Silver especially made political predictions look really easy (in comparison to the partisan clowns who populate cable n
244.
by cmsmith 13y ago
I think it's important to note that they sided with him while he was saying what they wanted to hear. Reddit/MSNBC had it easy this past election, because they could say what they could be optimistic and listen to the experts at t
245.
by cmsmith 13y ago
In US style dates, 2/6/11 (February 6th, when Skype appears on Prism slide) comes before May 10th (when Skype was purchased by MSFT). If that isn't the source of confusion, I don't understand your point.
246.
by cmsmith 13y ago
The mass of the material with air in the pores is 1.2 times the mass of the equivalent volume of air. Due to buoyancy, if you were to weigh the material in a sea-level atmosphere, you would find that its weight was 0.2 times the mass of an
247.
by cmsmith 13y ago
This seems somewhat hard to believe. If you were actually pumping that much energy into the chip, wouldn't you end up boiling the water anyways?
248.
by cmsmith 13y ago
This is a great question. Distillation has the side effect of removing all of the microbes from water and sanitizing the output, but if this method only removes the salt will the output water be clean enough to drink?
249.
by cmsmith 13y ago
Disappointing, but not unexpected, because I was the only person I knew using latitude. My wife and I used it to know when each other were coming home from work, so we weren't providing much value to google.
250.
by cmsmith 13y ago
Note that this is the same justification the authorities use for actions like warrantless GPS tracking of cars or recording of phone call meta-data. That you have no expectation of privacy about where your car moves because someone could ju
251.
by cmsmith 13y ago
The marginal value of money decreases as income goes up. So a crime that has an expected positive return when you have no money becomes less and less worth it as you become richer.
252.
by cmsmith 13y ago
Except that collective bargaining distorts our perception of their value by allowing them to hold the entire system hostage. If my job was to press a button once a day that kept the electricity on in San Francisco, I could go on strike and
253.
by cmsmith 13y ago
An average radio audience of 1800 is not as low as you think. 1 M people within range of the average radio station / 10 radio stations per market * 5% of the time the average person spends listening to music radio = 5000 I am not any s
254.
by cmsmith 13y ago
I'm not sure that we want to short-circuit competition in the industry with one of the highest rates of innovation over the past 20 years. If we had followed this strategy, we'd all still be using Windows 3.1.
255.
by cmsmith 13y ago
Poor. [1, 2] Pretty much everything bad that the US does, these countries do worse by an order of magnitude. We use hyperbole to compare Snowden to political prisoners in these countries, but I imagine that idea would seem pretty ridiculou
256.
by cmsmith 13y ago
Obama 'started' supporting gay marriage in 2011. Given the current trajectory of public opinion, I would be surprised if the GOP candidate for president in 2020 or 2024 doesn't support gay marriage. I have a difficult time ge
257.
by cmsmith 13y ago
That is the exact idea behind this [1]. [1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
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by cmsmith 13y ago
Tangentially: Why do merchants really need to store CC numbers? From the consumers' standpoint, there would be no difference if, during the first transaction, the merchant is issued some alterate key with which to charge the account. Each m
259.
by cmsmith 13y ago
It seems unlikely that they would be peering in a way we would expect, considering that out of the billion-year history of life on a given planet, 100 years ago we weren't looking at all and 100 years from now we may be looking in entirely
260.
by cmsmith 13y ago
This is excellent, as I would love to have a shared login provider whose business model does not revolve around sharing my information (e.g. twitter, facebook, google). I really don't want everyone on my [friends list equivalent] to know ev
261.
by cmsmith 13y ago
There are regulatory mechanisms to make hotels and B+Bs pay their share of externalities. These are things like property tax, room tax, and insurance. Suppliers of airbnb units avoid a lot of these payments because they're paying taxes at n
262.
by cmsmith 13y ago
I would imagine that increasing the spacing between the cells actually fixed the problem, while the case and vent are just limiting the PR and financial liability.
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by cmsmith 13y ago
You're assuming that streaming video can provide data at the same rate as speedtest. In reality those numbers are nowhere close, and don't reflect the reliability of AT&T's service.
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by cmsmith 13y ago
I understand that this is how kickstarter works, but don't really understand why everyone is OK with it. Kickstarter is like a bake sale, where you pay more than the fair market value for things as a form of charity to support some activity
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by cmsmith 13y ago
The other sibling comments on the interpretation of this data are accurate, but my biggest problem with it is this: If you reduce the driving privileges of people with blue eyes, I'm sure that the auto-related fatalities of blue-eyed people
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by cmsmith 13y ago
I'm not defending gitmo, but why wouldn't we remember its defenders the same way we remember those who have suspended habeas corpus in previous eras [1]? [1] Abraham Lincoln : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus_in_the_United_Sta...
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by cmsmith 14y ago
It does as little as possible to distort the free market. In contrast, something like giving free food to developing countries is pretty damaging to the free market, because it will suppress local prices and drive local farmers out of busin
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by cmsmith 14y ago
From a statistical point of view, it seems kind of inappropriate to report something with a 100+ day standard deviation (iPhone release rate) down to the nearest day.
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by cmsmith 14y ago
This is addressed in the article. Losing defendants don't have to pay. Meaning that if you sue someone and win, you still have to pay your own legal bills.
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by cmsmith 14y ago
I'm no expert on this, but your 20% number seemed pretty low: According to this, the tesla regenerative braking is just as efficient as the motor is at acceleration. Result: up to 64% of the original battery energy returned to the battery.

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