comicjk

56 ms·

571.
by comicjk 14y ago
> the share of young people getting their first mortgage between 2009 and 2011 is half what it was just 10 years ago I would like to explain to the author, very slowly and carefully, that something happened in 2008 which made banks a bi
572.
by comicjk 14y ago
No; the waste is far more radioactive than the fuel. Nuclear fuel rods are perfectly safe to touch when they're first made; they rapidly become more dangerous as they fission in the reactor. By the time they come out they are lethal. Then t
573.
by comicjk 14y ago
Very smart to link nuclear thermal technology to manned Mars missions. It would be wonderful if public enthusiasm after Curiosity makes further development in this area possible. I want my spaceship!
574.
by comicjk 14y ago
Orion-type designs are less efficient than nuclear thermal, but have orders of magnitude more energy to work with. Nuclear bombs are pretty unbeatable for raw power. There is a safer and cheaper way to harness nuclear bombs for heavy liftin
575.
by comicjk 14y ago
You could still do fuzzy matching with a one-way hash, you would just have to generate the fuzz beforehand. Create ten or twenty strings which you will also accept and hash and store them all.
576.
by comicjk 14y ago
Assuming the balloon itself has zero mass, every cubic meter of hydrogen in your balloon can lift a maximum 30 grams of payload. For the 2000 ton space shuttle, that's sixty million cubic meters - a spherical balloon half a kilometer in dia
577.
by comicjk 14y ago
This essay is still buying into the idea that algebra is "higher level," or that only people who identify as mathematicians would be affected by this. There are 1.5 million engineers in the US and 3.1 million programmers, and without algebr
578.
by comicjk 14y ago
> Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. Ironic, since in our modern computerized world algebra is important and long division is useless. The writer himself probably carries
579.
by comicjk 14y ago
Even for short distances, a better device is more pleasant to use. Not sweating is worth a lot if you can't shower at your destination. And what if you want to travel 10 miles? Or 50? Carry more cargo, climb steeper hills? I think you shoul
580.
by comicjk 14y ago
Agreed. I never learned long division, and now I'm getting a PhD in engineering. Computers are good at arithmetic - let them do it! Teach your kids to code instead.
581.
by comicjk 14y ago
Human beings will accept some probability of death on manned missions - notably soldiers, but also miners and fishermen. It's politically unfeasible for NASA to plan a 5% chance of astronauts not coming home, but private companies could do
582.
by comicjk 15y ago
If the US had European tax rates, it could support its current commitments and more. The risk is political: that the US will default on debts which it has the ability to pay.
583.
by comicjk 15y ago
Space may not be the best place to get raw materials (being, after all, mostly empty space) but you are mistaken about falling demand for materials. Commodity prices alone should tell you that demand is hitting the limits of current product
584.
by comicjk 15y ago
I have another rational question for you: if an Ashkenazi family adopted a Pygmy baby and raised her, how smart would she be?
585.
by comicjk 15y ago
Breaking the law is against someone's religion? Whose? I think the typical argument is by analogy to theft.
586.
by comicjk 15y ago
I don't defend Lolita in particular, but there is clearly a difference between child porn and fiction about the boring, sad life of a real pedophile. One is meant to arouse and the other to show a truth.
587.
by comicjk 15y ago
Why don't you write an offline Javascript app to do it? Use one of the javascript syntax highlighters for the editor, the localstorage api to save, eval() to run, etc.
588.
by comicjk 15y ago
>Does the economist suggest an "open borders" policy? No, because they know that that would be silly. Can you explain why that would be silly - sillier than, for example, the open borders between states in the US? I'm glad you have such
589.
by comicjk 15y ago
Of course they can use other peoples' bank accounts. They're princes!
590.
by comicjk 15y ago
Not exactly difficult. A chemist with a mass spec could prove it in 5 minutes. Proving willful noncompliance with the dmca is a whole different league of problem.
591.
by comicjk 15y ago
In case you haven't noticed yet, digital goods aren't like physical goods. The feds could have made a complete copy of the Megaupload servers while still leaving some or all of them running.
592.
by comicjk 15y ago
At least in the US, the average actual corporate tax rate is much lower than the statutory (by about half). Corporations get deductions far beyond what individuals do.
593.
by comicjk 15y ago
To his credit, I suspect he also makes large charitable donations to the Mormon church which reduce his taxable income.
594.
by comicjk 15y ago
That's a nice way to carve out the middle class. Why not just have a graduated tax system with a clean base? It's not the tax brackets that make it complicated, it's the byzantine process of calculating "taxable income."
595.
by comicjk 15y ago
Re solar PV, the problem of the sun not shining is just a bigger-scale variant of load balancing, which has been addressed successfully before. The English grid does it with pumped hydro storage in this mountain in Wales: http://en.wikiped
596.
by comicjk 15y ago
Actually, competing with coal is no longer enough. They have to be able to compete with natural gas, which is getting very cheap. Coal plants are already failing this test: http://www.theithacajournal.com/article/20120103/NEWS01/2010...
597.
by comicjk 15y ago
I don't think this is a reasonable position at all, especially in my own industry, chemical engineering. The externalities that some businesses can impose on the public are so large that the public MUST have regulatory powers. If that encou
598.
by comicjk 15y ago
The BBC is a better example. They make some truly great content and seem to have no problem staying close to what consumers want.
599.
by comicjk 15y ago
We certainly don't want all OSs confined to closed hardware like OS X. Ubuntu (and open source in general) works because of inverse-free-riders, "free helpers" we might call them. That seems to be a sustainable model, but it likely won't wo
600.
by comicjk 15y ago
Since it seems to be impossible, from a technical standpoint, to prevent piracy, then maybe we have to accept the free rider problem and produce intellectual property on a public basis. One option would be a grant system, as is used in scie

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