elwin

13 ms·

91.
by elwin 14y ago
> Listening to him speak in 2009 was surreal, especially during the Q&A session. I can't recall any specific quotes but he was ready to burn ten bridges for an ounce of symbolic freedom. Was that when RPI ACM brought him in to speak
92.
by elwin 14y ago
From observing reenactments of early American life, I think an 18th century agricultural technology is self-sustaining and directly bootstrappable, except for the problem of mining and working iron. So my guess is not much longer than 300 y
93.
by elwin 14y ago
I think it's more accurate to say that the free market currently does not think that Internet surveillance is a problem. Consumers in general have decided that for Internet services and Internet access devices, factors such as cheapness, ea
94.
by elwin 14y ago
The Higgs field is something like the idea of an ether, pervading all space, but it is not related to the propagation of light.
95.
U.S. Would Retaliate Against Cyberattacks(nytimes.com)
3 points by elwin 14y ago|0 comments
96.
by elwin 14y ago
I haven't had any recent trouble with it. Back in the early days, it didn't always work well with SDL, but that was fixed years ago. I've been able to crash the daemon with stress tests, but it seems to restart automatically. I can't unders
97.
by elwin 14y ago
Then I shall be clearer and say that I disagree that vi/vim is harder to use than an editor that needs a command-line flag to enable search-and-replace and doesn't do case-insensitive search at all.
98.
by elwin 14y ago
I disagree that Pico is easy to use. The only way to move around within a line is to hit the arrow keys sixty times. By default, cut and paste works on whole lines only. If you want to cut just one word you have to figure out the commands f
99.
by elwin 14y ago
> I don't 100% get the band limited signal bit. How does band limiting imply that there's only a single possible reconstruction of the digital signal? I can kind of picture the fourier transform meaning that there's only one representat
100.
by elwin 14y ago
The suppression of dissent during WWI. Hayes' "corrupt bargain" and Southern "redemption". The Kansas-Nebraska Act.
101.
by elwin 14y ago
> The only question that seems silly to me is the last one. Of course a DoJ prosecutor is aware of the concept of prosecutorial discretion. To be fair, it's also a good counterpoint to the current silly "Congress made us be mean" line t
102.
by elwin 14y ago
It's easy to talk about using political power for good purposes when you don't have it yet. If Silicon Valley actually tried to become a political force, it might discover that the tech community doesn't agree on what the nation's most impo
103.
by elwin 14y ago
Yes, SSN's get assigned shortly after birth.
104.
by elwin 14y ago
This is neat. I was skeptical about the rhyme matching feature, but I ended up using one of its suggestions. When lines wrap, they stop lining up with the syllable counts. It would also be nice if the continued lines were indented, but I'
105.
by elwin 14y ago
Different observers will perceive different values for the photons' energy, but they will all observe that the total energy does not change.
106.
by elwin 14y ago
This kind of tutoring is already very common among homeschoolers, though without involving frustrated teachers. Homeschooling law varies by state and local district, but I've never heard of requirements for teaching to physically take plac
107.
by elwin 14y ago
That sentence is from the Phoronix article, not Kristian's announcement, which is quite fluent ( http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2012-Oct... ). Phoronix writing is always like that.
108.
by elwin 14y ago
> I swear, De Beers has probably pulled off the greatest marketing stunt in the history of humanity. De Beers has the advantage of selling a luxury good. The point of buying a diamond is to demonstrate one's financial ability. People do
109.
by elwin 14y ago
The songs were flagged by Youtube's ContentID system, which looks for infringing material and gives the labels the option of directly removing it. No DMCA notices were involved.
110.
by elwin 14y ago
sort -k 3
111.
by elwin 14y ago
During Charles Dickens' early career, his books had no copyright protection in America, and British copyright law could be evaded by just changing the protagonist's name to "Oliver Twiss". He was still able to become independently wealthy.
112.
by elwin 14y ago
The article links to Oracle's argument, which does not mention Klingon.
113.
by elwin 15y ago
I ignored xterm because the defaults were ugly. Then I figured out how to use a nice font at a reasonable size and added tmux, and I haven't looked back.
114.
by elwin 15y ago
I don't think RMS could advance the Free software movement by using a more normal setup. There are already plenty of people who think open source is sort of cool, and install it on their MacBook Pros when it's convenient, and sometimes help
115.
by elwin 15y ago
To give one example, there's Brad Sucks http://www.bradsucks.net/about/ , who has always distributed his music online for free. Over ten years, he's built a following and been able to switch from having a day job to being mostly a full-ti
116.
by elwin 15y ago
> I also notice that lots of early church hymns and political songs were merely new sets of lyrics put on the same melody over and over again. That's because those songs were meant to be singable by everyone, most of whom had no formal
117.
by elwin 15y ago
Assuming the errors are random and uncorrelated, the total significance is the square root of the sum of the squares. In this case, that's only 4.3 sigma.
118.
by elwin 15y ago
How about "write-closed" vs. "write-open"? Or more simply, "read-only open source".
119.
by elwin 15y ago
The purported purpose of patents is to increase the amount of useful stuff produced by the economy. The purpose of patent trolling is the opposite: the product stops getting produced, and the amount of useful stuff decreases. That makes p
120.
by elwin 15y ago
> Isn't there a law of thermodynamics that says that entropy increases in a system over time? Not exactly. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that all processes cause the entropy of a system to increase. But entropy doesn't natural

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