grondilu

95 ms·

781.
by grondilu 11y ago
> What do we want? Make some scifi become real? No, we just want helpful machines. I think you underestimate the desire for mankind to create something that resembles itself. It's a very old myth, and IIRC some traces of it can be
782.
by grondilu 11y ago
> Integrated 802.11n wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1 that will make setup even easier!
783.
by grondilu 11y ago
> What makes you say that? Is there some underlying principle I've failed to consider? Low fertility rates is a statistical rule. It's not absolute. There will always be people with high fertility, at the very least because t
784.
by grondilu 11y ago
Long ago I read "essai de prospective demographique"[1] written by French demographers. They were raising the concerns you mention and were trying to warn the public of a coming "demographic winter". So your point of v
785.
by grondilu 11y ago
A more interesting question is : what kind of delay is worth worrying about? I mean, for instance it is known that life will remain possible on Earth for about 500 million years, after which the Sun will be too bright. We don't seriou
786.
by grondilu 11y ago
An expression like "runaway greenhouse effect" is normally only used to describe what happened on planets like Venus. IIRC on Earth there is a consensus about something like that to have "virtually no chance" of being i
787.
by grondilu 11y ago
> We have been here for 4 mio years, right? Depends on what you mean by "we". Our genus is a few millions years old indeed, but our species is only about 200,000 years old.
788.
by grondilu 11y ago
Yeah I was vaguely aware that I had not much voting rights. That's what I meant by saying that I had not much illusions about it. Google is such a cool company that I thought I should own some shares anyway. But if it turns into a
789.
by grondilu 11y ago
I haven't looked at the details as I had not much illusions about it anyway. I was a shareholder before the split and I did not bother selling after it. Maybe I should, and as I said that's sad.
790.
by grondilu 11y ago
> Ultimately, all the progress in technology is to make us live better lives. Is it, really? That sounds very naive to me.
791.
by grondilu 11y ago
But big pharma companies have existed before Google. I was not interested in them and I don't want Google/Alphabet turn into one of them. If they focus on healthcare, they're doing something completely different which is of
792.
by grondilu 11y ago
IMHO that's sad, really. If they focus on things like that, it either means that they feel they don't have much more to bring in their original activity (A.I., networks and computer science), or that they have lost interest in th
793.
by grondilu 11y ago
> No, it never goes to zero, It never goes to infinity either. Zero and infinity are the limits. > An infinite number of small numbers adds up to infinity. Well, no. It depends. For instance the sum of 1/n goes to infinity, bu
794.
by grondilu 11y ago
But stars are getting fainter and fainter as they are further and further away. I get that there would be an infinite amount of them, but then it's an infinite times a zero. The limit is not obvious and I've never seen anyone di
795.
by grondilu 11y ago
I've always been puzzled by this paradox. More particularly, I'm baffled that apparently the mainstream explanation involves cosmological arguments such that the expansion of the Universe. Is it really that complicated? Take Hub
796.
by grondilu 11y ago
Kind of paradoxical that just after their first successful landing they ramp up rocket production. Isn't the point of re-usability not to have to build so many rockets?
797.
by grondilu 11y ago
Isn't solar power more efficient when concentrated? That should favor centralized solutions, shouldn't it?
798.
by grondilu 11y ago
> human life is worth existing on its own Worth to whom? A human life has value, but not to everybody. Or at least not the same value for everybody. Keeping people alive at any cost, and imposing to people how much they should contri
799.
by grondilu 11y ago
We know what space is, at least operationally. Or rather space-time. Space is what can be measured with rigid rods. Time is what clocks measure. Einstein painstakingly defined those concepts this way. Plank's question is more metap
800.
by grondilu 11y ago
I've struggled several times to formulate this question properly. I'm not convinced by your formulation. I'll give it an other try. Does space have an existence per se, that is regardless of the matter it contains, or is it
801.
by grondilu 11y ago
The Feynman lectures are also available on the Internet archive: https://archive.org/details/TheFeynmanLecturesOnPhysicsVolum... You can download them in several formats, including PDF and even pure ASCII.
802.
by grondilu 11y ago
By set operations I was more specifically thinking of intersection and union. Testing if an element belongs to a set can indeed be done with junctions but that's pretty much it. The third example shows the so-called auto-threading b
803.
by grondilu 11y ago
I'm not sure this is how you're supposed to use junctions. I vaguely recall that the semantics is not obvious when you put a junction on both sides of a relational operator. It's much clearer when there is a junction on onl
804.
by grondilu 11y ago
> if its very rich people you can not equate with, oh, so you mean stealing is OK as long as it's from people you're jealous of? The problem I have with that is that it's a foot in the door[1]. You begin with taking from
805.
by grondilu 11y ago
> Person C who has more wealth than average because his/her parents or ancestors created the wealth? Do you think it's wrong for parents to give things to their children? Do you think it should not be allowed to let them ensur
806.
by grondilu 11y ago
That's not the question I'm asking. Assume perfect adherence on the wall. My question is : to remain stationary, do the propellers need to exert a force equal to the weight of the device? In other words : if this machine can cli
807.
by grondilu 11y ago
Can't quite remember where I saw that, but I remember a comparable robot who was meant to wear opaque sunglasses. The idea was that since these robots aren't quite capable of looking at things and faces as a human would, they loo
808.
Lucianne Walkowicz: let's not use mars as a backup planet(ted.com)
1 points by grondilu 11y ago|0 comments
809.
by grondilu 11y ago
While I was watching that some time ago I was wondering what it would take to optimize this and make it still work with the same underlying principles. It occurred to me that falling dominoes are just transmitting a mechanical signal, that
810.
by grondilu 11y ago
> but is isn't like they are going to allow everyone else on the planet to start using their technology I don't understand. Did the Apollo program do that? Did it even intended to? NASA is a government agency, so I guess y

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