john_b

10 ms·

31.
by john_b 12y ago
My M.S. thesis was essentially an attempt to answer this question. The answer, it turns out, is that the readings you get from single bright celestial sources (sun, moon) aren't accurate enough to enable navigation primarily from this
32.
by john_b 12y ago
Personally, the content I'm usually interested in when I visit a page is just the text and images. There are some exceptions, but that's what a whitelist is for. Even if you don't count the numerous security benefits, denying
33.
by john_b 12y ago
I'm a mechanical engineer by training (B.S. and M.S.) but most of my day to day work is software development, testing, analysis, etc in the aviation industry. I haven't done anything "mechanical" for money since graduati
34.
by john_b 12y ago
"Unsolved" is very different from "unprosecuted". The question here is why the courts are overloaded, not why there isn't additional load due to the 80% of property crimes you mention.
35.
by john_b 12y ago
> "It's the engineers' job to resist with good reasoning. It's the visionary's job to convince them that we people only think the impossible things are impossible." While I don't disagree with you, co
36.
by john_b 12y ago
> "What's different between weather and software is that everyone knows that weather is extremely complex, and we account for that when we think about the weather in the future." Weather is governed by impersonal physica
37.
by john_b 12y ago
> "What I dislike about the evolution of MtG is the placeholder words that they constantly add to the rules" This is an odd criticism. It's the essence of DRY applied to a context with very limited space (the physical su
38.
by john_b 12y ago
You have completely missed the point. Seneca cared about using one's time wisely in order to maximise the meaningful accomplishments and noble conduct of one's life. Whether time is illusory or real is irrelevant to his philosophy
39.
by john_b 12y ago
My favorite fact about Betelgeuse is that light takes 1.5 hours to travel the distance of its diameter.
40.
by john_b 12y ago
Paris already bans drones at night and requires a permit to operate during the day. The fourth sentence in the article states this... It's far easier to "weaponize" your car and park it by a target. You'll do far more da
41.
by john_b 12y ago
> "one is entitled to employ any and all effort necessary to further one's interests" This is a classic mentality of victimization. By focusing on the theoretical harm that been done to the extent of all other considerat
42.
by john_b 12y ago
The obvious counterargument to HN's policy is that the developers building the next generation of web services should be able to openly discuss mass surveillance and how our present technology enables it. And that, furthermore, this di
43.
by john_b 12y ago
Or you could just, you know, check the published experimental results: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512281/chinese-physicis... Physicists are increasingly convinced that time is an emergent property that a
44.
by john_b 12y ago
> "being immune to a lawsuit as long as he was acting within the bounds of the law" There is no need for immunity when one acts within the bounds of the law. All that protects against is the hassle and cost of frivolous lawsu
45.
by john_b 12y ago
When a country's debt grows faster than its real GDP over a long enough period of time, some sort of fiscal tightening ("austerity") will become necessary to avoid default. This may take the form of reduced spending, increase
46.
by john_b 12y ago
Tell him that he has no right to make that choice for others, and while he may think he is only making that choice for his own family he is also choosing to put others at a greater risk. The braking analogy in this article is quite apt. Pri
47.
by john_b 12y ago
Unfortunately you don't, and you never will. You'll have to get used to the fact that "emotivist social pressure" is usually a more effective way to change peoples minds than reason. If people can't be convinced by
48.
by john_b 12y ago
There are actually multiple definitions that have arisen as our understanding of the cosmos has grown [1]. The word has always been a filler for "all the stuff there is" but as science has evolved it's become useful to make a
49.
by john_b 12y ago
True, but mathematical objects, unlike people, always behave rationally. If anything, events like negative interest rates simply illustrate how ridiculous the classical economic notion of the "rational actor" is in the real world.
50.
by john_b 12y ago
There are plenty of better ways already. A simple public/private keypair would go a long way towards this goal. The problem is that everyone working on crypto products focuses on just developing technology , often attempting to make e
51.
by john_b 12y ago
> "No quality control to even know you're getting what you ordered. I mean, seriously, you can't just do that. Society is the victim." This is a somewhat hypocritical claim. Society is only the victim of poor drug q
52.
by john_b 12y ago
> "But this guy was not doing anything to change those laws" I disagree strongly. One of his primary objectives appears to have been to show that widespread use of drugs does not require violent criminal gangs, which is one o
53.
by john_b 12y ago
> "Yeah but there is one thing that people doing quick mathematics ignore when they pronounce Basic Income unworkable. And that is that it will absolutely have to work in some manner." This is known as the head-in-the-sand ap
54.
by john_b 12y ago
> "Well you can realize that taking care of those people is not going to be free." Virtually every discussion of basic income on the internet these days avoids doing even the most basic arithmetic. So I'll give a very o
55.
by john_b 12y ago
It's chilling how far those in power will go to silence even the possibility of dissent that honest journalism provides. In this case, the Obama justice department inherited a case from the Bush era and fought it all the way to the s
56.
by john_b 12y ago
> "valuable" Your post only uses that word in its economic sense. Thus statements like this: > "Over time economic cycles destroy things that were once valuable." Are tautologies, not arguments. The set of thin
57.
by john_b 12y ago
I don't know if this reflects one or more widespread trends, but as someone who plays amateur hockey I've found that a very large number fellow players are engineers, programmers, market researchers, or some other white collar pro
58.
by john_b 12y ago
> "forced depression" Nothing about Greece's current situation was forced on them. Sure, lots of politicking went on and the current situation was definitely engineered to benefit others, but Greece was effectively bankr
59.
by john_b 12y ago
> "This idiocy encroaches on property rights." Notably, the property rights of the hotel patrons who bring their legally owned property on their person into the hotel and find that the hotel has surrepetitiously disabled it a
60.
by john_b 12y ago
> "Yes I do" You most definitely do not. You may own the equipment that emits or attenuates those waves, but the waves themselves are not owned by anybody. They are in the commons and are regulated by the FCC as such.

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