mquander

93 ms·

871.
by mquander 16y ago
" Few of us have been to Mars. But science fiction has filled in many of the gaps. We know that the Martian civilization is immensely old. Its software technology, therefore, must be similarly antique. Obviously nothing like it exists on ea
872.
by mquander 16y ago
I think there's a big confusion in a lot of this discussion between bias and general rationality. The Economist has a much more rational, well-thought-out point of view than most American newspapers and periodicals, but it's also a very id
873.
by mquander 16y ago
I think you're conflating giving technology to teachers and giving technology to students. It seems nutty to me to imagine that just giving students computers is going to provide an educational benefit, although apparently some people would
874.
by mquander 16y ago
I totally agree with Javascript. Consider: - Dynamic language, fairly concise, relatively natural syntax, lets you make simple things with no fuss. - Powerful enough for anything. - Extremely practical for making actual useful things. - Hu
875.
by mquander 16y ago
I forgot about that, thank you.
876.
by mquander 16y ago
I felt this way until I tried it. The rationalization, which I agree with as well, is that spamming in the early game and keeping up a steady rhythm "warms you up" in a way that makes it easier to maintain that speed when you really need i
877.
by mquander 16y ago
Speaking for myself, it's not getting a "project" up and running that's a pain, it's getting a single line of code up and running. I don't like to have to make a project (or even a Main method) to do that; I would prefer a REPL. When worki
878.
by mquander 16y ago
It sounds like you're opposed to bad questions, not questions. If you're listening to a talk that's at all interesting, you ought to be able to manage a good question by the end of it. If the audience genuinely doesn't care about good que
879.
by mquander 16y ago
You know, that's a pretty good point. Most console games have some "completionist" aspects that usually encourage some degree of cleverness and persistence, if nothing else. I know that I always enjoyed that aspect when I was a kid, altho
880.
by mquander 16y ago
I don't know how you're using the word "concentration" here, but playing an FPS (for example) usually demands that you pay attention to something new every few seconds, and definitely does not encourage lengthy focus or sustained thought.
881.
by mquander 16y ago
Well, your first suggestion is as equally impossible to carry out as the actual law. I think you have to prove that the sales are lost, if you're making the case that someone is being harmed by piracy. Based on my experience with a ton of
882.
by mquander 16y ago
It absolutely did not. The girl made it clear that she doesn't have a credit card and can't/won't convince her parents to pay, so there's no way he would have gotten a sale out of her.
883.
by mquander 16y ago
And most of those things that you can do, you should be able to do. The exceptions are what need to be justified. I don't see a lot of justification for claiming that piracy is wrong or bad. It's directly helping someone and not directly
884.
by mquander 16y ago
Yes, but the author is couching his rhetoric in claims to "fairness" and moral righteousness. I think his stories are most revealing of his position: I am an author, I tend to believe that I should be able to get paid for doing that work
885.
by mquander 16y ago
I sympathize with your viewpoint, but I'm not convinced it's correct. If there were a downvote, I might have downvoted it, but not flagged it. However, there's only a flag. I try to use the flag to mean "off-topic" or "very low quality
886.
by mquander 16y ago
I would absolutely flag that if I came across it (which I didn't.) I think it was poorly argued, disingenuous flamebait. (It never mentions the obvious retort, which is that the high profile of the cases in question, not a Batphone at App
887.
by mquander 16y ago
I still don't understand what you are trying to say. We already have laws dealing with mental illness. If a person is determined to be an imminent danger to themselves or others, we act proactively to treat them. I don't think that is pa
888.
by mquander 16y ago
Absolutely. I value living with relative freedom in a surprising world more than I value safety or justice. I feel compelled to point out that few humans would consider it ethical to punish someone for something they haven't done. I'm sur
889.
by mquander 16y ago
With respect to what issue? We already have laws for dealing with mentally ill criminals.
890.
by mquander 16y ago
http://3dalter.50megs.com/patterns.html
891.
by mquander 16y ago
Sure, if you want to actually explain your assumptions. When I hear that a guy was walking around, I don't usually start off by assuming that he had his face covered and he was acting suspiciously. And I sure don't consider "the police arr
892.
by mquander 16y ago
This comment is unbelievably bad. What are you talking about, "probably with his green bandanna over his face?" Refusing to show ID is being "passive-aggressive?" I'd call it common sense (if you don't know that you're legally obligated
893.
by mquander 16y ago
I don't really see how Scribd will be able to maintain any appeal if Chrome polishes up their in-browser PDF rendering, which basically loads instantaneously and seems to render things fine. (The HTML transmogrification is cool, but if PDF
894.
by mquander 16y ago
I would point out that "it's so damn easy for programmers to rename them" is a bit of a cop-out. It's never really free to do that, because then your code looks and feels foreign to other people writing code with the same library.
895.
by mquander 16y ago
I have a soft spot for The Castle of Crossed Destinies , whose imaginative structure I'm sure would appeal to any systematic kind of mind.
896.
by mquander 16y ago
I just happened across Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game recently. For whatever reason, I had never read it before, and it's probably been my favorite book of the past six months. As a programmer, you may find yourself with a unique p
897.
by mquander 16y ago
Google Reader is best in its class, in my opinion (although I have dozens of RSS feeds, not hundreds.) Google Books is great and represents a huge amount of effort. I don't know where Blogger came from, but Google has had it for a long ti
898.
by mquander 16y ago
There's an easy way to experience a small range of colors you haven't seen before. http://www.skytopia.com/project/illusion/illusions.html#Ecli... Documentation on the physical phenomenon behind this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagina
899.
by mquander 16y ago
That is a kinda boring link, but here's a high-quality (and dramatic!) exposition I encountered recently about Escher's correspondence with Coxeter and the method by which one might construct figures like his Circle Limit s without a compu
900.
by mquander 16y ago
If you don't want to study a whole new language or giant textbook, you might get some intellectual mileage from checking out the Reactive Extensions for .NET, which is an extremely slick implementation of functional reactive programming in

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