pfedor

12 ms·

61.
by pfedor 14y ago
Language affects how you think, there is no question about that. Quite to the contrary, it is an old and tired notion which has been refuted and refuted and refuted (see, e.g., the third chapter of "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker)
62.
by pfedor 14y ago
The way I understood it, the "cost" of watching an opera on YouTube is the time and mental effort it takes, which is many times greater than the time and mental effort it takes to watch a cat video. Like, say you may derive more enjoyment f
63.
by pfedor 14y ago
Is there any reason to believe the connection between this list and the questions Edison actually asked is any better than, say, the connection between what a Google interview actually looks like and how the newspapers like to portray it?
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by pfedor 14y ago
Letting in immigrants with tech skills would definitely hurt engineering salaries. Would it help the average person who doesn't have a VC fund? Possibly, but deciding that point involves a lot more assumptions about the nature of things.
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by pfedor 14y ago
Oh please. "The reason why there is no shortage of food is there are surplus 'Unrealized' meals, i.e., all the things other than food produced by people who could be producing food instead, if only food was more expensive." (As a side note
66.
by pfedor 14y ago
I don't know whether there is a shortage of engineers in the US, but I know that your argument that there isn't is invalid, because 90% of the country could be starving and you could still say that there is no shortage of food, after all an
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by pfedor 14y ago
So never mind that there are other studies which point to different findings. More importantly: the study finds that money above $75k has no impact on "Emotional Well Being = the quality of a person’s everyday experience such as joy, fasci
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by pfedor 14y ago
The same set of actions from his own network would have been mere copyright infringement. He wanted to make it less likely that he'd get sued, so he did it from someone else's network. I'm probably misunderstanding you: How could he have
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by pfedor 14y ago
You could similarly defend any kind of stealing. The communists said "грабь награбленное", which means "steal what has been stolen". Here's the English-version of an article from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia: http://encyclopedia2.thefre
70.
by pfedor 14y ago
Not true, see e.g., http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2451629 or http://www.fbi.gov/charlotte/press-releases/2011/defendant-c... "Along with the power to coin money, Congress has the concurrent power to restrain the circulation of mon
71.
by pfedor 14y ago
More so, in some states homosexual acts are technically illegal and in theory punishable by jail time. No longer true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas
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by pfedor 14y ago
I would never do anything to jeopardize my processing They can google your name and find the blog post next time you enter.
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by pfedor 14y ago
There is such a law but you should not assume it means what you think it means. Talk to a legal professional if it's important to you. One IP lawyer I interacted with maintained that the rulings in actual court practice are very unfavora
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by pfedor 14y ago
Not to mention, they presumably need to get paid.
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by pfedor 14y ago
Statistics proves that trade between nations reduces the likelihood of their engagement in wars (as documented, e.g., in Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature .) Therefore the western countries by buying cheap cell phones and wh
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by pfedor 14y ago
> So as long as you've either gotten the coverage below that age or had a job with a group plan at any point later in your life, and had no gaps in coverage since, you are fine. That's a whole lot of stipulations. I think it should jus
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by pfedor 14y ago
I'd like to meet one middle class person who's not on a big company's premium plan tell me otherwise. Happy to oblige. I recently looked into this before I quit my job four months ago to spend some time working on hobby projects. So her
78.
by pfedor 14y ago
I won't be adding much but want to make a small correction: it makes any retirement system difficult. The non-European-style system in the US, where people just keep stocks in their 401k and IRA accounts, is equally in danger when the nu
79.
by pfedor 14y ago
You think you'd be doing someone a favor by enabling them to carry on for a little longer without learning to communicate in English, but in reality, all you'd achieve is closing many many doors that otherwise might be open for them in the
80.
by pfedor 14y ago
OK I got hold of the paper, which is a very nice read, I can email it to you if you want. It's from a talk David Deutsch gave at some conference, I bet he is a very entertaining speaker. My summary won't do it justice, but anyway. The ex
81.
by pfedor 14y ago
You know what, this is interesting. I would love to be proven wrong. I searched for that paper but couldn't find it, nor any description of the experiment it proposes. I wrote an email to professor Deutsch asking him to send me a pdf copy
82.
by pfedor 14y ago
I'm not familiar with GRW, Penrose's theory is obviously more than an interpretation, he postulates new physics which is experimentally testable. The MWI does nothing of the sort to they're not at all similar. Looks like you are trying to
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by pfedor 14y ago
But have you considered that maybe (at least some of) the first-world countries are capitalistic precisely because they're democracies? For example Poland (where I'm from) was socialist until it became a democracy in 1989 and immediately a
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by pfedor 14y ago
If decoherence is "untestable" relative to collapse, then so too, collapse is "untestable" relative to decoherence. Of course! Nobody questions that. The two are equivalent. That means, neither is more true than the other. You just hap
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by pfedor 14y ago
Also, this is a marvel of a sentence: "Other than MWI and Bohm, the major interpretations (not including Copenhagen)" "Other than Android and Windows Mobile, all major cell phone operating systems (not including iOS)" The long and short of
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by pfedor 14y ago
This is not the case. Other than MWI and Bohm, the major interpretations (not including Copenhagen) make different predictions that are, in theory, distinguishable. It's just that it is completely infeasible to perform the experiments at t
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by pfedor 14y ago
Many people like to argue for political reasons that IQ tests are meaningless or fundamentally flawed. One of the typical arguments, repeated in the article, is that the questions on a test require some cultural background and a smart pers
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by pfedor 14y ago
Worth noting that nine years and one LHC later, the supersymmetric particles still haven't been found.
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by pfedor 14y ago
You might as well say that the Bohm interpretation is "like religion" then, rather than saying that the MWI is. I might except MWI clearly has more True Believers. If your assertion is that we might never know which is true My assertion
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by pfedor 14y ago
So you're saying, if Quantum Mechanics turns out to correctly describe larger and larger systems--in other words, unless we discover some new physics which makes QM break at a certain scale--then your pet interpretation will turn out to be

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