russell

56 ms·

391.
by russell 15y ago
OK, I need an explanation. Carbon-12 is stable, so how come it decays into 3 helium-4 atoms. Is the carbon-12 not really an atom but some kind of metastable thingy with too much excess energy to be stable?
392.
Thought Experiment [or What Happens When We Live to 600+](antipope.org)
2 points by russell 15y ago|0 comments
393.
by russell 15y ago
This case brings up the issue of attaching a GPS to a car surreptitiously without a warrent and using it for continuous tracking. Near the end it brings up the theory of "practical obscurity", which distinguishes between public records wh
394.
by russell 15y ago
I marvel how the world changed during my mother's lifetime, 1910-1999. Her family was the first to get electricity in the town and her uncle was the first to get a car. It died after a couple of thousand miles. No one had told him to cha
395.
by russell 15y ago
Two. And now you know I know. ;-)
396.
by russell 15y ago
I got a variant in an online interview: You have nine balls, one of which is heavier. How many weightings does it take to find the heavy one. I wrote back, "What is the maximum number of balls among which you can find he heavy one in fou
397.
by russell 15y ago
I think of printers as devices which produce hard copy 2-dimensional images. Star Trek coined "replicators". I think it fits pretty well even if the current versions are only 1.x of a pretty big n. "Robots" better fits the advanced artic
398.
by russell 15y ago
Successful roll-out of self-driving cars ought to pay for one or two. Even if they gave away the software, they could probably make billions per year from licensing content like maps and streetviews or the patent portfolio. Or license the
399.
by russell 15y ago
I followed the links and got to a fuller explanation: http://importance.corante.com/archives/002925.html#more I am confused by both the perceived need and the perceived damage. I assumed that the broadcast received copyright protection be
400.
by russell 15y ago
Well it sure sounds like a cranks's writing and wikipedia never heard of it But http://www.bnrf.co.cc/index_files/Page467.htm gives a formula that some one here can check out. (It looks like divide by 0 to me).
401.
by russell 15y ago
It's worse than the article says. In CA the prison guards union is one of richest and most powerful organizations is the state. Combine that with the propensity of conservative social engineers to throw anyone who doesnt fit in their mold
402.
by russell 15y ago
No. It's hundreds of people dying at a time with nothing that any of them can do to mitigate their fate. People are really poor at assessing risk, but marvelous at concocting horror stories. (I can see that you are not from California. A
403.
by russell 15y ago
You mean like we're all writers, instead of having to rely on a few professional scribes? I shudder to think of the programming equivalent of the blogosphere.
404.
by russell 15y ago
My GF is an artist so I am biased on the subject, but my take is that this is a direct copy for commercial purposes, not even as much originality as the Obama poster. My GF would certainly be pissed if one of her paintings were used in suc
405.
by russell 15y ago
Very long article, but if you dont know the many pitfalls of using floating point, you should read it.
406.
by russell 15y ago
"First to file" was put in to bring US law into alignment with the rest of the world, not that I think it is a particularly good idea.
407.
Women in Power: Tre Vassallo(huffingtonpost.com)
1 points by russell 15y ago|0 comments
408.
by russell 15y ago
I did it once to a client who agreed to my standard rate and then tried to squeexe me down. It felt vaguely unethical. At the time he was threatening to give the work to someone who was willing to do it for $35/hr. There was no way I cou
409.
by russell 15y ago
I recently had a similar problem. Users wanted to export a highly normalized structure to a csv file for munging in a spreadsheet. They were limited to 200 rows, because a thousand rows would bring everything to its knees. My first cut w
410.
by russell 15y ago
Writing is a useful skill.. Stupid people who write may become less stupid., although having read the comments on such sites as Huffington post, I dont hold a great deal of hope. But I say let them write. However, I would like to see an
411.
by russell 15y ago
No thanks. CA is 48th. They can keep their definition of freedom. I appreciate the no smoking bans and the gun control laws and short term disability (which I had to use this year). They dinged the labor laws, but in CA you can move from j
412.
by russell 15y ago
IANAL, but I would suspect that the construction company has a mediocre/inexperienced lawyer. Maybe this could be covered by check forgery statutes or something that works by analogy. Back in the last century a friend of mine won a case
413.
by russell 15y ago
In those days everything was terrible. We had to deal with 360 JCL an similar abominations. You couldnt dignify them with the term shell. It was timesharing and ultimately Unix that liberated us.
414.
by russell 15y ago
Binding time was thought of as compile time, link time, runtime, and even execution time. So in the time frame he was talking about nearly everyting had early binding, compile time or link time when libraries were included. With todays la
415.
by russell 15y ago
Kay mentions the Burroughs B5000. Boy you have to be an old timer to have worked on that. I did some Algol programming on the B6500, the next generation. They were stack machines, but what was interesting was that the memory words were t
416.
by russell 15y ago
The universe is continuous not discrete and those who believe otherwise are insane. I'll take his word for it. It is certainly outside my comfort zone, but interesting nonetheless.
417.
by russell 15y ago
How Tutorials Work at Oxford. Tuition works by becoming astronomical, with a whopping increase in 2012.
418.
by russell 15y ago
This also happened to Wells Fargo a few months back. Similar in spirit, groups of neighbors have successfully sued the owners of crack houses in small claims court. The individual awards were small, but if enough people are involved it ge
419.
by russell 15y ago
>> It is illegal for lobbyists to pay bribes. In the US the bribes are in the form of campaign contributions. No money comes from the lobbyist, but if the legislator performs, contributions appear from various PACs (Political Acti
420.
by russell 15y ago
The article mentions that land is scarce. It is often the case that the high cost item is not the obvious one, but the scarce one. California had very high housing costs, not so much because construction costs were high, but because land

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