rwallace

94 ms·

961.
by rwallace 12y ago
Voice recognition can work well for English text. For writing code, it's certainly better than nothing, but on the awkward side; I found a zero force keyboard works better: http://specialneedscomputers.ca/index.php?l=pr
962.
by rwallace 12y ago
In fairness, as things now stand, any nutcase who wanted to obtain Ebola with evil intent could do it more easily by hopping on a plane to West Africa than by reconstituting it from its genome. The threat is from the natural epidemic curren
963.
by rwallace 12y ago
The OP said interacting with Siri, far from causing her son to diverge from constructive social behavior, helped him learn it - he ended up being better able to interact with real people. I have no particular reason to believe her son'
964.
by rwallace 12y ago
Paul Graham's essays contain much wisdom and truth, but even Homer nods, and let's be honest, the paragraph you quoted is bullshit. Even if you care about nothing whatsoever except your job (which probably isn't - and certain
965.
by rwallace 12y ago
Given your stated requirements, I'd use Qt. There's a learning curve, but no worse than with WPF or anything else. But those are hefty requirements for a small in-house project! Spending a lot of extra programming time on producti
966.
by rwallace 12y ago
Well, one nice thing about using JavaScript and HTML 5 for the front end is it does, as you say, give you a lot of decoupling, which means you don't actually have to use Node for the back end; you're free to use C++ or Python or w
967.
by rwallace 12y ago
If I was writing line of business software these days, I'd either go the web route and use JavaScript and HTML 5, or if it was something that preferred to live on the desktop, I'd use Qt. Now, if you've only heard a little bi
968.
by rwallace 12y ago
I'd like to believe that. It would certainly be nice if it were true. Unfortunately it's not. Weev went to jail for reasons that had nothing to do with the bad things he did. And I think this is worth pointing out, because unjust
969.
by rwallace 12y ago
Suppose we postulate that exploiting a security flaw is wrong, and money obtained by doing so should be forfeit. The entire business of casinos is exploiting a security flaw in the human mind. By hypothesis, the casinos' money should b
970.
by rwallace 12y ago
Even if it's orders of magnitude slower, that should be okay, because you're not going to be using it for the hard job of finding a solution, only for the easy job of verifying the solution once found. (I don't know much abou
971.
by rwallace 12y ago
They might have, for all I know. It's doable in a product that isn't trying to do much else at the same time, if you own all the servers in question and can make sure they are connected by a low latency network. The bad news will
972.
by rwallace 12y ago
Your way of thinking is interesting, but in all of the examples you give, the execution was vastly more difficult than the idea. Furthermore, most of them weren't commercial products and couldn't have been done by a startup.
973.
by rwallace 12y ago
If you try to go extreme on all possible requirements simultaneously, the chance of failure approaches one hundred percent. The key to success is to pick one or two areas where you want to go beyond state-of-the-art, while staying within it
974.
by rwallace 12y ago
I've seen this article template rerun any number of times over the last couple of decades. "Why don't we enjoy the video games of today as much as those we played when we were twelve years old? It's because the video gam
975.
by rwallace 12y ago
What sort of physics calculations can you do within a cell? I would have expected the data structure for a cell to contain a handful of scalar parameters (e.g. temperature, pressure, humidity, velocity vector) related by a few scalar equati
976.
by rwallace 12y ago
Granted that watching instructional videos online doesn't (at least in and of itself) accomplish the goal of meeting driven and knowledgeable peers, but if that's the real goal, then let's focus on it, because there are ways
977.
by rwallace 12y ago
If you're going to take the attitude that nothing except physical proximity to a handful of high-status individuals will suffice, then you've defined terms under which almost everyone has to lose, no matter what happens. Then the
978.
by rwallace 12y ago
I would suggest actually reading about the facts of the case before commenting with such unfounded confidence. Empirically, sealing off the area has been working so far. The wonderful folks at the MSF were not outgunned - they had resourc
979.
by rwallace 12y ago
Your argument is from authority, but authority is trumped by empirical fact. The kind of strategy you advocate was, yes, the right thing to try back in spring, when there was reasonable hope that it could work. It conclusively failed, at a
980.
by rwallace 12y ago
No, I'm betting the world's medical resources can contain the occasional small outbreak created by the occasional individual who gets past the cordon, particularly since such containment doesn't have to last forever. You can&
981.
by rwallace 12y ago
I will suggest that given the historical data of "the US invaded many other countries, and it generally turned out to be a really bad idea," the correct conclusion is not "so let's go ahead and invade a few more countr
982.
by rwallace 12y ago
I recommend anyone proposing solutions to the crisis first read this explanation of events to date: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2014/10/ebola-virus-epide... In particular, the history of events to date
983.
by rwallace 12y ago
One thing we can do is stop the false accusations of suicide. Suicide - which is indeed almost always wrong - is choosing death when you could have had life. What we're talking about here is a scenario where you are going to die either
984.
by rwallace 12y ago
I'm afraid I can't; it's my personal guess, and with an admittedly large margin of error. You make a fair point that if it turned out to be more like a terawatt, that might not be out of the question.
985.
by rwallace 12y ago
Okay, so let's build a petawatt-scale fusion power plant. I can actually think of practical ways to build one if it can be that large. But that's not going to happen. A petawatt-scale fusion power plant is not going to be economic
986.
by rwallace 12y ago
Not everyone thinks the problem is the R&D cost. I mean if that was the only problem, then yes, I would agree, give them a blank check. It's my opinion fusion just isn't a good way to generate power on the scale at which 21st-
987.
by rwallace 12y ago
They did. Housing is the main component of cost of living in the developed world, but to a significant extent that's a problem of transportation, which was mentioned. In the US, housing, healthcare and college fees are the big three, a
988.
by rwallace 12y ago
It only asks for your e-mail address, not your password or any other secret information.
989.
by rwallace 12y ago
As a pragmatic libertarian, I'm fine with the free flow of capital across borders, but people are not mere capital. We are agents with opinions about how the world should be, who reserve the right under certain circumstances to back up
990.
by rwallace 12y ago
> When we started gmails were about $25 per 1000 so we were able to quadruple the price. Going higher than that is hard because all big websites use phone verification to handle false positives and at these price levels it becomes pro

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