hardwear
Re:A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
on Saturday August 18, 2012 @12:37PM (#4401525)
do you have a link to the thread?
Re:Google goes after Apple via Motorola patents
on Saturday August 18, 2012 @02:26AM (#4400410)
"Don't be evil, Google. Even when the other kids on the playground are."
Re:On the origin of specie: rethinking theories of where money comes from
on Saturday August 18, 2012 @01:18AM (#4400315)
The origin of money is inherently unknowable. It happens before the start of the historical record, and archaeological evidence will not have much to say, and anthropological studies are unlikely to find a money-naive culture at the point of discovering the concept. The theories cannot be expected to ever be tested.
Re:Virtual 3-D ‘knitting’ adds new stitch for graphic artists
on Saturday August 18, 2012 @12:52AM (#4400278)
no, it is a computer simulation of knitted clothing, as for a video game.
Re:3D Printed Houses Might be Closer Than You Thought
on Thursday August 09, 2012 @08:19AM (#4360631)
NY Times has a good article on this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/11/garden/robots-that-build-b...
Re:Russian investor’s $3 million prize for physics
on Sunday August 05, 2012 @05:09AM (#4340992)
The original source http://fundamentalphysicsprize.org/
Re:Using mushrooms to harvest electricity
on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @08:04PM (#4293686)
It is a joke.
Re:Why don’t we drink other animals’ milk?
on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @07:30PM (#4293600)
Pigs are actually similar to humans in many ways.
“What we've discovered,” says Lee, “uh, what we've concluded, you know, is basically that the machine that would fit a pig's teat is a human breast pump. It fits perfectly.”
Too bad they did not describe what pig's milk is like, or how “Anyone who farms pigs would say that pigs' milk would make an incredible cheese,” How would an ordinary farmer know, having never collected the milk?
Re:Even experts get it wrong
on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @09:20PM (#4288947)
It seems odd that the patent system does not take into account whether an invention could be nearly as profitable as a trade secret or on the other hand, could not possibly be kept secret while used for profit.
Re:Even experts get it wrong
on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @09:11PM (#4288916)
Imagine a manufacturing process, and a transformative invention that makes the product 10 or 100 times cheaper to make than any method that does not use the invention. The invention is used in-house, and there is no advantage to be gained from licencing the invention. Distributing the process to be closer to raw materials or customers conveys no advantage over centralized production. Given such a situation, the company with the invention is likely to bet they can keep it secret longer than the term of a patent.
Of course I cannot give any specific examples. They are currently secrets, or they are secrets that died with the company or died with the obsolescence of the product.
Re:Datomic Free Edition
on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @07:54PM (#4288710)
For (1), Use a "mark as deleted" option, with extremely strict permissions on viewing deleted data, to protect privacy.
Re:In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
on Saturday July 14, 2012 @05:29AM (#4243672)
Counting calories can not be a long term solution for obesity. A workable solution must be based on easier to implement facts such as the more sweets one eats, the more one craves sweets. I would recommend the No S Diet: www.nosdiet.com "I would have them eat a lower-calorie diet. They should eat whatever they normally eat, but eat less. You must carefully measure this. Eat as little as you can get away with, and try to exercise more." -Dr. Jules Hirsch. This is incredibly poor advice, based in physics, and ignoring psychology.
Re:Varnish author finds "the design approach taken in SPDY deeply flawed"
on Saturday July 14, 2012 @05:07AM (#4243639)
www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/http20.html?#spdy
HuffPost Pollster API Enables Open Access To Polling Data
Wanted: A Light Field CEO
Re:If you want to teach, isn’t it only fair to learn a few things first?
on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @04:55AM (#4160857)
>the gap between the average annual temperatures
She is probably using the percent difference, where an absolute zero scale should be used.
Re:Less is exponentially more
on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @02:07AM (#4160541)
It is a very old saying from when "prove" meant what "test" means now. Exception is meant in the sense of exceptional, unusual. "The unusual event tests the heuristic."
Re:The Disadvantage of Smarts
on Saturday June 16, 2012 @12:24PM (#4120941)
However, for a few evolutionarily novel problems, evolution equipped us with general intelligence so that our ancestors could reason in order to solve them. These evolutionarily novel problems were few and far between.
This implies that the evolutionary selection of intelligence was sexual selection, that our brains evolved like a peacock's tail.