shader

Thou/thee/thy/thine are singular forms, whereas you/ye/your are plural. Just as we and our became royal pronouns, where a monarch would emphasize that they spoke for a whole country by referring to themselves in the plural, it became popular for the upper and eventually middle classes to refer to each other as plural, as a more respectful or formal usage.

Quoting from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou):

"Following a process found in other Indo-European languages, thou was later used to express intimacy, familiarity, or even disrespect, while another pronoun, you, the oblique/objective form of ye, was used for formal circumstances"

They would still probably be trapped under parts of the plane, and if it's floatable, it can be punctured/crushed.

I'm guessing that as many people as are probably trying to log into his account, he probably doesn't answer his phone any more, or even use that email account. How would he know if the access he just authorized was him, or someone else?

Maybe if they texted him a code he had to type in, it would be more secure, but then it would be simple enough to brute force all of the codes, or find the seed and generation mechanism.

Sell it to as many customers as you can find first, and then go to them for the extra $10,000. You get more money than you would have otherwise, and you also save innocent people from being unduly compromised. It's a win-win situation ;)

And there is the essence of the need for captchas ;)

You need to scale, so you employ computers instead of people. Now you have to have computers run a reverse turing test. Otherwise, it's much easier for spammers to scale as well.

It's easy to cut down on spam if you don't accept any incoming mail.

Generally it's "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

I think this is one of the major reasons that Americans have so many divorces. They marry for the "feelings", and as soon as those change they want out. The Indians marry for more than that - financial support, children, family name, cultural pressure, etc. The end result is that they are interested in making it happen, and are willing to work for that, whereas Americans think that the fact that it might require effort proves that they are "incompatible".

Imagine if someone tried to run a startup the way most Americans try to manage their marriages; they wouldn't last a week before they gave up - the "feeling" probably wouldn't be there, and there would be something else they'd rather do.

If both you and your spouse want the marriage to work, it can work, whether you "feel" for each other or not. The problem is really when they don't want it to work, and need an excuse.

This works really well.

For some cool examples, check out http://tineye.com/cool_searches

Also, I recommend that you click the "compare images link" under each result image after you perform a search, to see which part it matched.

I've used tineye several times, and it's found the sources of heavily photoshopped images before. They've done a great job.

You're right, I forgot about the radiosity - but couldn't that still be split up to multiple cores per frame? i.e. simulate one "bundle" of photons per core, and then presuming that you're not too badly i/o bound, you should be able to do some sort of map/reduce. Each would generate a separate scene of light, and you would add them all together to make the final frame.

Why stop at one frame per core? Once you have easily scalable renderfarms, you could switch the the somewhat slower (though currently less heavily optimized) raytracing approach, and run almost as many cores per frame as you like. That way the only thing limiting your render time is your budget (not that that hasn't always been true, but your set up makes it sound like there is a "rock bottom" limit that you reach before the end of your budget at one hour per frame).

I should also have stated that in the reverse: What if he had patented the thing, when I have also independently created the idea? Looking over his curriculum vitae, it looks like he already has:

"Patent Pending: Methods, systems, and computer program products for simulating a scenario by updating events over a time window including the past, present, and future. Submitted July 10, 2008."

Oh well.

Most game replay systems work this way - they store the chain of user inputs, and then just resimulate it in order, with the same random seed. Thats the main reason they don't give you the option to rewind the replays and you have to start over.

This game just has multiple simulators running through the chain of commands at the same time, a "movable" simulator (the player's view) and the ability to modify the chain of commands. Once you can distill the idea of "moving backwards through time" into a command, it can be added to the chain of commands and be deterministically simulated like everything else.

WOW. Just WOW. I have always believed that you can't have a good idea without someone else having it at about the same time, but this is the most uncanny experience I have had yet.

I had this exact same idea in January, or at least a very similar one. Time waves, etc.

Amazing.

By the way, this is one of the reasons I don't like patents that much - what if I had patented "A real time strategy game with time travel elements using propagating time waves"? Then these guys wouldn't have been able to implement it, even though they obviously came up with the idea separately, and have spent more effort implementing it.

Not always.

My uncle's real estate page for Wake County in North Carolina shows similar figures: http://kengramley.com/city.php

That's calculated directly from the county's tax data. It's a bit out of date; from February, I think. I'll see if I can get some new data up soon.

Some people are actually interested in telling the truth, not misleading you. It's rare though, I'll grant you that.

Btw, he was an engineer before he became a realtor, and if you must know I am the "webmaster". Yes, it could be construed as shameless promotion, but it is relevant.

Edit: I don't know if it's clear enough - the data is year over year.

I think this article explains the idea much better: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/35391/title/Do_su...

Also, even court enforcement of contracts has its limits - you just go outside the borders of a country, and they can't (easily) make you fulfill your contract.

That said, I am all for court enforcement of contracts. In fact, I wish that the courts would respect, if not enforce, far more contracts than they do.

I don't think that the project can be 'subverted' from bringing freedom to users. A fork of it might be made "un-free", as in your Microsoft example. But Microsoft did a lot of their own work, and the original project is still around - completely free.

I like freedom. Freedom is good. The only question in this instance is - freedom for whom? Freedom for the developer to write code without comments, so that you can't hack it? Or freedom for you to read his code? I think that javascript currently embodies both of these freedoms in the best possible way. The author does not force you to execute his scripts; by your http request you asked for them. At the same time he is not being forced by you to make his source code "intelligible."

The implementation of JavaScript is most likely open source, and the script's code is obviously available. Am I missing something? Is he saying that it's not "Open Source" if it doesn't have enough comments?

Trying to prevent people from releasing source code without comments because it's not easily hackable is a bit much. Almost everything about RMS is "a bit much" though, and that's why so many hackers like him ;)

Certainly excessive usury is wrong, but being able to walk away from debts causes it's own problems. Because of the ability for people to just walk away from debt, they acquire more of it without the attention of paying it off. This can cause lenders to be more wary of loaning money, as well as waste resources when that person spends the money on a house or other item they don't need and can't pay for.

Why - are you writing an essay on the topic? ;)

Certainly. The two things are rather related: if you remove the appearance of danger, people will get themselves into more tight spots. It's amazing how many more people with four wheel drive get stuck in mud than normal cars ;)

Indeed. I didn't say that risk was bad, necessarily. Rather, encouraging risk to avoid a non-existent paradox of thrift is a dangerous thing. Personally, I think that the news about people losing less money at casinos is a good thing. They are much more likely to be able to invest it in worthwhile endeavors having not lost it ;)

Also part of the problem is that everyone was consuming their present and future income (negative net savings rate) - as opposed to some borrowing and consuming the present savings of others. As such we were actually consuming present capital and reducing our future income, as evidenced by the recent downturn.

Unfortunately, I don't think that stimulating production or innovation is a good idea either.

When you just stimulate production, it is true that production will increase but not in a way the consumers actually want. The evidence for this is that production has been stimulated (along with consumption) for a long time due to artificially low interest rates. The housing boom is a boom in production of houses.

"booms" in general are caused by the illusion that there are more savings than in reality exist - i.e. lowered interest rates, easy loans, etc. This causes the business to over invest, thinking there is enough in the way of resources to do so, and the consumer to consume more, thinking the same thing. Unfortunately, because the lower interest rate does not coincide with increased savings the businesses soon find out that there are not enough resources to complete their projects. This is when the boom starts to stagnate. In the late '90s, the scarce resource was programmers and IT employees, who were increasingly hard to find as businesses continued to hire them all for new internet projects.

Artificial stimulation is a very bad idea in either case, consumption or production. It is especially bad when you stimulate both at once.

However, I don't think you have to worry about innovation too much. Especially in this period of economic decline, people will be able able to innovate even without stimulation ;)

Certainly. But by saving you allow someone else to consume what you have produced, and you refrain from consuming things yourself. This permits businesses to invest in future production even if you don't personally do it.

Investment is a consumption, and it does involve risk. But to say that Americans in general need to take more risk with their money is rather foolish if you ask me. Especially when the aforementioned savings rate is at a paltry five percent.

Unfortunately, the reason that we are in this recession is that people took too much risk. We have been living with a net negative national savings rate for a while now. That consumption of capital is partly what has allowed this downturn to occur. We need to be saving now more than ever.

Also, there is no paradox of thrift. When people save, it does not mean that they do not produce, merely that they are refraining from consumption. And at a savings rate of five percent, we are hardly refraining at all.

Normally the higher savings (refrain from consumption, higher interest in future goods over present ones) would cause businesses to invest more in longer term production, i.e. making more future goods. Thus a higher savings rate is responsible for a higher future standard of living, and more risk taking. So attacking the savings rate and saying that we shouldn't be so careful is a terrible idea.

That said, businesses are still likely to take too much risk because of the low interest rates. The way that the higher interest in future goods signals the companies is normally through lowering interest rates, which the federal reserve has done recently even though there has not been a corresponding increase in savings. This imbalance between business expectations and actual consumer desires is what causes booms and busts.

So please don't tell me to be risky with my money. I'm not saying that taking advantages of opportunities is a bad idea. I like the idea of being an entrepreneur myself. But telling us that a five percent savings rate will cause our depression to get worse is like telling a sick person that taking a 15 minute nap will make them more sick. They probably need a lot more sleep than that, and encouraging otherwise may prove disastrous.

The problem is that the marginal value of the employee to the company is relatively low compared to the amount of extra in taxes they'd have to pay if they wanted to give that employee a raise.

It is often a much better idea for both the company and the worker to use some non-monetary compensation, because the benefit and cost fits within both of their marginal value curves. Otherwise the employee would only see a few more cents, and the company would be paying significantly more taxes (withheld) that they may not be willing to pay.

That particular disincentive is already handled properly by the decreasing marginal value of money. Unfortunately, taxes add even further pressure.

Most people won't change their habits, but it is always the marginal earner who has to decide Do I work x% harder for x% less money?

J. K. Rowling did most of her draft work on lined paper:

"There is only one thing that annoys me about living in Edinburgh - well, two, but I'm pretty much resigned to the weather now. Why is it so difficult to buy paper in the middle of town? What is a writer who likes to write longhand supposed to do when she hits her stride and then realises, to her horror, that she has covered every bit of blank paper in her bag? Forty-five minutes it took me, this morning, to find somewhere that would sell me some normal, lined paper. And there's a university here! What do the students use? Don't tell me laptops, it makes me feel like something out of the eighteenth century." -J. K. Rowling

Source: http://www.writerswrite.com/wblog.php?wblog=410061

According to Wikipedia, she did the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone on a manual typewriter.

Most of the top 30 look like a recommended reading list from Mises.org. Not that they're bad books, it's just an interesting coincidence.

Posterous seems like a logical place to add support for webhooks, as an alternative to rss and email. They practically have the whole system already, but in email instead.

Any plans to add webhooks functionality?