cecilpl

> There are also deep paradoxes which arise when one character with this power runs into another character with the same power. What does this person perceive when you rewind time, and vice versa? In a fight between you, who wins? How far back can you go? How much of your life are you willing to unravel and experience again just for the sake of a particular confrontation? How much of your life would you simply go back and re-experience over and over again?

This reminds me of the plot of the movie "Primer" (which, if you haven't seen, you owe it to yourself to go watch).

International relations is not as simple as your girlfriend cheating on you.

No, because then you can just flip the coin that doesn't affect the parity of any of the bits.

Why is this bad?

Nah, those values are generated by "JustSystems Homepage Builder Version 15.0.8.0 for Windows"

That's indeed true. My sister lives in Whitehorse, and she says that pretty much everyone who lives there is an outdoor enthusiast. If you aren't, you just won't fit in.

> he American authorities have already decided that Morgellons is psychological and — in classic hominin style — are merely looking for evidence to reinforce their hunch.

This makes total sense.

It's a classic human psychological flaw to jump to a conclusion and then filter all evidence through that conclusion, rejecting evidence that doesn't fit your preconceived notion.

Hominin refers to humans

It's florid, but not incorrect.

Indeed! This line especially stuck out for me:

> Your spending decisions should be tied to the money that’s already in your bank account, not to the contracts you’re signing right now.

No! Your spending decisions should be based on what you need to buy, and you should work to reduce that as much as possible.

My wife and I spend $35k/year and live very well. We currently make about $110k after taxes, but we would spend exactly the same no matter whether we made $40k or $400k. We have figured out that happiness isn't bought with money.

The other nice thing is that every year we work, we bank two year's worth of living expenses. At that rate it doesn't take long until you don't need to work for a living any more.

It's entirely possible that Elon Musk doesn't care about recouping his investment in SpaceX. It seems like the end goal of the company is to start a colony on Mars so he can go live there.

Because at these distances we can't actually detect their photons with our most powerful telescopes - we can barely see galaxies.

It isn't right, but that's the reality of civil forfeiture in the United States.

I think it's because the threat is not visible.

In the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, diseases like polio, measles, mumps, etc were very common. Everyone knew people who had them, knew how awful they were, and vaccines were a clear way of solving this imminent and pressing issue.

I'm 30, and I've never had any of those. I've never even seen a case of measles in anyone I know. I'm obviously still going to vaccinate my children, but the benefit is not immediately obvious. They are very unlikely to get measles no matter what I do.

Did you even read the article?

I think that's mainly because of the incredibly remarkable developments in computer technology.

Since 1966 most industries have seen technological improvements of one or two orders of magnitude, if that. 7% economic growth compounded over 50 years is a growth by factor of 30x.

Data storage per $ has increased by a whopping 8 orders of magnitude, or a factor of 100 million.

Meanwhile, FLOPS/$ has increased by about 11 orders of magnitude, or a factor of 100 BILLION.

That scifi writers were able to get even close to modern technology is amazing. Of course, don't forget that as late as 15 years ago, portable audio players did only have an hour or two of capacity.

More like, the inkjet printers from the 90's that aren't in landfills yet are very durable.

There were lots of 90s era printers that were just as trashy as the ones made today.

As a former national-level swimmer, I always shaved my legs/arms and tapered my training for a big meet twice a year.

I found that combination to lower my times by about 1 second per 50m, or about 5%. I don't know how much of that is attributable to the shaving, but I will say it helped me "feel" way faster.

I have a bulldog, and not only does he fetch, he can fetch me beer! He's way better than other bulldogs - I'd say he's pretty great.

He's a great bulldog.

I switched to Dvorak in high school and have been using it full time for about 13 years. I find I can switch back and forth almost fluently, though I do have to look at the keyboard when typing on qwerty in order to switch my mind into that mode. As a test, I typed the last two sentences on qwerty and it was a bit painful, but not too slow. Maybe 40wpm. I hit 80 on dvorak without thinking.

The biggest thing I notice when going back to qwerty is how horrendously uncomfortable it is. I feel like I'm doing contortionist exercises with my fingers, and my wrists start aching very quickly. Going back to dvorak after that is like switching to the "walk" section of a walk/run interval training session.

I agree with kingmanaz that words just roll off your fingers. Dvorak is like cooking in a kitchen where everything you need is in just the right spot and you can grab it without moving, versus qwerty where everything is over the place and the spices are opposite the stove. You can still cook, and even do it quickly if you know where everything is, but you wind up expending so much more energy moving around.

I did have problems at work when co-workers needed to use my keyboard to do something on my machine. The universal reaction is "what's wrong with your keyboard", sometimes with gratuitous profanity thrown in. Maybe 10% of people realise that it's dvorak without me having to explain. A handful try to hunt-and-peck before giving up and making me do it. One person surprised me by knowing dvorak as well. So, I had work buy me a hardware-switchable dvorak keyboard that has double-labelled keycaps (qwerty in small blue letters). That's solved the problem.

Gaining dvorak fluency in the first place took me about 3 weeks of inability to type, which was hell on a shy geeky 16-year-old whose main social interaction was IRC channels.

The one place I still use qwerty is on my phone. Dvorak is very poorly suited to thumb typing because it breaks autocorrect. Most of the time when you mistype a word, it's still a valid English word, because all the common letters are next to each other.

So... basically it lets you pay in dollars?

Because space.

If that was the case, generating prime numbers would be much easier than it is.

> Why not rocket power the plane portion and go for even higher based launch?

That's what the first stage of the Falcon 9 is - a rocket powered boost to enable the second stage to launch from a high altitude.

No.

Leaded gasoline. In my 70s-era car, I want to use it instead of unleaded, since it improves my fuel economy significantly. However, the total cost of the lead in the environment far outweighs the economic benefit. We needed regulation to fix this.

Thalidomide. Regulation prevented thousands of deformities in the US by imposing a proof-of-safety barrier before the drug was allowed to be sold. Other countries were not so lucky as to have that regulation in place.

More to the point... How, as an individual, am I supposed to make an informed judgement about the relative risks of MtGox vs Bitstamp, say? I have no inside information about how those companies operate. There's a huge information asymmetry problem that regulation alleviates.

Because people are used to dealing with the regulations that go along with other people storing your money.

Most people trust places like a bank, an investment brokerage, or paypal to store money, and not have it be "lost to hackers". There are banking regulations and insurance policy that have been around for 100 years to protect people from that kind of thing.

I'm sorry, but what's the point of a coding interview if you can pass it without knowing how an if statement works?

That would have required a plane change maneuvre that cost much more propellent than they had on board.

But Greenland is 1000km wide at its widest (east-west), which is 1/4 the distance from NY to LA.

It's more like Doom being "You can play the whole game for free, but you have to pay $0.50 every time you want to reload your gun."

There are four rovers that have successfully moved around.

Sojourner stopped working in 1997, Spirit stopped working in 2010, and both Opportunity and Curiosity are still moving around.