Normati

I wonder if perhaps it's a good thing that rich people can pay to use handicapped spots. We could just think of them as "priority parking", and the regular priority parking ticket costs $x while handicapped people get a coupon entitling them to free access. After all, the intention isn't to prevent healthy people using them, it's to prevent them becoming unavailable - a gaggle of handicap convention attendees would cause more trouble than an occasional CEO buying his own groceries.

You don't get to keep waiting for a prediction to finally come true when it doesn't come with a deadline. It already didn't happen despite all our labor saving technology so far (we don't even weave cloth by hand anymore!). Sure it might happen in another 100 years, or another 1000. But that's almost a given for most predictions.

They're not great on paper. They ignore some powerful personal human motivation that we know exists. Perhaps you should say "They're great for robots that can be programmed to think in whatever way is convenient for the academic imagining them".

I don't understand what is being optimized by minimizing the product rw. Reducing w reduces the number of digits, but how does reducing the radix r help with component count? Surely a memory cell that could store 1,000,000 different values in a base-1-million system is just one component, even if it is quite difficult to make. Are they talking about the components needed to perform calculations?

windows also comes with the well-hidden "Problem Steps Recorder" that takes a sequence of screen shots whenever you click something. Doesn't do the text overlay but it's already installed with Windows which makes some things easier.

Next, I hope somebody hacks the Tesla Model S low-battery-capacity model to provide full battery capacity without having to pay for it. After all Tesla is using evil DRM to force people to pay a premium to use what they already have.

Edit: I see they don't offer that option anymore. Problem solved :)

It's hard to understand why spoofing would be illegal. If it fools traders who are relying on buy orders to judge the price, then why don't those traders just accept spoofing exists and not rely so heavily on the unfilled buy orders?

If it's illegal to cancel a buy order immediately after placing it, then perhaps exchanges shouldn't provide that facility? Perhaps there's some legal reason you would immediately cancel an order, and this action somehow doesn't destabilize the market or screw over other traders?

It's quite tractable, stop voting for the same two parties that keep causing the problems over and over again. The trouble is, most of your voting neighbors don't mind so they perpetuate the problem - there's the downside of democracy, two wolves and a sheep.

> Use of force against people who commit such crimes as selecting their own sexual partners, being seen in public with members of the opposite sex, texting members of the opposite sex, being homosexual, etc.

This happens but you tolerate it because it's consistent with your arbitrary local culture. Consider pedophilia (having "wrong" sexual feelings) which comes with chemical castration and an attempt to "cure" it along with imprisonment of course. You don't even have to abuse anyone to suffer some of these consequences. Sound familiar? Have you ever met any self-confessed pedophile who hadn't been arrested for a related crime? Until they're outed, they're forced to keep their feelings secret from everyone because it's a kind of western thought crime. This leads us to imagine that all pedophiles rape children. They don't any more than 60 years ago all homosexuals raped children.

No, the solution would be to get insurance against high insurance costs. This already happens with medical insurance. If you're already sick your insurance costs more. But if you get insurance in advance, before you know you'll be sick, it's cheaper. The same could happen with driving. Get insurance before you've driven, before you know you'll be risky.

It's unfortunate that languages are so monolithic. You want to make a language that does concurrency differently and you end up having to design date format strings! Sad that we still don't have any kind of common libraries or whatever it might take to just do this a couple of times and let language designers pick and choose the preexisting components they want.

It's not just autocracy. The US government is quite aggressive in shutting down websites that spread information it doesn't like. They also sometimes go further and arrest and imprison the operators. Examples include gambling, piracy and drug trading sites.

It might not be practical to send information as light. You'd need a powerful transmitter so your signal can be detected among the noise from stars. It might turn out that sending a spaceship is actually cheaper and just about as fast. The spaceship can steer itself and doesn't spread out the further it goes.

It's because most scientists and the organizations funding them are not interested in advancing our knowledge of nature so much as looking like they're advancing our knowledge of nature. If we want to be less wrong, we need more replication. Scientists don't want to do replication because it advances our knowledge of nature without looking like it is. So instead they keep trying to find fainter and more obscure effects, so faint that they exceed their own abilities to recognize statistical significance. It fools reviewers, journal editors and employers though, so they keep it up.