I was a backer. Were you? Or do you feel compelling to complain on behalf of other people?

I got the main thing I backed it for - a dev kit.

Facebook buying them means an investment in learning to program for the Rift is probably 1000x more useful than it would have been otherwise.

I understand people are wary of Facebook, and for good reason. But I have seen huge upsides with pretty much no downside since Facebook bought the company.

If I wanted ritual in my life, I would have become a priest and pursued my career with extreme political ambition so I could vote for the freaking pope.

I guess you've never read an article in your life about mobilizing the voters who are too lazy (or metabolically downtrodden from their Cheetos and Coke diets) to physically show up at a polling station?

Paper is a physical token. Reliably obtaining exactly one unambiguous, untamperable physical token with confidentiality from each adult member of society—the vast majority of which are collected on the same day—hasn't exactly proven to be an easy problem, especially when broadened to include public trust—that every voter understands and believes the process to have all of these properties (to at least a substantial degree).

Electronic voting vastly reduces the complexity on the collection side, but then the tamperability problem looms supreme, but this could almost be solved with enough crypto cleverness, except that the public trust story then requires a tiny bit of numeracy beyond grade six math.

Ritual, however, is accessible to a four-year old.

The same four-year olds who are unfortunately not yet equipped with fully functioning batshit detectors.

I don't want to abolish ritual. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

and people still don't learn? If you find something like this keep your mouth shut. No good will come from you bring it to their attention.

Starbucks is a nasty company. Its CEO Howard Schultz is a fanatical Zionist; if you patronize Starbucks, you're supporting Israeli genocide.

Sony's headset is meant to reproject frames before render as needed to convert 60+FPS into steady 120FPS.

That seems fine as far as display goes, but part of that requirement for 90+FPS is that head-tracking is congruent... if "real" tracking only is happening at 60FPS, will the faster display framerate really matter as far as people feeling sick after a while (or in some cases instantly...)

Not necessarily. Greenland ice core records show that in the past the planet has seen temperature shifts of up to 7 C in as little as 30 years. 7 C is huge. It's like transporting Moscow to Rome. Of course, we have no idea what caused such rapid changes in the past. It wasn't CO2 levels, or particulates.

I would. If one or more isolated populations managed to survive more than a couple of generations after the event, I think it's highly likely that they'd continue to survive indefinitely. The worst of the changes would be past, and they'd clearly have learned how to survive in the new environment, else they'd have died sooner.

Human intelligence makes us highly adaptable, as evidenced by the extraordinary diversity of environments in which we live, and lived even before the advent of modern technology. Humans who lack the necessary knowledge of how to survive in a particular environment are at severe risk of death any place on the planet, but if they manage to survive for even a year or two, odds are that they'll have learned enough to be able to extend that time almost indefinitely.

Chrome starts up for me a lot faster than Firefox and runs much smoother. Especially on those stupid forever scrolling pages. Yeah I know code should be efficient with memory but these days there is no excuse for having less than 4Gb. Times change. Plus Chrome uses html5 playback on Youtube and supports the higher framerates (50/60 fps).

This StackExchange question has a nice answer showing why you have to be at the equator to have a geostationary orbit...

Someone else replied already and explained this, though that seems to have attracted a troll of some sort.

Basically, the idea is that people on bikes have better awareness of road conditions as they should be traveling cautiously at lower speeds and aware of their surroundings more than a vehicle driver would be. They can therefore approach an intersection with a stop sign the same way a driver in a car would a yield sign:
1. Slow down, checking for traffic in all other directions
2. If there's no other traffic, proceed without coming to a complete stop

Moreover, it can actually be more dangerous for a bike rider to come to a complete stop. It is much slower for a bike to accelerate from a complete stop than from a slow yield. That puts the bike rider in the intersection for longer, making it more likely that they'll be hit by someone speeding along in another direction, who was out of sight when the biker started. A car in this situation can gun it; a bike rider in a low gear just gets hit.

Next, it's safer on bike riders to take back roads than it is major arteries. In my area, bikers can take the main road with all its traffic and traffic lights, or they can take one of the collector streets in my neighborhood. If they take the main road, they might not have to stop as much, but they are more likely to be hurt in an accident. The neighborhood collector has a lot of stop signs, but if they can treat those as yields then they can take it also without stopping much and be safer due to less overall traffic and slower car speeds.

Finally, not every biker is in tip-top shape. Letting them bike without having to restart from a complete stop as often makes it easier on the biker, which keeps them biking, which is healthier for them and might take a car off the road. For people who don't give a damn about biker safety, but hate sitting in traffic, this benefit is for you.

This is incorrect.

If you are standing at sea level in a cave deep inside a mountain, acceleration will be less than 9.81 m/s^2. That's the point of the article. The mountain above you is pushing down into the mantle, displacing denser mantle material, so between you and the core is less mantle than if you were on a boat in the sea.

The question is, would he have done this even if not running for president?

The answer is obviously yes, based on past behavior. Rand Paul has been one of the few people willing to go on record voting against things he does not agree with, instead of not voting at all.

So while of course some element of it is PR, that is not the core reason as to why he did this.

Which is doubly annoying/funny because Google, at least, doesn't give people brain teasers.

researchers say that's up for interpretation

What good is a law if it cannot let the government arrest Sandor silence anyone arbitrarily based on the prevailing political winds?

Why not an RC Zeppelin with nuclear RTG powered fans, that also uses excess power to generate replacement hydrogen from ambient moisture.

Now THAT sucker would be up there forever. I'd live in one if I could.