What causes the emotion of happiness? Serotonin? Dopamine? Endorphins? But what do these chemicals do except trigger receptor sites or cause further chemical reactions. What is being modulated to create that emotion? Is it an EEG pattern in the brain perhaps that modulates something else? The experience of consciousness is still a mystery...

It seems like Chrome OS already won the usability contest and has had significant commercial success. It's funny because Chrome OS is so easy to use and polished that even techies assume it's not linux. Just flip a switch though and you've got a bash shell and you can install an Ubuntu system on top of it.

Here's an example of a guy easily turning these $199 chrome books into ubuntu based coding machines:

http://blog.codestarter.org/po...

30 years after the original 1984 commercial the rebels have been co-opted and are now partnering with big brother. That would make a great commercial: "2014". You could have the olympian women up on the screen and everything's colorful and everyone has prettier outfits but they're all still obedient slaves.

It seems like if there's one issue that rich people all over the world are throughly obsessed with, it's population control. It's all wrapped up with the future being dominated by visions of eco-doom (e.g Global Warming/Overpopulation/Peak Oil). Nobody can see a different future. It's pathetic.

Why don't you just get an AGM Battery. These batteries don't emit hydrogen, don't require watering and won't cause problems if they tip over. Sure they're more expensive, but they're so much easier to work with.

2004: Why is that website URL at the top of Google for that keyword? Answer: "The algorithm"

2019: Why did that fully autonomous weapon kill that person? Answer: "The algorithm"

That assumes that we know as much physics as they do. They might be using some medium to communicate that we haven't even discovered yet.

What are they going to do when they find out it doesn't work for smart people or people who make conscious decisions to alter their behavior based on their own research? They will just be ignored as outliers because they don't fit in to the statistical modeling. How does the machine learning algorithm model a learning human unless it knows where they're going before they do? What if people inside the model start computing social interactions based on a different model? Do we prohibit these people from evolving their behavior because they don't live inside the machine's conception of how they should act?

If you look at the heatmap of downtown San Francisco and you click off Apple you'll see that there are plenty of android users in wealthy areas. The apple red just blocks you from seeing the android blue underneath. So IMHO, Android has a lot of wealthy users but Apple only has wealthy users.

See my comments a couple months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

You bitcoin guys think you can push buttons on your computer and code around the system. So naive.
Sorry to be a pessimist, but they can just say anyone transferring bitcoin to another party without going through a KYC compliant intermediary is money laundering and then send the swat team out to whatever ip they can track down via NSA whatever. Game. Set. Match. Banks win as usual, all done. They'll take it down just like Pirate Bay, etc.
Can someone tell me how people think the cryptonerds can win here? I'll be over here munching on my popcorn thank you.

Remember when 1 bread winner could provide for a family in the 1950s? That was before women joined the workforce in mass and drove down wages by competing with men for jobs. It's all so defensible when it's masked as women's rights but it's really about cheap labor.

People getting confused about currency and money is something that is a very very old phenomenon. This article is no exception.

All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from a want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.
- Letter to Thomas Jefferson (23 August 1787), The Works of John Adams

It's really a "geek only" tool but emacs org-mode is great for me for organizing my work. The big plus is that the format is plain text so you can use version control to manage it. I use drop box and leave the files on there. I usually use one per project and then a master file.

Here's a specific guide to using it with GTD: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-gtd-etc.html

The online exercises for this course are great! They change every time so one can practice until one has mastered the concept. This was the real missing component in these online math courses. Most textbooks I've looked at don't have answers to exercises which makes it difficult to check that one has truly mastered the material without a teacher to act as a gatekeeper to the right answers.

You just have to send your id in the bottom 64 bits of your ipv6 address to access the internet. Why make the address space so large unless you were going to stuff authentication credentials into every packet? Then they could easily just turn you off whenever necessary.