Comment: Re:Easy (Score 2) 231
The kids will never learn, but I wager the dog won't piss on it more than once.
Yeah, but how is the dog supposed to pass that knowledge onto its successor?
Through the Baldwin effect, presumably.
Comment: Re:Any Oculus Rift developers in the house? (Score 1) 88
The eye doesn't see, the brain does. The eye simply collects light and other signals (like the aforementioned focus thing) and transmits them to the brain, where the image is actually formed -- the image landing on the retina, for instance, is upside down and backwards. But you see things right side up and not backwards; the brain does that.
I agree with the gist of your argument; however, I think you've got the specifics wrong. Fun fact: human retina is actually considered part of the brain.
Comment: Re:As of 8 APR 13 0624CDT there are (Score 1) 163
58 respondents with a sense of humor out of 1793
With a sense of humor or just over soft quota.
Comment: Re:TeX for Math (Score 1) 300
Subscripts (CO2), superscripts (cd/m2), funny symbols (tensorial multiplication, degree, aleph, ...), equations (including those with funny symbols in superscripts -- e.g. dagger), arrows (chemical reactions) -- to name a few off the top of my head.
Comment: Re:reductio ad absurdum (Score 1) 1121
Fair point. But with a finite upper bound for all computation that can be performed before the entropic death of the universe, if you can make these ticks exponentially longer, you will eventually find out.
Comment: Re:reductio ad absurdum (Score 1) 1121
Now how could one of my simulated subjects prove or disprove that they weren't living in my intelligently designed simulated universe, with me as their god, and that the simulation hadn't only started 6 seconds ago? I can't see a way.
Easily. They would only have to start observing so many individual events at once that you'd run of out computing power trying to simulate them all in all their detail.
Comment: Re:Easy... (Score 1) 1121
And from those he created the Word. And there were two Bytes in the Word
Was the Word big-endian or little-endian?
Comment: Re:128 bit floats: when? (Score 1) 176
What is the use for them? for "personal" use, floats are all you will ever need. Many physics computation stays in single precision to avoid doubling the memory usage. I guess fluid mecanic computation use double, but is there really a use for quad. Who needs that kind of precisions?
Not all uses are personal and the fact that some physics calculations trade precision for memory doesn't mean that all of them do.
One example could be matrix inversions with somewhat ill-conditioned matrices. When you know you're going to lose 14 digits of precision inverting the matrix, you'd better have a lot of headroom. Cue quad floats.
The car analogy that comes to mind is people often do sound mixing with 32-bit audio even though you 16-bit audio is perfectly fine for listening to the product.
Comment: Re:So.... (Score 1) 915
It wasn't him, it was his altar ego.
Comment: Re:does it have a FBI unlock code? (Score 1) 154
The system for destroying anything cannot be provably secure. Nevermind cloning the device and working on a copy.
Comment: Re:does it have a FBI unlock code? (Score 1) 154
What about fake back doors? How do you determine which back door is the real door?
By looking at the entropy of the result.
Comment: Re:does it have a FBI unlock code? (Score 1) 154
But that's not equivalent to having a backdoor to the device. If I catch a courier, who never knew the key code, no prison, gun or court order will do me any good. With a backdoor, however...
Comment: Re:Enjoy? (Score 2) 321
I object.
Comment: Re:Any Means Necessary? (Score 1) 283
It probably means that one doesn't care about whether it's from coffee, tea, energy drinks, as long as it contains caffeine. Also, a fun fact, caffeine can be trivially cold-water extracted from caffeine+ASA pills. The resultant powder can be snorted.