I was trying to think of an anonymous username, so I went with tauta_krypta, which means something like "these secret things" in ancient Greek.

There's nothing wrong with peace, wealth and education, but we don't need to force Christianity or all of western culture on anyone.

We need to obliterate the sense of identity in the middle east, fill it with Christian missionaries, propaganda of the American dream, and build so many factories and so much infrastructure that ISIS couldn't hope to destroy it. We need to replace their way of life with our own

This really isn't the right reaction – fear of this happening is exactly why people join terrorist groups.

I fed it a quite technical report on simulating model rocket aerodynamics (13000 words), which I wrote for school. Probably not quite the best text to use, but the results are still fun:

You are inner-directed, skeptical and strict.

You are imaginative: you have a wild imagination. You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. And you are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself.

You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of prestige.

You are relatively unconcerned with both taking pleasure in life and helping others. You prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment. And you think people can handle their own business without interference.

This is great.

Have you read the Feynman Lectures on Physics? They roughly cover a three year university course, but are quite readable and are available for free online here. (I hear that the last one does quantum mechanics in a different way from how it's done now, so it might not be as good a bet as the first two.)

autism isn't considered a mental illness

Adding to this, synesthesia is definitely not a mental illness. It would depend on exactly what sort it is, but as far as I am aware it is only very rarely even an inconvenience – Wikipedia describes it as a "neurological phenomenon", which seems about right.

There are proper EU standards for free-range; also the standard for organic chicken and eggs are even higher.

Can't you just buy free-range chicken and eggs? Free range chicken is easy to find in the UK.

I joined Facebook because apparently these days Facebook messenger is all anyone uses for communication?! I'm pretty sure I haven't posted anything yet though.

From actually looking at the comment section, almost all the comments seem to be critical, and about equal refer to him as male or female, with no particularly obvious difference (most comments don't refer to his gender at all). I wouldn't say there is any particular evidence that the criticism is related to perceptions of his gender.

Good point – I was imagining something with directed beams, but looking it up the idea does seem to be just to spread light everywhere. I'm guessing anything commercial will either use light so dim you don't notice it, or either infrared or ultraviolet, though – I suppose if it was just integrated into light bulbs that would work, as long as you want the light on (although it might still be cheaper to use a red laser with green and blue LEDs to make the overall lighting white).

Sorry, I meant why white lasers in particular, as opposed to e.g. red lasers. I suppose there's some extra bandwidth from having three channels, but I'm not sure this technique would actually result in a cheaper and faster system than using existing tech.

It's an actual prototype. The problem is that no one has a theoretical basis for why it would work, except for some mumbling about virtual particles.

white laser Li-Fi could be 10 to 100 times faster than LED based Li-Fi currently still under development.

Can anyone give a reason why you'd want to use a white laser for Li-Fi?

There's no point flipping J over, because the rule doesn't say anything about cards which don't have a vowel on the letter side. There's no point flipping 2 over, because if it isn't a vowel then the rule doesn't specify anything, and if it is a vowel, then the number is even anyway, so the rule still holds. On the other hand, if 9 has a vowel on the opposite side, the rule is incorrect, so you have to flip it over to check. Likewise, if U has an odd number on the opposite side, the rule is also incorrect, so you have to flip it over too.

But you get to flip the coin, so you can put that to your own advantage. Besides, the bias in flipping coins is only around 1%, which is far less than the 2x difference between what you might win and what you might lose. (Incidentally, when flipping coins, the important factor is which way up the coin starts – weight is only more important when spinning the coin).

I got them all right; how did other people do?

Exactly – I mean, skirts vs trousers is to do with gender, but male t-shirts vs female t-shirts is to do with body shape, and trying to find a compromise will just ensure they don't fit anyone properly.

If you use a sufficiently old version of any browser or Java or Flash I can guarantee that any reasonably motivated hacker could find an exploit that'll work for it.

Mythbusters did a similar thing with metronomes: you can see part of the episode here.

I think it's true that Apple generally do better with less RAM, but in the case of web browsing its basically inevitable that you'll use a large amount of RAM, and the more you have, the better the performance.

At any rate, I haven't had any issues with web browsing at all on a Moto X 2014 with 2GB RAM.

SpaceX Pad Abort Test

Better update Pluto on that!

The thing is, even if they do pass a law, all it'll do is hurt UK software companies trying to make messaging services with encryption, and security researchers. (And maybe I'll have to make sure I use Google's DNS before I can download GnuPG)

Google tends to have rather higher code quality than most, though, and presumably even more care is put in for safety-critical things.

You might be interested in Scott Adams' "Rationality Engine", which is a similar sort of idea for actually making good debates, just in text rather than as a video. Basically, two opposing parties put forward arguments, the community tries to find good sources for and against each argument, and then there is an attempt at a conclusion.

Just to add on the English side, it's "reminded", not "remembered", in this context.

In the UK, you have to pay 10% (I think) of your wages towards it for the first 30 years, but after that its completely gone. Also, it doesn't affect your credit score at all.

This is interesting in comparison to the UK, where the loan is just written off after 30 years, and there isn't any sort of moral pressure to pay it. The idea seems to be that if you are well paid, you should retrospectively pay for your education, and otherwise the government will pay.