Slashdot Mirror


User: KeithJM

KeithJM's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
197
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 197

  1. Re:This isn't scaremongering. on Scotland's Independence Vote Could Shake Up Industry · · Score: 1

    Right, but in this analogy DC represents the EU. A better example would have been Northern California splitting from California, but staying in the US.

  2. Re:Are You Kidding? on Geneticists Decry Book On Race and Evolution · · Score: 2

    Scientific discussion of racial differences is not the same as racism. It's amazing how afraid some people are of frank discussion about race. They want to shut it down as soon as it begins, typically by denying the question ("there's no such thing as race!!") or personal attacks like you're doing ("you're racist for even suggesting that!!!").

    And writing a book to be published to the masses on your "scientific" theory rather than submitting it for peer review and publishing it via the normal process isn't a scientific discussion. To me, that raises a red flag as big as all of the "cold fusion" and other physics discoveries that call press conferences rather than publishing papers and letting other scientists analyze their results before the press sees it.

  3. Re:Rather broad leap.. on Siberian Discovery Suggests Almost All Dinosaurs Were Feathered · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's a broad leap, but they didn't just find some random feathered fossils. They found fossils of various species that shared an ancestor very early in the dinosaur line. So it would be like discovering that Humans, Orangutans and Gorillas all had something in common (like a particular lobe of the brain) that we had previously thought only humans had. It would imply the there is a good chance Chimpanzees have it too, because it seems likely to be inherited from that early shared ancestor. They could be wrong, and each of those lines of dinosaurs could have evolved feathers separately. But it's not just a random conclusion.

  4. Re:Yep, they're doing seamless feedback on US Wireless Carriers Shifting To Voice Over LTE · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They won't want to pay for both systems forever though. The reason you'd do something like is partly to make your customers happy, but partly because you realize you're installing two sets of hardware on each tower (one for data, one for telephone calls) and if you treated everything like data, you could save money on purchasing and maintaining the hardware because you'd only need to install one.

  5. Re:Church? on Church Committee Members Say New Group Needed To Watch NSA · · Score: 1

    A former US Senator who was highly distrustful of the NSA in the 70s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... He formed a committee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

  6. But they need to move around in our environment on iRobot CEO: Humanoid Robots Too Expensive To Be the Norm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is a very good point, and for robots designed for a single task that obviously makes sense. But if they have to be able to move around a house or office (with either stairs or an elevator with buttons to push), or open doors, or put dishes away from the dishwasher, etc -- they'll need to be shaped roughly like a human. The more human-shaped they are the more easily they can integrate into a world designed for human-shaped things to get things done. The alternative is to redesign everything in the world to make LESS convenient for people to use them.

  7. Re:Anybody else wish Google would grow a mean side on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    If they did it for a day, that might annoy Apple and Microsoft. If they did it for longer, people would just move away from Google and go somewhere else. If people wanting to buy iPads or Surfaces or look up Windows APIs or whatever can't find their answers on Google, they'll stop going to google to find Thai restaurants and art supply stores too. It's kind of like shutting the government down to force negotiation over a particular law. You better be REALLY sure that the people affected by the shutdown feel as strongly as you do about the particular law before you do it.

  8. Re:Anti-Trust on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    It isn't ironic. The reason they took those actions and the reasons we are discussing it is because it gives them a legal monopoly. It's not like they banded together to buy these patents and then were later surprised when it occurred them that this allowed them to sue their competitors for competing with them.

  9. Re:I would love 4K!!! on 4K Ultra HD Likely To Repeat the Failure of 3D Television · · Score: 1

    But the Macbook Air is a specialist laptop specifically designed to be smaller, thinner and lighter. Apple has lots of laptops with 2560x1600 resolution, you just chose one designed for a different purpose.

  10. Re:Stop Interfering on Ask Slashdot: Experiences Working At a High-Profile Game Studio? · · Score: 2

    In the US, people refer to university and college are interchangeable terms. Normally, when we say "straight out of college" we mean graduating with a bachelor's degree.

  11. Re:News for nerds on When Vote Counting Goes Bad · · Score: 1

    Sure, it's only The Voice; but tomorrow it could be American Idol, and by next month, America's Got Talent."

    And nothing of value was lost?

    That's the joke.

  12. Re:Sperm Donors, That's All We Are on So What If Yahoo's New Dads Get Less Leave Than Moms? · · Score: 1

    Well, your brother married someone with documented psychosis, multiple suicide attempts and a known history of violent behavior. Can you really be sure his judgement is that much better?

  13. Re:How did he encrypt it? on Federal Magistrate Rules That Fifth Amendment Applies To Encryption Keys · · Score: 1

    Another possibility, as the summary implies, they might be trying to get the defendant to provide the key just to prove that the defendant knew how to decrypt the hard drive and had access to the contents. That is a classic 5th amendment protection.

  14. Re:Linux Desktop coming in 2015/2016 on Windows: Not Doomed Yet · · Score: 1

    Tablets are a fad in the consumer space which will fizzle out in 2 years

    iPads are officially 3 years old now. They certainly might still fizzle out -- netbooks were pretty much replaced by tablets, and tablets could be replaced by something else.You need some kind of rationalization beyond just saying they'll fizzle out, though. There is obviously a market for them (and netbooks before them) that traditional PCs don't fill. Something's going to fill that niche.

  15. What is the bottleneck in profitability for planes on Samoa Air Rolling Out "Pay As You Weigh" Fares · · Score: 1

    Lots of discussion here about why a 6' tall 200 pound person (who would be technically overweight, definitely not skinny) wouldn't expect to pay as much as a 5' tall 200 pound person (who would definitely be obese).

    Planes have a limited amount of lift (and can only lift so much weight), but before you hit that limit you'd hit another bottleneck -- planes have limited numbers of seats. Assuming that you can only fit x people on the plane and that planes will always be full to capacity (they all seem to be these days), and assuming their weight/fare formula guarantees that each extra pound is profitable for the airline, it's the to airline's advantage to carry non-obese people.

    If you have 300 seats, you can fill them with the 6' tall 200 pound people, 1 per seat. If you try to fill it with 5' tall 200 pound people, they will take up more than one seat each. You will make less money filling a plane with the obese people than the overweight people who still fit in one seat.

  16. Re:Maybe... on USPS Discriminates Against 'Atheist' Merchandise · · Score: 1

    No one questioned why Christian parents freak out. It was merely used as anecdotal evidence that the number of Christians is not exactly the same as the number of children Christian couples have.

  17. Re:Yes, it's inflation driven on Do Big-Money Acquisitions Mean We're In a Tech Bubble? · · Score: 2

    I never claimed that gold WAS in a bubble, and I never suggested that the value of gold should be related to the dollar. All I did was quote one line and reply to that line. Everything else you think you read (and thought was "interesting, interesting,") came from your own mind, not from my text.

    Assume for a minute that the Dow is a perfect way of tracking what it's intended to track, with no flaws. So it perfectly mirrors the US economy. The reason you buy gold -- rather than invest in the stock market or anything else dependent on a money economy -- is because you assume the money economy may either completely collapse, or at least develop another great depression or something similar. In those cases, even if the Dow reduced to zero, gold should still maintain its value, because it has value that isn't derived from the value of the dollar, unlike the Dow.

    So my point is that expecting the Dow to mirror the US economy (or the Dow) on the way up is ludicrous, since the whole reason to invest in gold is because it WON'T MIRROR THE DOW on the way down. The two derive value from completely different things, and in fact, that's the only reason people buy gold.

    If you think through your own argument (that the dollar is an arbitrary measure of value), you'll realize you agree with me. The Dow is much more closely tied to the dollar than gold is. If gold is growing at the same rate as the Dow, it has somehow become tied to the value of the dollar and the size of the US economy. That would make it a gold bubble, which is specifically what my post said.

  18. Re:Yes, it's inflation driven on Do Big-Money Acquisitions Mean We're In a Tech Bubble? · · Score: 2

    Gold isn't even at historic highs, for that it would have to be 1:1 with DOW, and it's nowhere near

    That's not really a reasonable comparison. First, the Dow is a bit arbitrary -- it follows only a specific group of 30 companies that are supposed to represent the US economy. Here are a couple of articles at different times about what would have happened if Apple had been added:
    when apple was up: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/perfi/stocks/story/2012-02-15/apple-stock-dow-jones-industrial-average/53109426/1
    when apple went down: http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/03/05/apples-not-in-the-dow-thank-goodness/

    Basically, that would completely change the value of the Dow and we would all be panicking right now, as the down dropped with Apple stock. On the other hand, around the election, people would have been crowing about the stock market hitting all-time highs.

    So apart from comparing an historically trackable value, like gold, to an arbitrary measurement like the Dow, they also track different things. You're comparing gold's value to something which is trying to track the overall US economy. And the US economy is MUCH bigger than it was at the turn of the last century. Gold shouldn't mirror the US economy. If it did, THAT would be a definite bubble.

  19. Re:Crap ... on MasterCard Forcing PayPal To Pay Higher Fees · · Score: 1

    If I read your post correctly, you should be fine. You're saying you don't do business with Paypal. Then why should you care if Paypal is charged higher fees? I also didn't see anything in the article about anyone suing anyone (though I wouldn't rule that out).

  20. Re:And those expensive E-books... on Apple Holds Firm As Publishers Settle With DoJ Over e-Book Pricing · · Score: 1

    What does it even mean to post a copy online and then "take your machines down?" Where are you posting it, Reddit? Even without any DRM you still need a server to be able sell it online. For instance, Apple doesn't have any DRM on music they sell, and I assume Amazon doesn't either. But they still spend quite a bit on software development, servers, network bandwidth and vendor contracts to be ABLE to sell it. It doesn't cost them $1 per song to sell it, but it's not $0.

  21. Re:Good on Indiana Nurses Fired After Refusing Flu Shots On Religious Grounds · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Check out the link on the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons in the summary:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physicians_and_Surgeons

    Among other things, their official positions include that the HIV virus doesn't cause AIDS, human activity hasn't contributed to climate change, the FDA is unconstitutional, that medicare is "evil", and that people are conspiring to replace creationism with evolution. (also, that requiring mandatory immunizations is wrong. They aren't a medical advocacy group, they are a political advocacy group. If they quote peer-reviewed research that shows immunizations aren't effective (and not from their journal) then it will deserve a citation in response. Until then, they are just making stuff up.

  22. Re:All power comes at a price on How Yucca Mountain Was Killed · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I think ethanol is an attempt to solve the second problem -- how do you replace petroleum products as a way to move energy around. Big, heavy batteries struggle to give you 100 miles range while gas can give you 400 pretty easily. Ethanol lets us inefficiently (from an amount of power used) store power in a very efficient form.

    Really, from a power production point of view ethanol is similar to solar power. You just have plants producing usable energy from the sun instead of solar panels, and that process is far more efficient than our solar panels. It's the conversion that sucks.

  23. Re:All power comes at a price on How Yucca Mountain Was Killed · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a Seattleite, I'll point out that solar energy isn't the solution everywhere. I think the real issue is that we can't just choose a single energy source and decide it is going to replace oil. If you look at the numbers, we don't grow enough corn to make enough ethanol to do it (and we grow a ton of corn). We don't receive enough sunlight to completely replace oil with sunlight with our current solar panels without covering most of the planet, etc. What we can do is use multiple sources to generate electricity, and work to improve battery technology so we can more efficiently cart it around (oil is a really efficient way to transport energy). We don't need to pick one. We can use a bunch of them, and Seattle can use the tide while Arizona uses the sun.

  24. Re:I agree... on Google Outage Shows Risk of Doing Business In China · · Score: 3, Informative

    The phrase is "toed" the line, as in, someone drew a line in the sand and you are sticking your toe across the line, challenging them.

    Close. Toeing the line means you keep your ties right at the line without crossing it, thus you are specifically obeying all of the rules and not challenging authority.

  25. Re:Jedi Town coming to Disneyland on Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm, Star Wars Episode 7 Due In 2015 · · Score: 1

    Have you ever ridden the Star Tours ride? It's far more cheesy than that. Seriously. Pee Wee Herman does the voice work, and George Lucas makes a cameo appearance at the end.