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User: franoreilly

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  1. Re:Touch typing defense on How To Steal ATM PINs With a Thermal Camera · · Score: 2

    Makes sense. Even though I cover my typing hand with my other hand, I always add a few more fake keypresses so that any camera can't make a rough guess, judging by the quadrant of the image showing slight movement, which key was actually pressed. So now I have to do this for infra red coverage also. Great.

  2. Re:It's still natural selection on Darwinian Evolution Considered As a Phase · · Score: 1

    There's nothing fundamentally different being mooted here.

    We are talking about the very early stages of life when I imagine that the boundary between separate organisms itself was probably very poorly defined compared to today's life forms; so in that sort of environment, a different horizontal mechanism of gene propagation could well have been the primary one.

    The mechanism may be somewhat different to most of what happens today, but the core concept of Dawkins' "selfish gene" is unchanged, where the propagation of the gene, not the type of organism, is selected for,

  3. Ireland got there earlier, actually on Minnesota Introduces World's First Carbon Tariff · · Score: 1

    Since the budget on 9th December, we've had a carbon tax in Ireland, at €15 per tonne. See http://www.moneyguideireland.com/new-carbon-tax-in-budget-2010.html

  4. Re:NHS Explains on Candy Linked To Violence In Study · · Score: 1

    This paper looks suspiciously like data-mining to find an hypothesis. It's based on a cohort study that was not specifically designed for finding a correlation of this type. For example, it did not find out what the family income was.

    An alternative hypothesis might therefore be that the amount of sweets you eat at age 10 is a predictor of what socio-economic group you're in then.

  5. Need to be embedded "in the world" on Translation Software That Learns by Reading · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If all they're talking about is syntactic analysis, it will never be enough. Semantic knowledge is essential for complete "understanding" of language, and that can only be attained by an agent that can interact with the world and humans and learn within that context.