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User: mestar

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Comments · 365

  1. Re:So, what's the correction? on Evidence of a Correction To the Speed of Light · · Score: 1

    So, when a photon travels trough a optical fiber cable, now does it know when to turn?

    Total reflection you say? So, it goes near all those electrons in atoms, and then it only decides to turn once there will be no more atoms in it's current path?

  2. Re:So, what's the correction? on Evidence of a Correction To the Speed of Light · · Score: 1

    Why is nobody mentioning the fact that the light particle does not take a single route trough space, but travels trough it in all possible ways.

  3. Re:Simpsons...errr....Matt Ridley did it on The Game Theory of Life · · Score: 1

    Or in the "Red Queen."

    So much time would be saved, and so much more understanding of evolution would be had, if sexual selection was thought in schools. My guess is that this isn't done be because of the word sex in the name.

    In the context of the article:

    survival of the fittest -> narrows the gene pool
    sexual selection -> increases variation in the gene pool

    The fist part prunes the "bad" genes. The sexual part actually encourages any "bad" genes that became sexually attractive by any random start.

    The examples are peacocks tail, deer's antlers and human brain.

  4. Re:Occulus Rift on 4K Monitors: Not Now, But Soon · · Score: 1

    "Why spend a shitload of money of a new 4K screen and the video card necessary for an acceptable game experience when I'll be able to do VR with a fraction of the cost and with my existing hardware setup?"

    Oh boy, somebody is going to get very disappointed.

  5. Re:Occulus Rift on 4K Monitors: Not Now, But Soon · · Score: 1

    The word "flat", it doesn't mean what you mean it means.

  6. Re: Progenitors? on Aliens and the Fermi Paradox · · Score: 0

    I would recommend an excellent book "The Red Queen" by Ridley.

    It explains why sexual selection pushes many organism features that are in fact handicaps for survival.

    Human brain has all the characteristics of a feature evolved to be a handicap. It uses 40% of total energy, it evolved quickly, and we seemed to survive without it being such a big organ before.

    Once you have a large brain and language, it becomes harder to just look at the genetic evolution, since it becomes a genetic/memetic evolution. And it is this person/culture complex that is seemingly most evolutionary successful thing.

    One could also argue that is it in fact bacteria that are evolutionary most successful organisms on earth.

    I would agree that it is hard to argue that a huge brain is a survival handicap. It may have started that way, but it got useful in all sort of ways. And also, we all look at this problem from the brain's perspective, since this is what we actually are, and not from the genes' perspectives. Also, being in a long non-food crunch situation also makes those 'details' hard to see.

  7. Re:What's mysterious? on Aliens and the Fermi Paradox · · Score: 1

    Or if it is coming, it is coming in the form of a simple single cell size, frozen in space, riding a simple rock. Perhaps that is how we got here. (plus the 3 billion years of evolution.)

  8. Re:Progenitors? on Aliens and the Fermi Paradox · · Score: 2

    And fire. Not much chance of using fire in the oceans.

  9. Re:Progenitors? on Aliens and the Fermi Paradox · · Score: 1

    Excellent points.

    Maybe the Earth is just lucky to contains all sorts of frequencies with various periods that hugely help evolution.

    Daily temperature cycles, yearly temp cycles, ice ages, continents moving around, volcanos with huge cycles.

    Perhaps we got lucky that the earth is not locked with the sun, that is, only one side always pointing to the sun. Perhaps we had some lucky series of large comet collisions that kept those cycles going. This could be quite rare thing in the universe.

  10. Re:Progenitors? on Aliens and the Fermi Paradox · · Score: 1, Interesting

    That is a very simple and probably the most important explanation.

    Life does not need intelligence. In fact intelligence itself is a handicap, and a product of sexual selection and its handicap principle. (Same with elks' antlers and peacocks' tails.)

    We don't know how long do intelligent species exist. By using one smoothing technique, one can say that they live for average of 200k years.

    It's worse for nuclear civilisations. A guess by the same rule would say that they live for around 100 or so years.

  11. Re:objective list on Wikipedia Mining Algorithm Reveals the Most Influential People In History · · Score: 1

    In that list of 100 most influential persons, who is on the number 11?

  12. Re:objective list on Wikipedia Mining Algorithm Reveals the Most Influential People In History · · Score: 2

    Where is the actual list?

  13. Re:Interesting wrinkle on Microsoft Confirms Disconnecting Kinect Gives Devs 10% More GPU Horsepower · · Score: 2

    And uses random forests to identify humans in the 3d space it sees, and also locate 3d positions of ten or twenty of their body parts. Just some details of what 10% does.

  14. Re:Happy to see it. on Pirate Bay Sports-Content Uploader Faces $32m Lawsuit · · Score: 0

    Did you even read the post you are responding to? MS has no 5000000 billion dollars.

  15. congrats on UN Report Reveals Odds of Being Murdered Country By Country · · Score: 1

    I want to congratulate that person that made an unsortable excel. What a superb idea that was.

  16. Re:Two Games on A Rock Paper Scissors Brainteaser · · Score: 1

    How the fck would you manage to lose 4/6 of the time to an opponent who must play rock at least 50% of the time?

  17. Re:You think programming's bad? on Toward Better Programming · · Score: 1

    "How about the fact that on a quad core, 16 gigabyte, 2.4 gigahertz computer, it can't buffer a few keystrokes as I type *while* the google page loads?"

    Almost everything is this fucked up, and nobody seems to notice it.

  18. Re:It is a pyramid game on MtGox Files For Bankruptcy Protection · · Score: 1

    And as long as an exchange exists, you can exchange your bitcoins for money, and thus use them for whatever you want.

    Also, Bitpay is nothing but an external branch of a bitcoin exchange.

  19. shortest path? on Wolfram Language Demo Impresses · · Score: 0

    At 3.29 in the video, if you connect Greece to Austria, and disconnect Porgugal from Iceland, you save about 1500 km.

  20. Re:Is MtGox Bitcoin? on Mt. Gox Shuts Down: Collapse Should Come As No Surprise · · Score: 1

    "3) Banks owe each other a lot of money. If a large enough bank goes down, it can turn another "good" bank into a "bad" bank simply because that bank was holding a lot of paper from the bank that died"

    No, this does not "turn" it bad. This means the bank was bad the whole time.

  21. Re:Is MtGox Bitcoin? on Mt. Gox Shuts Down: Collapse Should Come As No Surprise · · Score: 1

    "coinbase now being the most popular."

    What?

    http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=24h

  22. Any way to disable beta? on Wozniak To Apple: Consider Building an Android Phone · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Any way to disable beta?

  23. Re:Bitcoin is vulernable to government manipulatio on A Rebuttal To Charles Stross About Bitcoin · · Score: 1

    "But... people don't need to keep mining bitcoins"

    So, you can buy a machine that prints money and all you need is to plug it in, and you are saying people are not going to do that? Are you crazy?

  24. Re:Bitcoin is vulernable to government manipulatio on A Rebuttal To Charles Stross About Bitcoin · · Score: 1

    "The relative value of a bit coin will always rely on demand, if people want to use them and have to compete for them on the market then the value goes up, if not it goes down."

    Yes, and once that supply and demand had determined the price of Bitcoin, then you know how much will miners tend to spend on electricity, and so you also know how much new investments are need for the price to stay the same.

  25. Re:Bitcoin is vulernable to government manipulatio on A Rebuttal To Charles Stross About Bitcoin · · Score: 2

    Fresh investments are needed because Bitcoin mining network as a whole, has a real world bills to pay. That money has to come from somewhere.

    If a miner decides not to sell fresh Bitcoins, it is the same as if he himself invested his cash into Bitcoins. So, new cash has to come from somewhere, and miners have a strong reason to sell. So, it's close to $3.6 million daily fresh cash, or the price of Bitcoins goes down.

    The mysterious thing is why this fact that the Bitcoin price on the exchanges causes the total electricity cost of the network to follow it, is not wildly known.