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User: stymy

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  1. Re:Chip and PIN on Banks Report Credit Card Breach At Home Depot · · Score: 1

    Doesn't the authentication of Bitcoin transfers take something like half an hour? That doesn't exactly cut it for retail stores.

  2. Re:Munich did it already on Switching From Microsoft Office To LibreOffice Saves Toulouse 1 Million Euros · · Score: 1

    You would use a 9-year-long migration as a success story? Also, Excel has many useful features not in Calc, that I couldn't live without. I'm an actuary, and none probably work for a municipality, but I can see accountants and the like getting a lot of use out of them.

  3. Re:hahaha! on House Majority Leader Defeated In Primary · · Score: 1

    Except that 70% of Republicans in that district are in favor of immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship, so essentially what Cantor was proposing. If that's among the Republicans, I would expect people to the left of that to me more in favor of it. Where are those polls you talk about?
    Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...

  4. Re:meaningless, unless the geothermal is new on Geothermal Heat Contributing To West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melting · · Score: 1

    Except that millions of years ago the poles had no ice cap.

  5. Re:Disregard the percentages on Wikipedia Medical Articles Found To Have High Error Rate · · Score: 1

    You had me, up until you referenced how many articles Wikipedia has. That shows you don't understand how sample sizes work, and thus statistics pretty much at all. http://www.angrymath.com/2010/...

  6. Re:Hurray for Japan on First Arrest In Japan For 3D-Printed Guns · · Score: 1

    I don't think just looking at rate of gun ownership is the answer. At least in North America, most gun homicides are committed with handguns, but most of the guns in Canada are rifles and shotguns, so I think it's quite possible there's a very strong correlation between rate of handgun ownership and murder rate.

  7. Re:Of 1000? on Survey: 56 Percent of US Developers Expect To Become Millionaires · · Score: 1

    If you have a mortgage on a decent apartment or house in SF or NY, between that and your 101k that's probably at least a million by the time you pay off the place.

  8. Re:Comparison from a real climate modeler on How Well Do Our Climate Models Match Our Observations? · · Score: 2

    The error bars on some of those graphs are so monstrously large it would be almost impossible for the real data to fall outside that range (in the first one, the margin of error for the forecast grows to a range of almost 0 degrees to 1). Anything with that much error has no real predictive value whatsoever.

  9. BlackBerrys only store stuff in foreign servers by default. You can set up your own servers, with end-to-end encryption from them to the phones, and that's presumably what the Swedish police has done.

  10. Re:Why sell mining rigs? on The Bitcoin Death Star: KnC Plans 10 Megawatt Data Center In Sweden · · Score: 1

    Bitcoin prices are very volatile. It's a death knell for a business if your revenue can drop by 50% or more in the space of a few weeks. You'd need to keep a ton of cash on hand just in case. While you might make more money in the long run mining bitcoins rather than selling rigs, it's very hard to run a real business that way. Selling the rigs is the lower-risk, lower-reward option.

  11. Re:I TOO CAN HAVE RECORD REVENUE IF !! on Microsoft Reports Record Revenue · · Score: 1

    They just started that product line. Microsoft looks at the long-term more than other companies. For example, the XBox originally made them lose billions, but now the newer versions are raking in the dough.

  12. Re:"Concerns" on Paging Dr. MacGyver: Maker Movement Comes To Medical Gear · · Score: 1

    Generally, hearing aids only raise the volume for very select frequencies. What she's done is probably just ramped up the volume for everything. So she could end up with far worse hearing loss.

  13. Re:Collusion, in tech? on Silicon Valley Workers May Pursue Salary-Fixing Lawsuit · · Score: 1

    Regular workers vastly outnumber management. Pay of C*O level people at S&P 500 companies is generally a decimal of their total expenses, so axing their pay really won't change much for the average worker.

  14. Re:some facts on Federal Judge Rules Chicago's Ban On Licensed Gun Dealers Unconstitutional · · Score: 1

    Considering most murders are committed with handguns, just the overall rate of gun ownership is pretty meaningless. I don't know about Iceland, but here in Canada, there are tons of rifles and shotguns, but very few pistols and revolvers. I expect European countries with a high rate of gun ownership will be similar.

  15. Re:"Dark Market"? on Some Londoners Cut Off As Failed Copper Thieves Take Fiber · · Score: 1

    I think the difference is that black market is strictly illegal, while dark market includes legit businesses that sometimes buy stolen goods (like copper lines, etc.) on the side.

  16. Re:Teach to the test on New Education Performance Data Published: Asia Dominates · · Score: 1

    It's not just like that in Asia. When I came to Canada from Argentina, I had just finished grade 3, and I was given a bunch of tests to see what my level was. In particular, I was tested at a Grade 9 level in Math, and I wasn't privately tutored or anything like that.

    Of course, my parents could afford to send me to a good private school, where I worked very hard. Argentina as a whole did rather poorly on this test because those whose parents don't have money go to schools with no budget for anything and teachers that are on strike half the time.

    That said, I never had any homework, and the school didn't filter incoming students with tests or whatever, anyone who could pay could get in. However, the work was rather hard. For example, in grade 3, one was expected to write 3-5 pages by hand for a 1-hour test. In Canada, I only started to see that kind of crunch in grade 10.

  17. Re:Officials say? on Officials Say HealthCare.gov Site Now Performing Well · · Score: 1

    Just because people with money have access to very good care in the US does not make a good system, which involves the whole population. On average, pretty much all other OECD get better results for far less money (both as a %age of GDP, and in absolute terms).

  18. Re:Honesty is never treasured in corporate world on The Best Way To Blow the Whistle · · Score: 1

    No, in many cases it's the exact opposite. If you took the stuff people say to each other in Argentina at face value, you'd think the country was made of the most racist and belligerent people on the planet.

  19. Re:Different? Indeed. on Nasdaq 4000 — This Time It's Different? · · Score: 1

    Japan's economy has been crippled because of deflation over the last 2 decades, not inflation as you suggest. Any reasonable economic indicator shows that if anything, inflation is too low right now.

  20. Re:Phases of Evolution on Elon Musk Talks About the Importance of Physics, Criticizes the MBA · · Score: 1

    I get the feeling Musk & Tesla are purposely drumming up the fire non-story as a way to draw attention away from how they missed expectations last quarter. In particular they lost 38 million last quarter, which is not as much as a year ago. However, with the heavy R&D done, since they got a good car to market, they should start actually generating revenue soon, but they also cut sales forecasts. So the stock tanked because of missing the expectations, but Musk is probably trying to get people to think the drop was due to the fires.

  21. Re:in sue happy america on Woman Facing $3,500 Fine For Posting Online Review · · Score: 0

    Especially if you load it with rock salt (I had kind of a wild childhood).

  22. Re:The real issue on Weak Statistical Standards Implicated In Scientific Irreproducibility · · Score: 1

    Actually, there is a really good reason to use least-squares regression. A model that minimizes squared error is guaranteed to minimize the variance of error, obviously. Now assume that in a model you have taken into account all variables that have real predictive value, and are fairly independent. Then your error should be normally distributed, and randomly over the range of your data by the Central Limit Theorem. So if your data looks like that after fitting the model, your model probably has very good real predictive value. Note that this definitely may not hold for data where there is no clear causative link, I assume that the variables chosen to predict the response have clear reasons to provide predictive value. For example, if trying to predict the yield of a farm, the soil type, rainfall, sun coverage, and so forth clearly have a part in the resulting yield, but what the farmer drinks on a Sunday night might not, so it's best to exclude from the model even if the variable has a p-value0.05.

  23. The Central Limit Theorem doesn't state that the samples are normally distributed, but their mean (average). So the average surface area, volume, and diameter will all be normally distributed for a large sample of independent berries (ie. not from same plants, and so forth).

  24. Re:Size, range and much hype... on North Korea Developing Electromagnetic Pulse Weapons · · Score: 1

    Seoul is close enough to North Korea that it can be hit with artillery. Hard to imagine them having nuclear weapons but lacking the ability to deliver a EMP weapon a few tens of kilometers away.

  25. Re:What is odd about those results? on Most Drivers Would Hand Keys Over To Computer If It Meant Lower Insurance Rates · · Score: 3, Informative

    In fact, your local Department of Insurance wouldn't allow the insurance company to lower premiums by that much unless there was very strong evidence that the computers would cut claims by at least that. (Rules like that are so that Ponzi schemes can't disguise themselves as insurance companies. That is, a company could undercut all its competition massively without the regulations, and it could pocket big profits in the short term, but long term, as the bulk of the covered people die, and so forth, it would go broke.)