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User: pclminion

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  1. Re:that does seem possible according to the photos on Man Claims iPod Set His Pants Aflame · · Score: 1

    Several years ago, I was splashed with gasoline and set on fire while wearing a polyester Hawaiian shirt. No damage was done to me or the shirt. I slapped it out. It happened twice because the girl I was with thought it was funny so she did it again. It was funny. I'm sorry about what happened to you, that looks like a lot of damage, but fire does strange things.

    What happened to you isn't hard to explain. The gasoline vapor was burning -- you weren't. But where would flammable vapors come from in an iPod?

    I also think the guy's story is bullshit, but you can't really make a comparison between what he claims happened, and what happened to you when you were doused with a volatile, flammable substance.

  2. Re:rocket science on Orange Box In Stores Wednesday · · Score: 1

    No shit. First time I saw the commercial I thought to myself "What the hell kind of name for a game is 'The Orange Box?'" I had no clue it was a collection of multiple games until I read this article just now.

    Way to go marketing "geniuses."

  3. Wow. on Listening To The Radio At Work? Prepare To Be Sued · · Score: 1

    This goes beyond stupid and asinine and directly into batshit insane territory. I really don't know what else to say. I guess they figure all those people should listen to the free broadcast on their OWN radios? That must be it. These guys are shills for the boombox industry.

  4. Re:Do you remember tube data? on James Randi Posts $1M Award On Speaker Cables · · Score: 5, Funny

    My primary reason for selecting larger cables is to reduce power loss, not safety... but larger cables have other benefits, however marginal they may be.

    This is why I use sections of railroad track for speaker wires. A little heavy though. :-)

  5. Re:Do you remember tube data? on James Randi Posts $1M Award On Speaker Cables · · Score: 1

    I find this whole audiophile thing to be absurd, but tubes are the real deal. Maybe not for stereo systems, but for guitar amps there is a noticeable different between those that are tube and transistor based.

    Or, you could get a digital amp with a DSP which produces an identical sound. Just because most transistor amps don't do that doesn't mean they CAN'T.

  6. Re:Banlists are now illegal? on German Court Rules That Websites Can't Retain Logged IPs · · Score: 1

    Hash the addresses.

    unsigned int randomness[5][256] = { Random Numbers };
    unsigned int salt = rand() & 0xFF;
    unsigned int hash = randomness[0][ip[0]] ^ randomness[1][ip[1] ^ randomness[2][ip[2]] ^ randomness[3][ip[3]] ^ randomness[4][salt];

    Now "hash" contains a value derived from the address, but the address cannot be recovered from the value. If you're concerned about collisions, use 64-bit quantities.

    The salt is probably not necessary.

  7. Re:Does this explain liquid Helium's behavior? on 'Floating Bridge' Property of Water Found · · Score: 2, Informative

    Given that helium is a monatomic gas, nonpolar, and far less dense than water, I would have to say... no.

    Oh, and then there's the fact that we already understand superfluid helium pretty damn well.

  8. Re:Um No. on Know How To Use a Slide Rule? · · Score: 1

    Everyone like you would rush to the streams and start trying to spear fish.

    People "like me," huh? I'm glad you could infer so much from so little. And I'd use a FISHING ROD.

  9. Re:Um No. on Know How To Use a Slide Rule? · · Score: 1

    So knowing how to use a slide rule will save humanity? Nice!

    Did you READ the guy's post? A slide rule might not save you, but being able to hunt, kill, clean, and cook an animal would probably be useful, don't you think?

    The hilarity is that if civilization does go in the shitter, it's the so-called "hillbillies" who are going to absolutely own everyone's ass.

  10. Re:We're going down the wrong path. on Dutch Commission Deals Blow To Electronic Voting · · Score: 1

    We've become so enamored and dependent on technology that we are COMPLETELY missing the point here. Get off your lazy ass, go to a polling place, wait in line, show some patriotism, and cast your fucking vote.

    Quit making me barf. Voting is a civic duty, certainly. It's what keeps the gears of the democracy turning. But patriotic? Get over yourself. Voting is basically like changing the oil in your car. You have to do it from time to time to keep things running smoothly. But we don't throw a fucking party and slap ourselves on the back every time we get an oil change. "How proud I am of myself, for taking care of my vehicle!" What crap.

    In the US, the original patriots were the OVERTHROWERS of British rule. How the hell do such actions relate to the mundanity of voting?

  11. Re:Um No. on Know How To Use a Slide Rule? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sounds like if the global shit ever hits the fan, you're simply going to DIE, because you have no ability to care for yourself.

    Living in modern civilization is no excuse to be ignorant.

  12. Re:Half-click shopping ... on 1-Click Rejection Rejected · · Score: 1

    Personally, I'm a fan of Negative-One-Click-Shopping, where the online store decides at random that I want shit, without me even being logged in, and bills me and ships it to me. I think that would be rad.

  13. Nuclear slide rule. on Know How To Use a Slide Rule? · · Score: 4, Funny

    I prefer to use a tactical nuclear slide rule, myself.

  14. Re:Mired in statistical fallacies on Chicago Developing 'Suspicious Behavior' Monitoring System · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I could have gone into accuracy, recall, fallout, F-measure, etc... However, in the media, a 99.99% true positive rate is often called "accuracy" and so I used that term. The terms don't change the math.

  15. Re:Mired in statistical fallacies on Chicago Developing 'Suspicious Behavior' Monitoring System · · Score: 1

    Care to explain what aspect of my argument is frequentist in nature? I assigned values to the P's and stuck them into Bayes' rule. Identical examples can be found in any statistics textbook. I did not make a frequentist interpretation of ANYTHING.

  16. Re:Mired in statistical fallacies on Chicago Developing 'Suspicious Behavior' Monitoring System · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In other news, this system would classify 0.09% of all activity as true positives which are also false, miring the poster in statistical fallacy.

    In yet other news, doctorcisco falls for the fallacy that the sum of the false positive rate plus the true positive rate must be 1. It needn't be, and often isn't.

  17. Mired in statistical fallacies on Chicago Developing 'Suspicious Behavior' Monitoring System · · Score: 4, Informative

    Let's apply a little Bayesian reasoning, shall we?

    Given that system X identifies your behavior as suspicious, what is the probability that you are a terrorist? This probability is written P(T|S). This is what we want to find.

    Bayes' Rule: P(T|S) = P(S|T)*P(T)/P(S).

    P(S|T) is the probability that the system will identify you as suspicious, given that you are a terrorist. You can call this the system's "accuracy." Let's be generous and say the accuracy is 99.99% = 0.9999.

    P(T) is the probability that you are a terrorist. Let's say that this probability is one in a million: 0.000001.

    P(S) is the probability that the system thinks you are suspicious. There are two sources of suspicion: true positives, and false positives. The true positives are given by P(S|T)*P(T). The false positives are given by P(S|~T)*P(~T).

    Let's again, be generous, and say that the false positive rate P(S|~T) is only 0.1%, or 0.001.

    P(~T) is just 1-P(T) = 0.999999.

    So, let's substitute everything in:

    P(T|S) = P(S|T)*P(T) / (P(S|T)*P(T)+P(S|~T)*P(~T)) = 0.9999*0.000001 / (0.9999*0.000001+0.001*0.999999)

    What's that equal, everybody? 0.0009989 which is about 0.001, in other words 0.1%

    What does it mean? Even with a system that has a true positive rate of 99.99% and a false positive rate of only 0.1%, the probability of a "suspicious person" actually being a terrorist is only 0.1%.

    In other words, these systems are inherently useless in identifying terrorists. This is because terrorists are inherently RARE in the population. The massive accuracy of the test cannot make up for this fact.

  18. Re:Personal experience in the UK on UK Schools Will Fight Cyberbullying · · Score: 1

    You know what? Ignore my previous response. For some jackass reason my brain skipped over the actual CONTENT of your first paragraph. My bad.

    But as I said, if the damage is equal on all sides... And in your case, it wasn't. A bunch of thugs consistently ganging up and beating the crap out of you is indisputably CRIMINAL behavior and yes, they probably should have faced serious consequences for it.

  19. Re:Maybe I want my code to be used Commercially! on Survey Says GPLv3 Is Shunned · · Score: 1

    That's fine; don't use it in your projects. But why do you have a beef with people who do? It's a lot better than closed-source code, and I don't see people going around bitching about XYZ software company selling closed-source software (I don't mean MS, I mean smaller non-monopoly companies), while I constantly see people ragging on the GPL.

    I'm not talking about a choice between closed-source vs. GPL, I'm talking about, for instance, BSD vs. GPL. If it's a choice between "open" and "not open" I think the choice is fairly obvious.

    And I don't see the mystery why I would be commenting about the GPL in an article about the GPL and how people love/hate it.

  20. Re:Maybe I want my code to be used Commercially! on Survey Says GPLv3 Is Shunned · · Score: 1

    Back in the old days, when you bought some expensive piece of equipment, they gave you the schematics with it. This is basically the same thing. It's basically a safety net in case the proprietor goes out of business or is unsatisfactory in their service efforts.

    I've never claimed that open source is free of cost, nor have I even said that it's a bad model of software development. I just hate the GPL, specifically.

  21. Re:Maybe I want my code to be used Commercially! on Survey Says GPLv3 Is Shunned · · Score: 1

    Every software maker advertises how important support is, after the sale. If you have problems with a high-dollar product afterwards, you have to have someone to talk to about it and fix the issue. We're not necessarily talking about cheap-ass $50 boxed software; there's lots of software out there that costs 4-5 figures per seat.

    For 4-5 figures per seat you'd think you should be able to operate the software without constant assistance. If something is regularly not working for you, here's an idea: HIRE A PROGRAMMER.

    Another utterly stupid argument. When you're dealing with specialty software, your choices are generally few, and limited to smaller companies. Obviously, you have no idea of what it's like working in a real company.

    I do work at a real company. And yes, there are often few choices, and sometimes all the choices are bad. I do not see how Open Source is the answer to this problem as you claim it is.

    The idiocy never ends! Creating a large special-purpose software product can take years. If your company doesn't specialize in that, it makes more sense to spend $30k on pre-made software to do it than to hire a team of programmers for 3 years.

    I'm confused. Are we talking about Open Source here or not? First you say Open Source is a benefit because you can hire programmers to work on the code, and THEN you say it's better to spend money up-front so that you... don't have to hire programmers? What the fuck exactly IS your opinion?

    I happen to disagree with your stances. You can hate me for that, it's okay. But it doesn't mean I'm a kid.

  22. Re:Personal experience in the UK on UK Schools Will Fight Cyberbullying · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure how your response pertains to what I said. At some point, the only option is to hit back. I agree with that. I just don't agree that "bullies" should all be doing jail time. Adults can have a very hard time determining who is truly the instigator in a lot of situations. Once you throw jail into the mix, you run the risk of jailing the wrong kid.

    How about this: if the damage is about the same on both sides, and there are no life-threatening injuries, then the case is closed. Some kids got in a fight and one of them probably got what he deserved.

  23. Re:Maybe I want my code to be used Commercially! on Survey Says GPLv3 Is Shunned · · Score: 1

    If you're small-to-medium business GrishnakhCo, and you buy software product XYZ from JunkSoft, and then proceed to use it for many business-critical tasks, like storing all your designs in it, then the company goes out of business, you're screwed.

    Why would you be screwed? Does the software disintegrate when the maker goes away?

    However, if you access to that source code, you can hire programmers to fix problems in the software or modify it to fit your needs.

    If you had serious problems with the software why were you using it? You just said it yourself -- a company and the support they provide could disappear at any moment. You could choose a product that DOESN'T suck.

    You don't have to be a programmer, though it obviously helps. All you have to do is hire a programmer.

    Which you could have done initially, and gotten a product far better suited to the original need.

  24. Re:Maybe I want my code to be used Commercially! on Survey Says GPLv3 Is Shunned · · Score: 1

    It's about preserving users' freedoms.

    It is not. The open-source nature of the codebase is only helpful if the user has (or is) a developer to do the required work for him. A non-programmer who has source code has no advantage at all over a closed-source product.

    It is only developers who can extract the so-called "value" from open source.

  25. Re:Remember! on Survey Says GPLv3 Is Shunned · · Score: 1

    Unless you are an anarchist, you really have no basis for criticising the GPL in this regard, because you agree with this logic applied to different areas.

    Argument by analogy is always stupid, and this is no exception. Just because you can substitute all the variables in an argument with other variables to produce a situation which is ridiculous, does not mean that the original argument with its original variables is ridiculous. You can argue against ANYTHING that way.