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User: mark-t

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  1. Doesn't do enough, IMO on A Toolbox That Helps Keep You From Losing Tools (Video) · · Score: 1

    It appears to only be able to tell if something is missing from the toolbox, which is perhaps useful because you can have an external indicator on the box that shows that the toolbox does not contain everything, and may reduce the occurrences of having a toolbox stored away before it has been properly restocked, but it does not do anything to actually locate the tools that were once in the box. Even if the range were limited to a few hundred meters within the box, that would still be extremely useful because you would still generlaly be able to locate it as long as it is still at the same work site.

    So it's doing half a job... which however better than no job at all that may be, is still not a full job.

  2. Not impossible, just ruddy expensive on Two Google Engineers Say Renewables Can't Cure Climate Change · · Score: 1

    Which is what being fully environmentally conscious always amounts to.

    They are right... renewables can't compete with coal economically, and it's foolish to try.

    Where they *DO* compete with coal is in longevity.... in partictular, being sustainable for durations that are many orders of magnitude longer than any fossil fuel based system can hope to achieve while still keeping the planet's ecosystem unaltered. Yes, it costs more, but until somebody finds another habitable planet for us to live on and a way for us to actually get there, even a more expensive option is more desirable than no option at all.

  3. Re:When war is faught entirely by machines... on How the Pentagon's Robots Would Automate War · · Score: 1

    Uhm... what are even you talking about?

  4. Re:Let's do the math on Complex Life May Be Possible In Only 10% of All Galaxies · · Score: 1

    Even if the universe were expanding into some hypothesized infinite space, the fact remains that it has only been doing so for a finite amount of time, and so therefore is not infinite in size.

  5. Re:The universe is not 13.8 billion light years wi on Complex Life May Be Possible In Only 10% of All Galaxies · · Score: 1

    I said it was 13.8 billion years old, I never once suggested it was 13.8 billion light years across, I am well aware that the observable universe is actually much larger than that... what I've always found interesting, however is that the ratio between the proposed estimate of 93 billion light years in diameter and the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years is within 8% of the value of 2pi. That could be a coincidence. of course, but hey.... maybe it's something to think about?

    My point remains. The universe is finite.

  6. Re:Occams razor says this girl is lying on Married Woman Claims Facebook Info Sharing Created Dating Profile For Her · · Score: 1

    My point is that amidst all of these people here suggesting that she is lying about the dating site, the similarity of information she claims was found elsewhere and what info was gathered from myself suggests to me that she is telling the truth about what happened.

  7. Re:Let's do the math on Complex Life May Be Possible In Only 10% of All Galaxies · · Score: 2
    For what it's worth, Olber's paradox uses the wrong formula for the volume of a shell some distance R from earth... The formul as I remember it from Olber's paradox is 4*Pi*R^2*dr, where dr is the thickness of the shell. However, this value only approaches accuracy as R approaches infinity. It is wrong for all finite values of R.

    And I was not double counting anything. The actual volume of such a shell is: 4/3*Pi*(r+dr)^3-4/3*Pi*r^3. This is a value that is admittedly less than proportional to R^3, but more than proportional to R^2 for any finite value of R greater than zero. This volume is actually even greater than the value that Olber was utilizing, and dividing it by R^2 to calculate the expected intensity of radiation in that entire shell that reaches a point at distance R does not approach 0 as the distance approaches infinity.

    But the real problem with Olber's paradox is not the miscalculation of the volume of the shell at some distance from earth,and in turn the number of elements within that volume which will emit radiation,but rather with the assumption that the universe is somehow actually infinite in the first place.

    Olber's paradox revealed that trying to make an assumption that the universe might be infinite is flawed, and by my understanding helped to serve as an impetus at the term to find alternative explanations for what we observed, eventually leading to the widely accepted big bang hypothesis.

    And observed red shift means that objects are moving away from each other, which means that at some point they were much closer together, and rewinding the clock even further suggests that the universe began at a single point, and has been expanding outward ever since (although you can no more find a point in space that is the center of it than you can find the center of an inflated balloon anywhere on the surface of the balloon).

    Bottom line: the universe is finite. Even if it were ever found to be expanding into an infinite unbounded space.

  8. When war is faught entirely by machines... on How the Pentagon's Robots Would Automate War · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... where will the incentive for peace come from?

  9. Re:Let's do the math on Complex Life May Be Possible In Only 10% of All Galaxies · · Score: 2

    What evidence is there of an infinite universe that had no beginning?

    Bear in mind also that if an infinite universe exists, which had no beginning, then light would also have had infinite amount of time to travel to here from absolutely everywhere else, and although the intensity of radiation that reaches a point is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to that point. the volume of space that is an average of some given distance away from a point is greater than an amount proportional to the square of the distance from that point, and so the number of things in that volume which produce radiation at that distance would be be correspondingly greater, more than cancelling out the inverse square relationship to the intensity of radiation reaching a point some fixed distance apart. Every point in the universe would be perpetually saturated in radiation that is reaching it from every other point in the universe, infinitely far away, and certainly things like life bearing planets could not exist.

    Critical observation suggests that the universe is finite.

  10. Re:Occams razor says this girl is lying on Married Woman Claims Facebook Info Sharing Created Dating Profile For Her · · Score: 1

    Before that happened, I hadn't realized how much of my profile was public, but I do now, and I've long since gone through the facebook privacy settings, and turned it all off so the info is no longer publicly visible. I'm just saying that the similarity between what happened to her and what happened to me is striking, especially with regards to the actual data that they obtained, and I thought that it could be the same thing. Facebook's default privacy setting suck, and not everyone necessarily realizes until something happens that they actively need to do something to keep unknown people from finding out about them. Prior to seeing this story, I also hadn't made any connection to any particular ads that I had seen on facebook, but that is also entirely possible. As I said, the reason I connected it to facebook at all was because of the image that they had, which I happen to use as my profile pic for facebook and which isn't used for anything anywhere else.

  11. Re:Occams razor says this girl is lying on Married Woman Claims Facebook Info Sharing Created Dating Profile For Her · · Score: 1

    I don't think so... something strikingly similar to what she is describing happened to me as well, although in my case, it wasn't with a dating website. The website had clearly scraped facebook for its info about me. It got my full name, my city and postal code, and the image I was using for my main facebook profile pic, exactly as she described happened to her. In my case, if it hadn't been for the image associated with my name, I wouldn't have had a clue where they got the info, but facebook is the only place I happened to ever use that particular pic, so I had a pretty good idea what happened.

  12. Re:Let's do the math on Complex Life May Be Possible In Only 10% of All Galaxies · · Score: 1

    Experimental evidence suggests that the universe had a beginning. and that based on observation, this appears to have been about 13.8 billion years ago.

    13.8 billion years ago is not an infinite amount of time. The universe is not infinite.

  13. Re:Nope... on It's Not Developers Slowing Things Down, It's the Process · · Score: 1

    None of the companies that I've ever worked for exercise that principle.... in my experience, if you are incompetent at what you are asked to do, then you are fired. If you are just barely competent enough to keep your position past your probationary period, then this would come up during an annual performance review, with a critique on your work habits and what you can do to improve. If no improvement is noted over the next several months, you will be laid off. In my experience, if you are going to get promoted, you will need to go above and beyond what your job expectations are, and show the employer that you are capable of taking on greater responsibilities than what you were initially hired for, while still meeting all of the expectations of your current position. If there are no exceptions to the "Dilbert Principle", then how does that experience jive with promoting the least competent people to management, exactly?

    Or are you incorrect about your assertion that there are no exceptions?

  14. In my experience.... on It's Not Developers Slowing Things Down, It's the Process · · Score: 2

    ... when developers say "no", they soon find themselves unemployed.

    Of course, one could theoretically argue that working for an employer who won't give due consideration to a developer's input isn't worth working for in the first place, but that nice little theory doesn't pay the rent. Oh, and try explaining to a future would-be employer about why your last job didn't work out... care take a guess how that will go down?

    Of course, it might seem that working for yourself solves much of this problem, but even that still requires that you actually have paying clients, enough of them that you can support yourself on what they are willing to pay you. Of course, then you are actually back where you started, where saying "no" to a person who pays you money to do whatever it is that you do carries a risk of not getting paid by that person again. If you have enough clients, this may not be a problem to lose the odd one or two because they are dillholes, but getting to that point will take time... possibly many years... so until that time comes, you'll just have to do whatever the heck the person who is paying your salary tells you, unless you really have an affinity for living in a cardboard box on the street.

  15. Re: wont last on Customers Creating Fake Amazon Pages To Get Cheap Electronics At Walmart · · Score: 1

    How was the latin phrase used incorrectly? It seemed entirely relevant, if you ask me.

  16. As an exercise, define "human".

  17. Uhmmm....What? on Microsoft Azure Outage Across the Globe · · Score: 1

    Isn't a cloud supposed to be, you know, *distributed*? So that this sort of thing doesn't ever happen, barring a catastrophe of no less than nation-wide proportions, where people are more liable to be more worried about other things than availability of said service anyways.

    I would think this is more an illustration of a failure on Microsoft's part to properly implement their cloud services than it is indicative of a failure of such services in general.

  18. Re:Study says less about altruism, more about fair on Electric Shock Study Suggests We'd Rather Hurt Ourselves Than Others · · Score: 1

    Altruism has nothing to do with hurting oneself needlessly. It has to do with putting another's needs above one's own. In this study people were more willing to hurt themselves for money than they are willing to hurt other people for money. If money were not involved, there would not necessarily be any motivation to do either.

  19. Re:Where does the right to privacy come from? on 81% of Tor Users Can Be De-anonymized By Analysing Router Information · · Score: 1

    What if I'm in Saudia Arabia and am an atheist?

    Even then.

    I'm not suggesting if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide, because that's actually a completely misleading argument that can be easily shown to be a false notion anyways.

    Privacy, as I said, is created by two things, neither of which one is really in direct control of. The first thing is how polite other people are making a deliberate choice to be... invading someone else's privacy, for any reason, almost invariably amounts to rude behavior. Privacy is a courtesy that as civilized human beings, we should always extend to those around us. The world, however, has more than its share of rude people, nor can you really legislate that people not be rude to other people, so the measure of confidence you can have in privacy in this factor is entirely out of your control.

    The other thing that creates privacy is something that you may have a small amount of indirect level of control over, which is how disinterested other people are liable to be in whatever it is you are doing. but the only way you really can influence this is by taking efforts to try and secure some measure of privacy for yourself, to the extent that you do not harm other people or infringe on their rights, and to a degree that the efforts that must be taken by others to overcome the efforts you have put in to secure some privacy are likely to outweigh how interested other parties might be in knowing about whatever it is that you are keeping private. Such measures might give you a greater feeling of confidence or security, but since you actually do not have any real control over what other people might want or how badly they might want it, I would still suggest that any appearance of privacy you may seem to achieve for yourself is still going to largely be illusionary. Certainly, if the efforts required to overcome whatever barriers you try to put in place to give yourself some privacy amount to needing to break the law, then you can probably have a high degree of confidence in how much privacy you have, as long as whoever might be interested in your private affairs has not been offered any legal immunity... and you certainly deserve to have legal recourse when someone infringes on your privacy in that regard... not because they infringed on your privacy, per se, but because of whatever law it was that they actually broke.

  20. Re:Where does the right to privacy come from? on 81% of Tor Users Can Be De-anonymized By Analysing Router Information · · Score: 1

    Just because I don't think people should really have any expectation of privacy at any time doesn't mean I think people should not have any right to do whatever is in within their own personal power and ability to directly control to preserve whatever privacy they feel they might be able to secure for themselves, to the extent that such efforts do not infringe on anyone else's freedoms or rights.

  21. Re:Where does the right to privacy come from? on 81% of Tor Users Can Be De-anonymized By Analysing Router Information · · Score: 1

    Except that society seems to function perfectly fine, even if not necessarily ideally, without everyone following the golden rule everywhere... which is what any kind of ubiquitous expectation of privacy actually generalizes to.

  22. Where does the right to privacy come from? on 81% of Tor Users Can Be De-anonymized By Analysing Router Information · · Score: 0

    Where do people get the idea that privacy is some sort of inalienable right? I'll agree that it's a civic courtesy, and certainly it's impolite to disregard another person's privacy, but to that end, I see it as more of a social contract than any sort of actual right. I would suggest that any appearance of privacy we might seem to have is actually just an illusion offered by the fact that other people are either making a deliberate choice to be polite in that regard, or else they are simply not interested enough in what we think is private for others to be bothered with it. Either way, it's not something that you can actually control... its largely determined by what other people do or want.

  23. Re:Shocked... on Window Washing a Skyscraper Is Beyond a Robot's Reach · · Score: 1

    I asked for a citation of how being broke was supposedly illegal, not about being a vagrant.

    For what it's worth, you can be broke without being a vagrant anyways, and of course, being broke is not strictly required to be a vagrant either.

    Vagrancy laws are only applicable to being broke if you consider vagrancy the only possible outcome of being broke. While that may statistically be the most likely outcome, it is far from the only one. A destitute person may have a friend who is letting them stay at their home at no charge, for instance (presumably to help them out until they can get financially on their feet).

  24. Re:Perhaps when NVIDIA's NDK supports Netbeans.... on Nvidia Shield Tablet Gets Android Lollipop Update, Half Life 2 EP1 and GRID · · Score: 1

    I suspect you were just trying to be contrary with that remark, but if you don't believe what I'm saying about what I've tried, then it really seems kind of pointless to be trying to convince me that I'm wrong about what I've said I prefer to use.

  25. Re:Shocked... on Window Washing a Skyscraper Is Beyond a Robot's Reach · · Score: 1

    Citation?