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User: mark-t

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  1. Re:The good news? on Chinese Couple Sells Children To Support Online Game Addiction · · Score: 1

    You can't sell your kids to an adoption agency.... you can give them up for adoption, but it's quite thoroughly against the law to have any monetary transaction accompanying it.

  2. The math of retina displays on Nano-Pixels Hold Potential For Screens Far Denser Than Today's Best · · Score: 1

    Human visual acuity in a healthy human eyeball can discern features as tiny as 30-arcseconds in size. If you holding a retina display device 30 centimeters away from your face, 30 arc-seconds is only 48 micrometers at that distance, while retina displays use a resolution of 78 micrometers. Further, because the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem suggests that you will need at to sample at at least double the highest frequency of a signal to receive the signal with minimal distortion, suggesting that a true retina display would need pixels that are only 24micrometers in size, and not 78.

    So basically, increase the resolution by a factor of slightly more than three, and then you're looking at something that you could truly call "retina".

  3. Re:So instead of "free" why don't they say "covere on The Least They Could Do: Amazon Charges 1 Cent To Meet French Free Shipping Ban · · Score: 1

    I get the marketing speak, but if the french government has a problem with free shipping, then certainly they can just call it something else that works out to the exact same thing for the consumer.

  4. So instead of "free" why don't they say "covered"? on The Least They Could Do: Amazon Charges 1 Cent To Meet French Free Shipping Ban · · Score: 2

    The implication being that although shipping is not truly free, the cost of it is already fully covered by the order and will be paid for by the shipper.

  5. Can we teach one to play chess? on Chimpanzee Intelligence Largely Determined By Genetics · · Score: 1

    [nt]

  6. Re:Y10K Compliant on Today In Year-based Computer Errors: Draft Notices Sent To Men Born In the 1800s · · Score: 1

    Did someone forget to take their meds for schizophenia this morning?

  7. Absurd on The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test At Detecting AI · · Score: 2

    The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program

    That is a flatly ludicrous requirement, far in excess of what we would ever even consider applying to determine if even a human being is intelligent or not. Hell, if you were to apply that standard to human beings, ironically, many extremely intelligent people would fail that metric, because in hindsight, you can very often identify precisely how a particular thought or idea came out of a person.

  8. If you intellectually understand *how* memories... on A Brain Implant For Synthetic Memory · · Score: 1

    ... are formed, then could you algorithmically synthesize that process with your own mind to help you remember things? Seems like this could present a foolproof way to bypass a lie detector if possible, since you could synthesize the memory of the event that you want to lie about, and form it in your brain as if it were a real memory so that you no longer can appear to be lying about it.

  9. Implications for copyright? on A Brain Implant For Synthetic Memory · · Score: 2

    When the mere act of *remembering* something can amount to creating a diigtal copy of it because of a brain implant, can copyright even continue to exist?

  10. Re: more leisure time for humans! on Foxconn Replacing Workers With Robots · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Communism has been done correctly in the past, but never on a scale as large as a country.... at best, I think it has only been achieved at the scale of a modest community, and generally involving no more than a few thousand people or so.

    Basically, when everyone in the community personally knows practically everyone else in it, there is a social obligation on everybody to conform to expected behavior on account of a complete lack of anonymity, and communism works. Individuals who do not fit in to such societies are unceremoniously kicked out and left to fend for themselves.

  11. Re:That's Less Than $1 per Device on Foxconn Replacing Workers With Robots · · Score: 1

    No. It means that certain people are going to get richer faster because not as much money needs to be delegated for salaries

  12. Re:Failsafe? on Airbus Patents Windowless Cockpit That Would Increase Pilots' Field of View · · Score: 1

    Fly by wire still has a manual backup.

    You can't exactly have a manual backup if you've designed the plane so that the pilots can't actually see anything.

  13. Re:In a watch, batteries should last a year or mor on Android Wear Is Here · · Score: 1

    I'm unsure why the part of your brain that figures I shower infrequently (evidently deduced from the weekly total that I cited) can't figure out that I usually only spend 4 or 5 minutes to take a shower in the first place.

    I have a waterproof watch and it wouldn't be harmed by the shower, but if I wore it in the shower all the time, then I couldn't effectively wash my skin under the watchstrap. Since I don't tend to take my watch off otherwise, dead skin would build up underneath it, and it would get rather disgusting in short order.

  14. Re:In a watch, batteries should last a year or mor on Android Wear Is Here · · Score: 1

    Not everyone takes their watch off at night. I don't. It comes off my wrist for what is probably about 30 to 40 minutes or so cumulatively a week, which is about how much time I spend in the shower.

  15. In a watch, batteries should last a year or more on Android Wear Is Here · · Score: 3, Insightful

    IMO, of course.

  16. This is hardly new... on TSA Prohibits Taking Discharged Electronic Devices Onto Planes · · Score: 1

    At the lineup going into the area where the gates are, you have to demonstrate that you can turn on any electronic devices so that they know it's not just a case containing something else. This has been in place for at least the past 10 years.

    What I'm wondering, however, is if they charge people whose non-working electronics that they might confiscate any fees for proper disposal/recycling? If not, then a positive spin on this could be that someone could exploit this to utilize as a free electronics recycling facility.

  17. Re:Why not limit them to one per customer? on Oculus Suspends Oculus Rift Dev Kit Sales In China · · Score: 1

    In a pre-release phase, what other demand with there be?

    Other dev studios.

  18. Re:Why not limit them to one per customer? on Oculus Suspends Oculus Rift Dev Kit Sales In China · · Score: 1

    If it's being ordered online, why would he need to hire anyone else to buy it for him?

  19. Re:Why not limit them to one per customer? on Oculus Suspends Oculus Rift Dev Kit Sales In China · · Score: 1

    Wouldn't limiting supply involve limiting the *total* number sold, not just the number that they are allowing per customer?

  20. Re:Why not limit them to one per customer? on Oculus Suspends Oculus Rift Dev Kit Sales In China · · Score: 1

    Actually, during the pre-release phase, they can and often will limit things to one per development shop until they have actually satisfied the other demand... only afterwards can a development shop make a request to get a second one. Also, in my experience, such development devices can differ in some significant way from the commercial product, and will thus remain property of the supplier... and the development studio has to return the device when they are no longer doing development for the product.

  21. Re:Why not limit them to one per customer? on Oculus Suspends Oculus Rift Dev Kit Sales In China · · Score: 1

    As long as you know for sure that the person you are paying doesn't intend to just keep the thing that they bought for you.... which, since you paid them to scalp it for you, and scalping tends to be discourage by the law, you aren't terribly likely to succeed in any sort of legal claim for it. All you will have successfully done is subsidize their own purchase.

  22. Re:Why not limit them to one per customer? on Oculus Suspends Oculus Rift Dev Kit Sales In China · · Score: 1

    That system doesn't scale very well when there is a limit of *ONE* per customer. That's not generally the case with event tickets, where one person may entirely reasonably be buying tickets for a themselves and anyone else that he or she specifically intends to go with so that they can all sit together. Regardless, the limit is large enough that its just practical to hire people to stand in line to buy tickets for you if you want a really large number.

  23. Re: Not surprising. on When Beliefs and Facts Collide · · Score: 1

    How many eugenics programs were based on scientific rigor or even half-assed logic?

    Very few, if any... admittedly.

    Historically speaking, however, that's how eugenics has been practiced when it has been applied to human beings. Off hand, historically, I can think of cases where they've tried to remove undesirable traits by executing people who had those traits were with homosexuals, believers in jesus, to the poor, to people who are left handed, and to even people who needed corrective lenses (I personally know someone who, during WW2, narrowly escaped being executed for that last reason).

    So yeah... not very scientific.

    But that still doesn't mean there's ever been a scientific study performed to conclude that it would work.

  24. Re: Not surprising. on When Beliefs and Facts Collide · · Score: 1

    Why they failed is not as significant as the point THAT they failed... A cornerstone of science is repeatability, but if something hasn't even ever been recorded to happen *ONCE*, how can you call it repeatable? How can you call it science? Even if it *IS* politics that's getting in the way... there's still no repeatable scientific study to substantiate the claim.

  25. Re:Why not limit them to one per customer? on Oculus Suspends Oculus Rift Dev Kit Sales In China · · Score: 1

    What does how many people there are have to with scalping? If they don't want to sell in China because there are too many people trying to order one in just that one country to both satisfy the demand there while meeting the demand anywhere else, then why don't they just say that instead of blaming it on people who are scalping dev kits?

    One would assume that if scalping were a problem, limiting to one per customer would, as I said, make scalping prohibitively inconvenient... but all that you are saying is that they can't produce enough supply to meet the demand. They are two very different things, I trust that you realizes.