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User: 91degrees

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  1. Re:'click and connect' is three words on Bitcoin, BYOD, Phablet, Selfie, and Twerking Find Place In Oxford Dictionary · · Score: 1

    But the meaning of "Click and connect" as a phrase is different from the meaning as individual words. The indivdual words could refer to a set of actions. The phrase rarely means a very specific subset.

  2. Re:Of course it doesn't. on Scottish Academic: Mining the Moon For Helium 3 Is Evil · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is a repost from back in the day when trolling was a performance artform. Slasdot trolls would come up with ludicrous rants, knowing that some people would ignore them, or find them funny, but a few would take them completely seriously and argue, thus increasing the hilarity.

  3. Re:I don't want anything from the sales___, except on Death of the Car Salesman? BMW Makes AI App To Sell Electric Cars · · Score: 1

    Why don't you want to test drive? Can you really establish how it feels to drive from online research?

  4. Re: "Board game designer"? on Afraid Someone Will Steal Your Game Design Idea? · · Score: 1

    The idea, perhaps, is more along the lines that 95% of board games are crap and would never ever get published

    Of course, 95% of everything is crap. Although I'd say this is a figure you'll end up with after you've eliminated all the game ideas that are based off a roll-and-move mechanic.

  5. It might not be completely pointless. Radicalised childen are likely to recruit their existing friends. It's not a lot to go on but it is an independent variable.

    Suppose 1 person in a million is terrorists, and a friend of a terrorist is 10% more likely to be a terrorist than a general member of the public. That's not a lot to go on by itself, that means there's a 1 in 910000 chance that they're a terrorist rather than 1 in a million. But get enough independent variables - 100 or so, all of which point towards terrorism, and you reduce the suspects down to a few thousand most likely terrorists. This is a small enough number that more direct intelligence can be gathered on them.

    Whether they should be doing this is another matter but if there's a correlation, even if we don't know the reason, between certain behaviour, then this can provide information.

  6. Re:Just let me get this straight on Lord Blair Calls for Laws To Stop 'Principled' Leaking of State Secrets · · Score: 1

    You seem to be critical of governmentpolicy. A sure sign of terrorism if ever I saw one!

  7. Re:And letter case indicates what? on How Deadbeat Facebook Friends and Using ALL-CAPS Can Lower Your Credit Score · · Score: 2

    So here's an informal poll for readers: Just what, exactly, does using all caps to fill out a form indicate?

    That you are statistically more likely to default on the loan. They don't care about cause and effect. If someone showed that people with names beginning with T were 17% more likely to repay the loan than people with names beginning with F, and the difference was statistically relevant, then they'd give better rates to the T's than the F's.

  8. Re:No chance! on Could a Grace Hopper Get Hired In Today's Silicon Valley? · · Score: 1

    Plenty of tech firms would be satisfied with maths and physics.

  9. Re:Opinions please on Dentist Wants To Clone John Lennon Using DNA Extracted From Lennon's Tooth · · Score: 1

    C) He made a joke and a journalist decided to take him seriously.

  10. Re:What about all the non-researchers? on Half of All Research Papers Published In 2011 Already Free To Read · · Score: 1, Insightful

    There's a question of convenience.

    I was doing some reasearch at work into computer vision systems. I could have asked for them to allocate a certain budget for buying the papers, but that would involved going through several laers of bureaucracy to authorise this. It was easier to seach for the authors.

    There's also the fact that it's not always possible to tell whether this is going to be useful from the abstract, and most people have an aversion to wasting money.

  11. Re:Not pointless at all on UK Government Destroys Guardian's Snowden Drives · · Score: 1

    I missed a braket too.

    I think there's a law somewhere that any post commenting on typographical errors will have at least one error itself.

  12. Re:And now to our resident expert: on Three Banks Lose Millions After Wire Transfer Switches Hacked · · Score: 2

    As a dude who's done decades of banking work, this was inevitable, because uhm... something to do with 1970's infrastructure or something.

  13. Re: Stolen or copied on Urban Terror Code Stolen · · Score: 1

    Piracy of media doesn't put anyone in mind of a pirate (an even if it did, the popular image of a pirate is of a heroic rebel such as Jack Sparrow). Nobody has ever drawn a parallel to copying a DVD and taking hold of a vessel for ransom.

    Plagarism requires they take credit for the creation, which I don't think they have done yet.

  14. Re: Stolen or copied on Urban Terror Code Stolen · · Score: 1

    Some words have more than one meaning.

    For example, Somali pirates don't cover ships in wooden boards, nor do they offer them a food and lodging.

  15. Re:Stolen? Steam? on Urban Terror Code Stolen · · Score: 1

    The term "Pirate", in the sense of copying without consent, predates the MPAA. Or movies. It even predates modern copyright (first recorded in 1701, whereas the first copyright act was 9 years later).

  16. Re:Stolen or copied on Urban Terror Code Stolen · · Score: 1

    "Pirate" works pretty well, and it's been used in this context for at least 4 centuries

  17. Re:It's untested tecnology on Transport Expert Insists 'Don't Dismiss Wacky Hyperloop' · · Score: 1

    You're quite right. Still, even for a government, a multi billion dollar high-risk investment is still a bit much.

    We really need a low cost short range version as a test plaform (major city to airport, for example), but the concept isn't really designed for short distances.

  18. Re:Not pointless at all on UK Government Destroys Guardian's Snowden Drives · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's a long running joke. The Guardian is known for making a lot of typesetting errors so often gets called that. Similarly the Daily Telegraph is known to be very strongyl aligned to the Conservative Tory) philosophy so is nicknamed the Torygraph.

  19. Re:There should be a new law - UK Miranda Rights on Members of Parliament Demand Explanation For Detention of David Miranda · · Score: 1

    Especially in internet discussions.

    Your dedication to trolling is truly admirable.

  20. Re:System may be working? on Members of Parliament Demand Explanation For Detention of David Miranda · · Score: 2

    Pretty certain US border officials have ridiculous powers that aren't properly kept in check by the US constitution though. Here's an example.

    Our rights in Britain aren't as strong as the US but even here it would have been a lot harder to search him if he wasn't at an airport.

  21. Re:Would not have expected? on Members of Parliament Demand Explanation For Detention of David Miranda · · Score: 1

    The problem with this is that this government is not the next government. Even if they are malicious, they're malicious in a stupid way. The government after them might also use this legislation in a malicious way, when the government that passed the legislation is in no position to do anything about it.

  22. It's untested tecnology on Transport Expert Insists 'Don't Dismiss Wacky Hyperloop' · · Score: 1

    There are a lot of good ideas here, and there's no reason that this would be an engineering impossibility. The problem is just a risk ratio.

    This will cost billions even if everything had been ested. there will be some ideas that work on paper but in practivce need to be re-engineered. this happened with the Space Shuttle and even the Shinkansen; where the basic technology was already well understood.

  23. Re:Hardly surprising.... on Using Laptop To Take Notes Lowers Grades · · Score: 1

    This was the basis of my revision technique. Take notes from notes (summarised so that I know which bits I don't understand). Throw away newly written notes. Repeat. When I started a third iteration, I knew it all, and knew I knew it.

  24. Re:Since when has Shakespeare been boring??? on Bill Gates Seeking Patent To Make Shakespeare Less Boring · · Score: 1

    Since schools started teaching it.

    Schools never teach what the plays are about. Romeo and Juliet contains fights, murder, wordplay, and a forbidden romance. Macbeth is actually a pretty tense horror story, where the enormity of the murder constantly haunts the main characters. But teachers are so busy disecting every single line that the actual stoy gets lost.

  25. Re:It's not a jet pack on The First 'Practical' Jetpack May Be On Sale In Two Years · · Score: 2

    At least having a seatbelt makes it a safe deathtrap.