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User: NoOneInParticular

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  1. Re:Damn... A win for the creationists on Oldest Human Fossil Fills In 2.8-Million-Year-Old Gap In Evolution · · Score: 1

    Both humans and Europeans are primates, evolved from primates. Apes also evolved from primates.

  2. Re:Lift the gag order first... on House Republicans Roll Out Legislation To Overturn New Net Neutrality Rules · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As all these extra cables are not needed for providing service, their sole purpose is to feed some free market fundamentalist pipe dream. The more sensible solution is to have only one provider for each type of cable technology, and have sensible regulations in place to make sure that there is a competitive market for service providers. Saves a lot of money, as otherwise you will be paying in some way for the twenty identical cables going to your house.

  3. Re:Last straw? on ISIS Threatens Life of Twitter Founder After Thousands of Account Suspensions · · Score: 1

    So once they quit there was no longer a danger for the commies to wreak havoc in our streets? How does that work? Your mind I mean.

  4. Re:Last straw? on ISIS Threatens Life of Twitter Founder After Thousands of Account Suspensions · · Score: 1

    This is an interesting view, in particular because the Czech army was not at all small, and definitely not a walkover. All they wanted was some support from the Western countries. But Chamberlain determined otherwise and gave up an army that would have been pretty useful when the inevitable happened. Maybe the Brits weren't ready for war, but the Czech's were, and that army got lost. So either Chamberlain was a lousy strategist, or he did believe that he could contain Hitler by giving him ground. Probably both.

  5. Re:Best idea is not to hide. on Statistical Mechanics Finds Best Places To Hide During Zombie Apocalypse · · Score: 1

    Have you seen "World War Z"?? These zombies were wicked, nothing like these lame stumbling death we've seen before. They're fast, ferocious and spread like wildfire. In hand-to-hand combat, you become zombie in seconds. One of those can definitely spread an infection. I think "World War Z" has real zombies, in the other movies I think the zombies are ill or something.

  6. Re:hrmm... on Google Wants To Rank Websites Based On Facts Not Links · · Score: 1

    The 'fact' that a significant number of people believed that the earth was round 1000 years ago is itself a myth ([citation needed]). The myth was popular in the late 19th century to highlight the superiority of the scientific method over religious dogma w.r.t. the theory of evolution.

  7. Re:Climate change phobia on We Stopped At Two Nuclear Bombs; We Can Stop At Two Degrees. · · Score: 1

    We're actually ignoring it at the moment. There was a report created in 2008 that created a plan to cope with an expected maximum of 0.65 to 1.3 meter rise in 2100 and 2-4 meter rise of sea level in 2200. Deniers got in, screamed their harts out that this was unsubstantiated and that it would never rise that high, and the plan would anyway be too expensive. So there was no action. No doubt we'll revisit this soon, but we did lose a decade for prep work.

  8. Re:Let it happen on We Stopped At Two Nuclear Bombs; We Can Stop At Two Degrees. · · Score: 1

    It seems you read a bit too much Taleb. When working with systems that exhibit finite variance, the mean certainly exists and is subject to the Central Limit Theorem, making all these nice Gaussian theories apply. Earth temperature definitely exhibits finite variance (ever seen a summer of 2,000 degrees?).

    Here's a quick test to figure out if a system is exhibiting finite variance: take a sample of cases, and systematically leave one out and compute the mean and variance. Do they fluctuate like mad, then you have an 'long-tailed' system. Do they not, then you have a normal system. Many statistics of the physical wealth exhibit this. Take for instance 'average weight of the population'. If you have a sample of 1000 people and you leave out that one guy that weighs 600 pounds, the mean weight will not change dramatically. However, people's wealth works differently: take a sample of a 1000 people including a billionaire, him being in or out of the sample completely determines the mean. BTW, I took this example from one of Taleb's books.

    There's a bit more to this as there is a region of these 'symmetric-alpha-stable' systems where there is no variance but still a stable mean before you get to a distribution as extreme as the Cauchy distribution, but in general, we have no evidence that earth temperature is even as dramatically fluctuating as the weight profile of the American population. Long-tailed statistics don't seem to apply here.

  9. Re: Let it happen on We Stopped At Two Nuclear Bombs; We Can Stop At Two Degrees. · · Score: 1

    Oh, as long as we can retaliate if their opinion turned out wrong, I'd be happy to recognize their contribution into keeping the earth a dirty place if they turn out right.

  10. Re:Actually, we've already stopped... on We Stopped At Two Nuclear Bombs; We Can Stop At Two Degrees. · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You're right, temperatures have not gone up. The ten warmest years since 1901 are not all in the last two decades, and the last 38 years have not all been above the 20th century average. It's all a hoax, North-East America is experiencing harsh winters so there can be no global warming.

  11. Re:Wrong name on Invented-Here Syndrome · · Score: 1

    Couldn't agree more. 'Invented here syndrome' reads as if everything necessarily gets invented 'here', so roughly the same meaning as 'not invented here'. What the article writer probably means is something more akin to 'Not re-invented here'.

  12. Re:Darwin never suggested "survival of the fittest on Game Theory Calls Cooperation Into Question · · Score: 1

    Traditionally, 'most fit' is measured in the units of fecundity, the expected number of offspring that reach reproductive age. So, 'survival of the fittest' actually means 'survival of the ones that get most offspring'. Although it has been argued, by Karl Popper no less, that this is a tautology in its own right, some relatively recent research has shown that in pre-biotic life, this is not necessarily true. You might get something best characterized as 'survival of the first', i.e., if you're first in the game, you can out-wit better adapted individuals by sheer numbers. Although a new breed can produce more offspring, once this game is iterated, the advantage disappears after a few generations, and the status-quo is maintained.

    So, essentially, nothing really trivial or tautological about 'survival of the fittest'. And going back to the article itself, it might be that the paper actually shows some circumstance in which survival of the fittest is untrue.

  13. Re:Waterboarding.... on An Argument For Not Taking Down Horrific Videos · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty sure another two decades of bombing will show ISIS the errors of their ways and let them truly appreciate the love that the Western world has for the Middle-East.

    If you've seen enough limbs flying around, a little fire seems like a kindness.

  14. Re:Forced benevolence is not freedom on RMS Objects To Support For LLVM's Debugger In GNU Emacs's Gud.el · · Score: 1

    But of course, in reality, Greenplum nor Netezza would have developed commercial offerings on GPL based software. They would have chosen some other starting point, or, if no such point existed, would have built from scratch. So there would not have been any giving back.

  15. Re:Oh yeah, that's a great idea... on Free-As-In-Beer Electricity In Greece? · · Score: 1

    Right now, Angela Merkel has a problem, because she guaranteed the German public that all the money that they lent to Greece would be eventually paid back.

    Angela Merkel has a problem because she deceived the German public in order to save the German Landesbanken that owned most of the Greek debt. Instead of letting the banks go bankrupt, and thereby creating a political problem (these banks are state owned, and run by politicians), she created enough time for the banks to offload the debt to the EU public at large. In the German case: profits go to politicians, losses are socialized. Pretty Soviet.

  16. Re:What do you expect? on AP Test's Recursion Examples: An Exercise In Awkwardness · · Score: 2

    If you want to really hurt your head, try implementing Ackermann's function using iteration. For a less theoretical example, try traversing a tree. It can be done using a stack and iteration, but the result is much more messy.

  17. Re:"They" is us on Davos 2015: Less Innovation, More Regulation, More Unrest. Run Away! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Globally, you're probably below the lowest 1%, as nobody in the developing world is allowed to rake up this much debt without being killed or going to prison. Interesting paradox of wealth.

  18. Re:One important use left for Pascal on Ask Slashdot: Is Pascal Underrated? · · Score: 1

    struct TRTPHeader {
    unsigned Version : 2;
    unsigned Padding : 1;
    unsigned Extension : 1;
    unsigned CSRC_Count : 4;
    ...
    unsigned Data : 8;
    };

    And now I can say packet.Version = 2. I can also see that 'padding' is not at the byte boundary, so that's probably a bug. So why is the Pascal version better?

  19. Re:Ppl who don't know C++ slamming C++ on Bjarne Stroustrup Awarded 2015 Dahl-Nygaard Prize · · Score: 1

    I think that OO is possibly the worst thing that ever happened to computer science. Nice try, but it turns out that in practice, inheritance is a bad idea. Luckily C++ doesn't force one into OO like the more pure languages do. That's why I like C++.

  20. Re:More proof on US Senate Set To Vote On Whether Climate Change Is a Hoax · · Score: 1

    Numbers are ordered. By construction.

  21. Re:Way to Elevate the Debate.... on Ted Cruz To Oversee NASA and US Science Programs · · Score: 1

    The arithmetic mean is an average, as is the geometric mean, as is the median. Also, intelligence as measured by IQ tests actually is symmetric and non-skewed.

  22. Re:Makes sense. on Google Throws Microsoft Under Bus, Then Won't Patch Android Flaw · · Score: 1

    So Google has chosen a business model where they cannot patch the software they put out in the wild. And that makes them blameless how?

  23. Re:Yay, religion of peace! on In Paris, Terrorists Kill 2 More, Take At Least 7 Hostages · · Score: 1

    So you think art has no objective benefits? Back to your cave, Neanderthal!

  24. Re:islam on Gunmen Kill 12, Wound 7 At French Magazine HQ · · Score: 1

    The same reasoning holds for capitalism as worshiped by free market fundamentalists. There's a supernatural agency (the invisible hand of the market), both to suspends disbelief about actual human behaviour (who form cartels and monopolies to dismantle competition) and to explain why things aren't working as expected (all evil is caused by regulations). Checks all of the boxes as well.

  25. Re:No such thing as luck, scientifically on 65% of Cancers Caused by Bad Luck, Not Genetics or Environment · · Score: 1

    The cell itself is an environment, and still far beyond our understanding. So yes, there's no way that we can control this with our current technology.