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User: OeLeWaPpErKe

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  1. Re:Poor QA on Why Computers Suck At Math · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Iron dome system works perfectly. It's just not capable of protecting any kind of large area. It can, however, make a military base invulnerable to rocket fire, and they're working on making the system mobile, to protect tanks. The only real problem left for doing this is the power requirements.

    For ships, another such system exists, and protected the ships perfectly well from those same rockets fired by hizbullah. It's "protection range" ? In the largest deployment about 200 square meters.

    There is also the problem that a downed missile presents. What is a "downed missile" ? Well it's a large collection of very-high speed pieces of metal that have been heated up by a large explosion that's about to crash into the ground. So far so good.

    So what is "the ground" in the case of a hizbullah or hamas missile launch ? Well it's the center of the city that's controlled by the terrorists. It's their human shields. Markets, schools, you name it. So a successfull missile intercept is reported in the press as "Israel fires a rocket into a palestinian kindergarten". That is, by the way, the literal truth, even if the rather important detail of a rocket's presence above said kindergarten is left out. In the deployed missile intercept installations "the ground" is chosen to be something else, like the ocean surface.

    Missile intercept systems are no solution for terrorism. Most unfortunately, the only solution for those rocket attacks is preventing they're fired in the first place. Which obviously requires either palestinians police their own terrorists, or someone does it for them (that's called "occupation").

    These systems work, they are deployed successfully in the field. They're no silver bullets, and any bullet that's fired, whether a missile or a missile-intercept-missile, will eventually hit the ground at rather high speeds. Which makes their use above urban environments result in civilian casualties.

  2. Re:Poor QA on Why Computers Suck At Math · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Mod parent up ! This idiotic article blames computers for programmers using numerical approximation algorithms illadvisedly.

    which is stored as the number of 0.1-second ticks since the system was started up. Unfortunately, 0.1 seconds cannot be expressed accurately as a binary number, so when it's shoehorned into a 24-bit register — as used in the Patriot system — it's out by a tiny amount. But all these tiny amounts add up. At the time of the missile attack, the system had been running for about 100 hours, or 3,600,000 ticks to be more specific. Multiplying this count by the tiny error led to a total error of 0.3433 seconds, during which time the Scud missile would cover 687m. The radar looked in the wrong place to receive a confirmation and saw no target. Accordingly no missile was launched to intercept the incoming Scud — and 28 people paid with their lives.'"

    So in a system that should have clocks synchronized to less than a microsecond nobody bothered to run "ntpdate" even once in hundred days ? And surely the military has better clock synch than a stupid home pc ? This is stupidity, also known as "human error", causing those deaths. It's a case of "the correct answer to the wrong question".

    What is always brought up as a "computer problem" is the crash in Paris of a jet due to infighting between the human pilot and the autopilot. Of course, there the ultimate mistake was the pilot's : he had forgotten to turn off the autopilot to land. It was set for cruising altitude (3km), and the pilot was trying to land. This resulted in ever more desperate attempts by the autopilot to get the plane to gain height, which eventually resulted in a total loss of lift for the plane, which naturally resulted in the plane hitting the ground nose-down and a big fireball. The computer did exactly as instructed, it's just that the pilot's (unintentionally given) instructions were stupid, and the fact that it took the pilot over 3 minutes to realize just how stupid he had been.

  3. Re:Good name on Leaked Modern Warfare 2 Footage Causes Outrage · · Score: 0

    It's strange. You'd think people would be against random killing, and for those trying to avoid doing that.

    Of course the terrorists don't listen, and democracies do. Makes one think that in reality, all the complaining about regular armies is mostly a way to attract attention, and not, as claimed, moral outrage.

    Just like this newsitem, actually.

  4. Pray tell, what does it "mean" ? on Leaked Modern Warfare 2 Footage Causes Outrage · · Score: 1, Interesting

    And why do animals eat, you know, eachother ? There are even cannibalistic animals. Worse : we need a long list of proteins, fats and enzymes that cannot be found except in other animals. Why ?

    You can recognize someone who's led a vegetarian diet all their life : they're dead before they celebrate their first birthday (of course, if the mother does eat meat and breastfeeds that may prolong things right up to 8-9 years). Until you're well into your thirties there are serious health consequences to eating vegetarian.

    Of course the point of vegetaranism is that they see themselves as better than everybody else. You see somehow it shows "better morals" to sabotage your own digestive system (just in case someone disagrees). They're rather up front about that in general too. Their morality, you see, is better than yours.

    Of course, vegetarians are more respectable than your average "better morals than you" idiot. Mostly people just claim they're better for having studied, or being a certain color (ever been to the middle east or India ?), or having a certain ideology. Mostly a political ideology, but again in the middle east, it's mostly religion. Then again, out there politics and religion are the same thing.

    Still that doesn't mean anyone has to like it. If you don't want to eat meat, by all means go ahead and do it. Just don't try to "convert" me, and don't dare you accuse me of "moral failures" as if I'm some kind of murderer or rapist, simply because you need to feel better than everyone else.

  5. Re:Do not want on Nationwide Shortage In Supply of Swine Flu Vaccine · · Score: -1

    Is this really the swine flu? If so, it's not bad around here, near Raleigh, NC.

    The problem with mexican flu (that's the name btw.) is not that the disease in itself is particularly deadly. The problem is that it's a H1N1 virus.

    H1N1 are the proteins found on the mantle of the virus. The problem is that no human can develop an immune response to either H1 or N1 (as that would be deadly). If a virus were to infect a cell, and the mexican flu would infect the same cell, there is some chance that the mantle of flu would be copied around the much more dangerous virus, which would beat any immunity or vaccine we currently have, would react differently to most treatments and be capable of spreading through open air (through coughing).

    If such an event were to take place, that event has a good chance of making the 1917 flu pandemic look like a tiny issue. That disease literally blocked the world economy for over 2 months, making millions of victims.

    The problem is not the flu in the H1N1 form. The problem is that pneumonia might "be infected" and transform into an H1N1 virus. The problem is, in essence, the evolution that it might cause in other viruses. Cases of gene transfer between viruses are well-studied, and the current consensus is that it's commonplace.

  6. The whole point of national healthcare on Nationwide Shortage In Supply of Swine Flu Vaccine · · Score: 1

    Based on what I've heard from people who actually had the swine flu, I'd rather have the disease than the vaccine.

    The whole point of national healthcare is having choices like that forced on you by some washington bureaucrat. After all, without the power to force the cheaper option on you (vaccination versus treatment for a disease as infectious as this), controlling costs is simply a non-starter.

  7. "Pacifism" = law of the jungle, in practice on Democrats, Minority Groups Question Net Neutrality Push · · Score: 1

    Also (and at the risk of invoking Godwin), when asked what the Jews could have done to prevent the Holocaust, Gandhi suggested that they should have committed mass suicide. That is the logical conclusion of uncompromising nonviolence.

    And, pray tell, do you consider that reasonable ? He's quite right that that was the only nonviolent way to deal with the situation. Of course, the nazi government stated it's intentions in no uncertain terms : if Europe fell completely, America would be next, and Germany would assist the mikado (Japan) invading China. Gandhi's policy would only have lead to peace in that it would have led to spreading the genocide over the entire world. This was before the Soviets "betrayed" their national socialist "brothers" (a word Stalin liked to use for the nazi's).

    Furthermore, if I tell you I want to kill you because of your ugly face, would you commit suicide ? Would you consider yourself violent if you didn't ?

    Pacifism, in reality, is an extremely violent ideology, as long as there is a single person on this planet that wants to use violence. Pacifism on the part of others will encourage this person to use more violence, and will encourage others to imitate him, leading to more violence. Pacifism, in an actual conflict, is merely rooting for the party that uses the most direct, most cruel violence. In the palestinian-israeli conflict, for example, pacisifism is merely wanting the palestinian massacrers and terrorism to win, and not even "all" palestinians, but merely the cruelest, most violent ones among them.

  8. Aren't they busy killing all non-muslims ? on Maldives Government Holds Undersea Cabinet Meeting · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is the revised penal code for the maldives. Surely a cabinet that makes such decisions are worthy of billions of aid !

    They claim, by the way, that it is the duty of all muslims, "even in America", to do this.

    I'm tempted, quite frankly, to not give a shit. Quite frankly, I hope their islands do not just disappear, but everyone of these racist assholes drowns in those rising waters. Slowly.

  9. Re:Scientists don't get to say "we don't know" on On the Efficacy of Flu Vaccine · · Score: 1

    I have a phd in mathematics thank you very much. Nobody knows the "we don't know" parts of maths, they are mostly discarded as useless.

    Unless you consider stuff like the second incompleteness theorem unimportant details. I only saw it in the third year. Yet what it says ("we will never know if math is correct, no matter how much research and discoveries we make") does not seem a "detail" to me.

    The limits of science, such as the small detail that there is a good chance that real number arithmetic is, plain and simple, wrong, are not mentioned, even in maths. Yes they're paid a bit of lip service and then teachers say "but since we're teaching maths, we will essentially ignore this".

    And in my experience, other parts of the university aren't nearly as well behaved concerning what they know and don't know as the maths department. Even the physics department. It was nightmarish how fast and loose they played with equations. The joke was what the professor said the first time someone pointed out that you really can't just scratch 2 infinities because "they're probably opposite". He said "it's mostly correct". At first we hoped that more advanced courses would be more rigorous. Heh.

    Fifth year, we were forced to take 1 course from the humanities. And we all agreed about the correctness of psychological research (which was an easy, and yet mathematical subject of "the humanities", therefore popular as the compulsory "non-exact" subject). A friend put it quite succinctly : "dear ... God ...". What passes for statistics in things like social sciences or even climate science should really be called "fiction".

  10. Re:Government parties against neutrality on Democrats, Minority Groups Question Net Neutrality Push · · Score: 1

    *sigh* Let's take an evolutionary algorithm :

    We start with some basic population
    1. we let them multiply, inserting mutations
    2. we calculate the fitness function
    3. we discard everyone "failing" minimum fitness -> this one would be death in the real world
    4. goto 1

    Obviously if you, as you suggest, take out step 3, then what happens ? Well, quite simply, the genetic code slowly randomizes. While one could say this will not destroy the evolutionary gains of the species in a single generation, it will eventually destroy all information that was gathered previously. Some people call this "de-evolving", which is blatantly incorrect. The correct term would be "suicide". It is like taking out parts of an engine and replacing them with random parts. Sure, the first change will (probably) not cause total destruction of the car, but obviously there's a limit of such changes you can do before the car will be destroyed.

    It doesn't work without death. Without death, evolution has essentially the same function as "rm -Rf /".

  11. Re:Scientists don't get to say "we don't know" on On the Efficacy of Flu Vaccine · · Score: 1

    Sure, but that's because of a straightforward cardinality issue. The cardinality of the set of all real numbers between 0 and 1 is a second-order infinity (aleph sub one);

    Huh ? Have they proven that if aleph sub 0 < x < aleph sub 1 that x cannot exist ? I was under the impression that it was an open question if a collection larger than N and smaller than Q existed ... Add to that that R > Q (strictly) and that [ 0, 1 ] has the same cardinality as R.

    So shouldn't it be aleph sub "at least 2" ?

  12. Say it with me : on Maldives Government Holds Undersea Cabinet Meeting · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    "Hope and Change"

    Hope being what comes before the election
    Change being what happens after

  13. Re:Government parties against neutrality on Democrats, Minority Groups Question Net Neutrality Push · · Score: 1

    Evolution does not require death, merely successive generations. Violence is not remotely necessary.

    And we're supposed to take this as an article of faith ?

    No offence, but are you truly this stupid ? Have you ever seen animals hunt ? Would you call a bacterial invasion of a human nonviolent ? Yet all those things are very, very important for both human and bacterial evolution. Hunts are about 50% of animal evolution.

    Of course, in American cartoons they all look very cuddly. And that you never ever see that in real life, never mind in open, free nature, oh, who cares ? It's on TV ! It must be true, right ?

    What exactly do you base this idiotic "nature is nonviolent" bullshit on ? I truly wonder.

  14. Re:Scientists don't get to say "we don't know" on On the Efficacy of Flu Vaccine · · Score: 1

    The problem is that if you accept your remark 3 then everything except the exact sciences can be essentially equated to fiction. Including medicine, including climate science, including all the humanities.

    And about point 4 "oversimplifying". That something is "oversimplified", by the way means that it's correct, except in corner cases ...

    Of course that's not what you mean. You mean physical violence does not work in the real world. Unfortunately, as the more than 2/3rds of humanity that lives under non-free governments can attest to : violence works rather well. Evolution would not work if violence didn't work, of course.

    In reality the basis of civilization, of every human society is violence. In reality the way westerners do things, even in our worst periods, was not very violent compared to all other societies. Violence is all but banned from normal daily life ("from polite society"), and one can live out one's life with very, very few encounters with direct physical attacks on humans. One thing is certain, no other society, whether we're talking Indians their societies, or even contemporary muslim societies, but even more so in the past, and societies like mayans, Incas, Chinese or Japanese, just to name a few, would you have been able to live a single day without direct confrontation by violence, or at the very least direct threats to apply violence.

    The mistake every "intelligent" westerner makes is assuming that just because a situation is normal in a christian, western and very scientifically advanced society, that it is somehow part of humanity itself. In reality, of course, there are more differences between societies than the 5 letters that make up the word "Jesus", and many of those differences involve violence. Just to name one, the constant and universal application of lethal violence against free speech that is part of islam. Or the death penalty for daring to question any representative of the mikado in Japan, including things like looking in the eyes of a lowly soldier. People got executed for daring to question that the world did not revolve around the political leader in Japan less than 60 years ago. And the mikado could easily be said to be the leader of a religion. Of course now one is supposed to say that all these are somehow "equal". I'd love for someone to explain to me exactly what is equal about different ideologies, for I see nothing but differences.

    Just because western christians once, long, long ago, set out "to see the beauty of the lord", slowly exploring the world around them to the point that we can split the atom, and apply human rights masks the fact that they are in fact the only civilization to even attempt to do so, with the potential exception of one or two (certainly not all) greek city states that were overrun by barbarians. Everybody just can't seem to believe that no other society even tried, and what a fact like that might mean.

  15. Scientists don't get to say "we don't know" on On the Efficacy of Flu Vaccine · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not that the medical establishment even gets trained to do this. The last thing a sick person wants to hear is "we haven't got a clue what's happening".

    Anecdotes are all we have in everything except the exact sciences. All other sciences is based on anecdotes and stories, or their similar, but more systematic brother : data. Only things confirmed by controlled and direct experiments is real, trustworthy data, only such things lend themselves to real predictions. And most sciences, like medical science, climate science, social science, and any part of the humanities just doesn't allow experiments. We can't infect people with designed viruses to see what they do, we can't inject masses of gasses into a planetary athmosphere and see what happens and we can't run experiments on humans, never mind the issue that repeating any experiment on a thinking creature can obviously only result in a manipulated result.

    But the problem is more general. People abhor the answer : "we don't know this" or " we couldn't change this". Science has long since become a sort of religious status, where it's claims are total. Details like that the scientific method just doesn't work like this are not mentioned. You can see the headlines : "does the earth warm ? Scientists doubt it" (that would be what the scientific method dictates : that you doubt it, and the more you believe it's warming the more thoroughly you should go looking for any indication that you're wrong. Some scientists actually still do this, but it's an ever shrinking group, especially in the politicized sciences)

    But the issue of not knowing is problematic. Take the economic crisis for example : the basis of the problem is that nobody expected the cascade effect that failing mortgages would have. The problem is : the scientific reasoning for concluding that it couldn't happen was, statistically, very sound : it never happened before. In 50, and for some banks 200 years of data, the statistical algorithms never encountered that situation, so they concluded it to be impossible. You can wine all about it, but that's an entirely correct conclusion.

    Whatever your position about climate change, it is a science that will encounter the same problem : It has very limited data at the moment, real, quality (calibrated and double-checked), first hand data is limited to less than 200 years, and the list of huge energy reserves that are not considered is very likely to be a long list. The list of how they respond to different climatic events is likewise limited : we don't even know how half of them reacted in the past. Even if we did know that, there is the possibility that we are in a new situation, and things could react very differently to a very different situation. If such were true all statistical inferences would be 100% correct, and yet they would not match reality at all. You cannot test for this (despite how much people like to think that if "variance is explained 100%" that it can't happen, even though the variance in the financial data was 100% explained, it failed to predict the cascade failure). Yes humans put (a bit, compared to the ocean) of co2 in the athmosphere, they also put a few million other gases in the athmosphere. What will happen ? The pedantic, information theoretically correct answer is : "we haven't seen this before, we don't know. If we saw this one gas rise in concentration due to natural causes, a million years ago we would have seen a tempearture rise". Of course nobody likes that answer.

    Evolution theory dictates that training everyone's immune system before infection will result in one of 2 things :
    a) either viruses die
    b) they learn to bypass it entirely, making vaccines entirely ineffective
    So far, every success by science in finding some way to fight disease has ended in option b. It just never was vaccination, the human immune system, our last line of defence, that was manipulated by science. And it's a defensible position that a number of incidents came close to b), like the spanish flue of 1930 for example.

  16. Re:Government parties against neutrality on Democrats, Minority Groups Question Net Neutrality Push · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    As regards peace, no one argues the basis for WW2. The Soviets were dogs because we were. Violence can be overcome, just like hunger. You have to work at it. So I do.

    You're an idiot.

    One wonders how a mind like yours work. For example. Without violence (that ends in death), evolution would not work. Without violence constantly comitted by the police, America would look like Somalia. Without massive violence, Europe would have become Nazi, and would have devolved into a failed remnant of a communist state by now. Without the constant application of violence by the state that you so despise you would have had to sit in a corner while some brute raped your mother, hoping against hope he wouldn't rape you next, like half of Somalians do in that "nonviolent" country.

    As I said : you're an idiot, and that's assuming your total dishonesty and inconsistency are caused by your stupidity. All other explanations are worse.

    If you really abhor violence, I challenge you. I will keep abusing you, and you will solve this without using violence. Without ignoring me, without insulting me, like in your last post. If you can't, you're a dishonest man. If you use violence (like your last post for example) you're a lying hypocrite. Do however, feel free to retreat in any dimension other than the 4 I will not tolerate your ugly disgusting face in. See ? Lots of anger issues need solving here.

    And as your answer clearly indicates, you're not against agression. You're just an asshole that thinks he is the SOLE justified user of violence. You're an elitist idiot, and you're weak. That's why you "abhor" violence, of course only that comitted by others, not that comitted by you yourself.

    Let's be realistic : you're not (that) stupid, you're nothing but lying scum. A little crybaby screeching about how terribly unfair the real world is, for not being exactly the world that you want it to be. And obviously that this world exists is entirely my fault.

  17. Re:Government parties against neutrality on Democrats, Minority Groups Question Net Neutrality Push · · Score: 0, Troll

    These are utilities and common carriers. They're supposed to work for US

    No, these are for-profit companies. They work for their shareholders ("themselves").

    The group of Democrats that have been suckered in by the propaganda become their stooges, once again. They won't learn. But why should they as long as their own campaign finances are good.... filled and lined by the telcos?

    Then perhaps, vote for their competitors. Or campaign by yourself. I question that there is any need for the federal government to intevene. Let's let a few states do net neutrality, let a few other states not support net neutrality, and see what happens.

    ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.

    With people like you, Europe would have been nazi. Asia would have been massacred until it was 100% communist, or worshipped the mikado and the US would likely be fighting a war for survival. If the Soviets combined forces with said mikado, they would likely win. I wonder if statements like this mean that you are pro-Nazi, pro-Soviet and pro everyone who ever went to far. Surely you are in favor of kidnapping children of anyone with a competing religion ("devshirme"), for example ? Otherwise you wouldn't be pro-peace.

    War is not good, but violence is the basis of society. Whether we're talking protecting the weak from the (physically) strong, division of resources, or borders. Violence always was, is, and always will be the basis for civilization. And if you don't agree with me, think that peace is more important, I will personally come and hit you hard in the face until you agree with me, or die. If you do hit back, or call the police, you're obviously dishonest.

  18. Actually it doesn't on First Black Hole For Light Created On Earth · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's a lens. It only affects light (electromagnetic radiation).

    It's a lens, specifically, that bends light into a spiral path that ends in the middle of the lens. It could presumably be used to amplify light into a small point. The same small point, regardless of the way the light strikes the surface of the lens, making it potentially useful for solid-state light gathering.

  19. Re:Bad summary on Researchers Discover "Magnetic Current" · · Score: 1

    Okay ... buy an old tv. Produces those by the billions (and we're talking Obama's "at most 10 million" billions here),

  20. Re:Looks like a brilliant move on Free-To-Play Switch Going Well For D&D Online · · Score: 1

    One thing I wonder about, though. Doesn't this fall under gambling (and the legal minefield offering gambling is) ? Especially if it's true transactions ...

  21. Re:The answer to the pointy haired boss on Why Cloud Storage Is Lousy For Enterprises (and Individuals) · · Score: 1

    You're absolutely right. So don't use SHDSL for that and buy the internet line you require.

  22. Re:Brazil on Captain Bligh's Logbooks To Yield Climate Bounty · · Score: 1

    Just so I might learn. What exactly is wrong ?

    Is the alphabet an ancient Egyptian invention ? Yes/no ...
    Is the numeral system we use Indian (Hindu) ? Yes/no ... ...

    What exactly is wrong ?

  23. They do support other things on Image Recognition Neural Networks, Open Sourced · · Score: 4, Informative

    So please don't take the (dumb) slashdot blurb as the exhaustive feature list of the library.

    Supported :
    -> Adaline
    -> Perceptron
    -> Multi layer perceptron
    -> Hopfield
    -> Kohonen
    -> Hebbian
    -> Maxnet
    -> Competitive network
    -> RBF network

    So it does support several quite modern approaches. It also has a training utility which supports image training. This should be very useful to students imho.

  24. Re:The answer to the pointy haired boss on Why Cloud Storage Is Lousy For Enterprises (and Individuals) · · Score: 1

    Given that you have multiple locations - and your server room is colocated in some internet DC, the "not enough bandwidth" argument is also moot.

    For any large company therefore, and for all those internet startups, the "endpoint bandwidth sucks" argument is nonsense.

  25. He asked for a C++ toolkit on Platform Independent C++ OS Library? · · Score: 1

    The obvious answer would be QT, imho.