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User: clovis

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  1. Not good news on Bitcoin Breaks $1,000 Level, Highest in More Than 3 Years (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Another way of writing the story is this:
    People who bought bit coin in 2013 had lost money for the last three years, and at long last are now even.
    Look for the same if you buy bitcoin now, you can help make the 2013 losers whole by participating in the next round of pump and dump ... From the losers side.

  2. Re:Blues Brothers on Iconic Star Wars Actress Carrie Fisher Dies at 60 (people.com) · · Score: 1

    Gee, Carrie, where'd you learn to shoot? Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy?

    All those misses is how Jake knew she still loved him.

    When your wife peppers the doorframe around you with her 9mm from the kitchen, do you just think "Well, I married a bad shot", or do you realize that she's trying to communicate something non-verbally?

    BTW, for the slashdot aspies reading this, the answer is that she's trying to communicate, and she wants to know you still care for her.
    So you need unzip, pull it out, and waggle it at her so she sees that you still want her.

  3. Blues Brothers on Iconic Star Wars Actress Carrie Fisher Dies at 60 (people.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    I liked her best in The Blues Brothers.

  4. Re:Drugs are bad for you on Iconic Star Wars Actress Carrie Fisher Dies at 60 (people.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I wonder if a generation of marijuana users will lead to early onset dementia, and low IQs.

    We just had an election for President of the United States that pitted Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, so here's your answer: it's more than just one generation that got addled.

  5. numerous errors seen on Uber Admits To Self-driving Car 'Problem' in Bike Lanes As Safety Concerns Mount (theguardian.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    So I looked at the video in the article
    https://www.theguardian.com/te...

    1) It's a one-way street, and the crosswalk has SIX red lights. one over each lane, two at the sidewalk before and after the crosswalk. How did the sensors miss all those lights? Was it looking at tree and decided "Green? Keep going ..."

    2) There is a pedestrian stepping into the crosswalk and the Uber drove past him. In Ga, all traffic must stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk, and I'm quite that sure Ca's law is even more strict.

    3) The uber passes a car already stopped for the red light at the crosswalk. I don't know California law, but in Georgia it is also illegal to pass a car stopped for a pedestrian at a crosswalk. It's also common sense - you can't see if the car was stopped for a child/short person/wheelchair attempting to cross, so you should stop first and look second in that situation.

    4) the light turned yellow at the 2 second mark in the video, and the Uber went though at 11 seconds, so it's not even close.

    5) common sense that people have: If I'm coming to an intersection and other cars are stopping, I slow and look around; I know something is happening.
    maybe the light changed while I was dozing, or maybe a passenger is going to open the door in front of me.
    It appears that the Uber lacks this sort of situational awareness, but I don't know if the human was given an alert and ignored it in this case.

  6. There's plenty to like about Clinton and plenty to dislike about Nixon, but to claim that the military played 'keep-away' with the nuclear football for the five years he was President is unbelievable. We were decades into a Cold War with Russia, and had they known POTUS couldn't retaliate we surely would have been attacked/provoked by the Russians.

    So, got anything to backup your claim?

    OP Creimer is wrong. There was a rumor that during Nixon's last days that they kept the football away from Nixon, but that did not happen. William Gulley among others have debunked that story.

  7. Re: Stop calling it "skepticism". on Weather Channel To Breitbart: Stop Citing Us To Spread Climate Skepticism (weather.com) · · Score: 2

    I can contribute to this discussion, but I have to post anonymously for reasons that will be obvious. I work at a major research institution along the east coast. I am paid well, well into six figures, as a climate researcher. My job is to fabricate data, but to make it believable enough that people accept our research is true. I can assure you that most climate research, like my own, is fabricated and completely false.

    My favorite part of this is that this numbskull thinks there's a climate scientist who makes six figures.

    It's like a riddle, and the answer is:
    The AC climate researcher is working for the Koch brothers.

  8. Is Joe McCarthy back? on The US Government Funds A War On Online Fake News (bangordailynews.com) · · Score: 1

    Oh, great. So now we'll have a truth commission
    Next we need to find the disloyal propaganda-spewing reporters and make them sign loyalty oaths.
    Oh, and don't forget that Hollywood is owned by foreigners. Something should be done about that.

  9. Why would anything in the universe be constant? Maybe the variability is beyond our ability to observe.

    Anyone who has studied the time cube already knows this.

  10. Re:Good then bad then good on Sugar-Free Products Might Actually Stop Us From Getting Slimmer (dw.com) · · Score: 1

    Hate to be that guy, but:

    [citation needed]

    Here is a sample calculation done by the various people who make that claim:

    typical study of reduction in lifespan due to smoking:
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

    The average geezer on SSA gets 15K a year.
    https://www.ssa.gov/policy/doc...

    The average medicare per-person yearly cost for the over 65 people is $19K.
    https://www.cms.gov/research-s...

    cigarettes killing the old folks 7 years early save $238K from SSA and Medicare

    Lung cancer is an expensive way to go. typical last-year costs are 95K.
    cigarettes death include heart failure and strokes. quick deaths are cheap.

  11. I would do it if I were young.
    As written, it would mean that in exchange for a year of no sex, I would get decades of not having to worry about not only my own account, but also the integrity of all the places that I have accounts. I have several bank, credit union, and brokerage accounts, and they would all have to be made secure to protect my accounts. There is also the IRS, and the various hospitals who hold my medical records.

    "online security" has to include both endpoints to be safe. It's neither your MS windows nor your Linux boxes at home that You should to worry about.

  12. Re:The Unintended Consequences of Bad Math on Snopes.com Editor on Fake News: Social Media Is Not the Problem (backchannel.com) · · Score: 2

    So given a line-up of 2 randomly chosen people, one white and one black, there is essentially equal chance that either one is an ex-con. And if you have a line up of more than 2 people, one that is racial proportional to the general population, say 7 white guys, 1 hispanic guy, 1 black guy and one ethnically ambiguous-maybe-asian, then the chance that at least one of the white people is a felon is about 7x higher than the chance that the black guy is a felon.

    I agree with everything you're saying, in principle, but your math is bad.
    It's not true that there's an essentially equal chance that either one of a randomly picked white-black pair is an ex-con.
    From your provided numbers ...
    A randomly chosen white person is one out of 156 million of which there is a 2.1% chance you picked a felon.
    A randomly chosen black person is one out of 27 million with a 12% chance you picked a felon.
    The combinatorics of picking two people, one white and one black give us 4,212 million combinations of two chosen.
    (for each white cycle through 27M black =156M*27M)
    Of these 4,212M combinations, there are four possible arrangements.
    innocent white and innocent black (152.8M Innoc-W * 24.2M Innoc-B = 3697.76M pairs gives 87.8% of pairs both innocent
    felon white and innocent black (3.2M felon-W * 24.2 Innoc-B = 77.44M pairs gives 1.8% of pairs felon white and innocent black
    innocent white and felon black (152.8M Innoc-W * 2.8M Felon-B = 428.06M pairs gives 10.2% innocent white and felon black
    felon white and felon black (3.2M Felon-W * 2.8M Felon-B = 8.96M pairs gives .2% both felons

    So, of two randomly chosen white-black pairs out of the general population, there's a 2% chance you have a white felon and a 10.4% chance there's a black felon.

  13. Re:Blame the news websites. on Snopes.com Editor on Fake News: Social Media Is Not the Problem (backchannel.com) · · Score: 1

    The problem is he was asked to point out one person.
    The generalization is absolutely true (black guy is more likely to be ex-con), but you absolutely cannot take a generalization and apply it to a single specific case.

    You can make a generalization from an aggregation of data points, but you cannot take a generalization, a single fact, and re-create an original data point, which is what you're being asked to do in the case of "pick the ex-con".

    You can indeed state the probability that it's the black guy, but you simply do not know if it is him with certainty.

    So the correct answer to the line-up question is "Not enough data. I don't know".

  14. Typing cmd in the run dialog will launch PowerShell as well, so Microsoft has made a significant step towards phasing out the traditional Command Prompt.

    I just upgraded my Insider preview to 14971,

    As a result, PowerShell officially replaces the Command Prompt in the Win + X menu, so when you right-click the Start menu, you'll only be allowed to launch the more powerful app.

    This is true.

    Additionally, in File Explorer's File menu and in the context menu that appears when pressing Shift + right-click in any folder, the old Command Prompt will no longer be available.

    This is false.

    Typing cmd in the run dialog will launch PowerShell as well, so Microsoft has made a significant step towards phasing out the traditional Command Prompt.

    Wrong again. Typing "cmd" into the run dialog launches "C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe"

  15. Re:I still don't want it on Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build (softpedia.com) · · Score: 1

    You can't issue dos/cmd commands. The likes of "dir" are aliases onto things in powershell which superficially resemble the old commands but function differently.

    For example I can type "dir", but "dir /?" doesn't do a thing. So maybe the syntax is a bit different. Typing "dir -help" or "dir --help" issues an enormous error message that apparently I've done something wrong. Not helpful. Typing "help dir", tells me about something called "get-childitem" but essentially doesn't help at all except tell me to type "get-help Get-ChildItem -detailed". Eventually I get a wall of text which STILL doesn't correspond to the old syntax.

    Would it have really killed Microsoft to make "dir" function like "dir"? Maybe later on when I'm comfortable and familiar with the powershell I might want call get-childitem for something. But it is FAR more important to me during transition that the thing is familiar and all the various .bat / .cmd scripts that I have actually survive the transition.

    I should add that the command "ls" also aliases to "get-childitem". So Microsoft are equal-opportunity confounders.

    Yes, what you said about dir etc being aliases in PS and not the "real" commands.
    Presently you can run .bat file in powershell just fine because powershell spawns a cmd.exe to run that bat file in the same way that opening a .txt file opens notepad.exe.
    Oddly enough though, as you pointed out, running single cmd.exe commands doesn't work under powershell in many cases.
    Most of the non-text characters, @, $, | and so on, have different meanings in cmd and in powershell.
    From the PS prompt "@echo Hey!" fails, but put "@echo Hey!" in a .bat file and it works because PS launches cmd.exe to run it.

    However, if you really want to do things from the command line and you're in a PS prompt, you can type cmd.exe and then dir /? or anything works just fine in that shell. Notice that the prompt changes when you do that.

  16. Re:I still don't want it on Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build (softpedia.com) · · Score: 1

    Out of curiosity, have you ever opened powershell and started issuing dos/cmd commands?

    Here's a hint: works great. Powershell isn't a superset of cmd, but it implements cmd commands. You can likely take a .bat file, rename it to .ps, and have it run just fine. I've never had a problem doing so, at least.

    This is kind of like complaining that your Linux distro is replacing sh with bash; all your old stuff will keep working, but now you have new options and abilities that you can slowly migrate to.

    Powershell launches cmd.exe to execute .bat files in the same way that typing "names.txt" opens "names.txt" in notepad.

  17. Re:All Grown Up on 'Stranger In a Strange Land' Coming To TV (ew.com) · · Score: 1

    " What technology needs to happen that does not exist already? "

    Since we have not sent even a rat to Mars, the answer to your asinine question is: EVERYTHING. Until you've BUILT and DONE it, all you have is WISHFUL THINKING.

    How is that an asinine question?

    Make a list of the technology needed to send and land humans on the moon.
    Make a list of the technology needed to send and land the Curiosity rover to Mars.
    Make a list of the technology needed to support humans in the ISS for the last 18 years.

    You've just made a list of almost all of the technology needed to send humans to Mars.

    So the next question is exactly, " What technology needs to happen that does not exist already? "
    I think that the radiation problem, that is, how to lift how much shielding is going to be a big one.

  18. Hissing or fake engine noise.

    I want my car to play the crocodile theme from the Disney "Peter Pan" cartoon.

  19. Re:But what is the crime? on 'Flash Crash' Trader Pleads Guilty, Facing Up To 30 Years In Prison (telegraph.co.uk) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Also, one thing that media forgets to mention is that his activity was noticed before the flash crash and the exchanges told him to stop doing that. He continued his bogus trades, and he made the mistake of lying about his activities in emails with the exchanges.
    Nothing quite like documenting your crimes in email, is there? For some reason that sounds familiar, but it no longer seems important ...

  20. Re:But what is the crime? on 'Flash Crash' Trader Pleads Guilty, Facing Up To 30 Years In Prison (telegraph.co.uk) · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's the criminal complaint as filed by the US government.
    It includes what he did and why it was a criminal act.

    https://www.justice.gov/sites/...

    What Navinder was trying to do with his bogus orders was to place them OUTSIDE the existing range of buy/sell orders and in large volume to make it appear that there were people actively buying which drives the price up. Ideally ,once he's made his actual sale, he stops placing his bogus orders and the price returns to normal. If he gets too greedy and screws up, he causes a crash and gets caught.
    You can also do it with bogus sell orders to drive the prices down.
    People have been doing that since forever, and it's been illegal for some time.
    It's a variation of what you may have heard called "pump and dump", but instead of spreading rumors, he abused the market's internal machinery to artificially manipulate the prices with a specially designed computer program to prevent his trades from getting filled.

    How is what he did different than HFT?
    HFT traders do place orders that they intend to cancel, however, if someone successfully intercepted an order placed by a HFT trader, that order would get filled. It appears to me that there was no possibility that Navinder could fill the orders he placed.
    The other difference is that the HFT traders are doing price discovery and arbitrage, which is to say they are placing their orders BETWEEN existing active buy and sell orders to get an optimal price for a trade. That is, they are trying to find the best sell and buy order prices so that they can place an optimal buy/sell order.
    What HFT traders do tends to bring prices closer together and increase liquidity in normal conditions. These are good for the market (unless they screw up).
    BTW, HFT and algorithmic trading are not the same thing, but they can be combined and done by the same people. Some of what HFT gets blamed for is actually the fault of computer-driven algorithmic trading.

  21. Re:Where's the kaboom? on Intel Wants To Replace Fireworks With Drones (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 0

    There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom.

    Maybe they can keep it fun by using industrial lasers pointed into the crowd.
    Make it a "Day of the Triffids" kind of thing.

  22. Re:Vote-flipping Evidence on Lawsuit Seeks To Block New York Ban On 'Ballot Selfies' (msnbc.com) · · Score: 2

    There are already a lot of videos circulating that show vote-flipping, where you vote for A, but the machine records B. Making selfies illegal would make the evidence that this has happeened inadmissable in court.

    What is happening is a combination of poorly calibrated machines and parallax on touch-screen devices.
    People touch one place and the adjacent spot is activated. All the voter has to do is touch again a bit higher or lower to get the vote they want.
    It's not changing the vote after the fact.

    The same thing happens on bank ATMs when you try to touch $20 but get $50 instead, but people realize this and don't post to Facebook that they think the bank is cheating them.

  23. What do we want?
      Parallel lines!
    When do we want them?
      Forever!

  24. Re:This doesn't prove what they were hoping to pro on Doctors Perform Better Than Internet Or App-Based Symptoms Checkers, Says Study (sciencedaily.com) · · Score: 1

    "Eighty-four percent of clinicians listed the correct diagnosis in the top three possibilities, compared with 51 percent for the digital symptom-checkers. The difference between physician and computer performance was most dramatic in more severe and less common conditions. It was smaller for less acute and more common illnesses."

    I'm surprised that digital diagnosis is that good already. The era of an "iDoc" app being as good as a gateway practitioner is probably not far off.

    It's not that surprising when you consider that most of the diagnosis was done by the humans that chose what questions to ask and what tests to run before the data was presented to the AI. When the AI correctly chooses what questions to ask and which tests to run, then we'll have something.

  25. Re:This doesn't prove what they were hoping to pro on Doctors Perform Better Than Internet Or App-Based Symptoms Checkers, Says Study (sciencedaily.com) · · Score: 1

    The other problem is that some patients will lie about their symptoms -either exaggerating or denying. Doctors know this and have the problem of seeing through what the patient says without pissing the patient off so that the patient would then refuse to cooperate or comply.
    It will be interesting to see how an AI will deal with that aspect of medical care. And yes, I'm aware that there are tests, but you can't run every test just because.