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User: jpmorgan

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Comments · 1,267

  1. Re:An overregulated province anyway... on Ontario Government Wants To Regulate the Internet · · Score: 1

    Alberta also has private liquor stores.

  2. Re:Gridlocked with No Way to Prime the Pump on Vast Bulk of BitCoins Are Hoarded, Not Used · · Score: 2

    The US currency is backed by something. If you think somebody owes you something in the US, they can throw a pile of little green pieces of paper and call it even. Disagree? Take it up with the US government, and see who wins.

    US currency is backed by US government power.

  3. Re:Great! on Richard Branson 'Determined To Start a Population On Mars' · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What's wrong with his wealth? The man is a serial entrepreneur and he started out selling budgies and Christmas trees. If we had ten of him, the world would be a better place.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Richard_Branson's_business_ventures

  4. Re:Not sure about the thesis of the article, but.. on Why Aircraft Carriers Still Rule the Oceans · · Score: 1

    That's how all of war works. Battles usually have lower casualties than a casual observer would guess, and those that do are usually remembered as bloody. You don't engage until you know you can win. If your enemy advances you retreat. The weaker side retreats until they can't, then they surrender or are destroyed.

    If anti-carrier missiles have a longer range than the carrier's aircraft, then the carrier is in check. So now maybe you have to use a guided missile submarine and cruise missiles to destroy the anti-carrier missiles first. Maybe your opponent has a good anti-submarine force. But maybe your carrier's planes don't have enough range to hit the anti-carrier missiles, but they do have enough range to hit the anti-submarine force.

    War is not rock paper scissors.

  5. Re:Unionize on Ask Slashdot: When Does Time Tracking at Work Go Too Far? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't worry, your union dues are well appreciated by the politicians your union supports in your name.

  6. Re:Unionize on Ask Slashdot: When Does Time Tracking at Work Go Too Far? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Unions would be okay if they were subject to the same market forces as their employers. But they're not, they're protected by reams of labour law. Unions are allowed to monopolize labour in an industry and force anti-competitive security agreements, which would be considered anti-competitive and illegal in any other contract.

    Consider the infamous 'right-to-work' states. What does being a 'right-to-work' state mean? It means unions can't compel people to join. In Germany, for example, the decision to join a union is considered an individual decision, and workers have an equal right to join or not join a union; the right to free association, means you're also free not to associate if you don't want to. But if you disagree with your union in Michigan and want to opt out, good luck making that legal argument.

  7. Re:Sigh. on QR Codes As Anti-Forgery On Currency Could Infect Banks · · Score: 1

    The moronic part was so publicly expressing an opinion about something which the poster obviously knows so little.

    Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.

  8. Re:Just goes to show you... on Look-Alike Web Sites Hoodwink Republican Donors · · Score: 1

    Alan Greenspan. If you're going to accuse somebody of not knowing what they're talking about, it behoves you to avoid such simple errors.

  9. Re:A load of hooey on Obama and Romney Respond To ScienceDebate.org Questionnaire · · Score: 1

    Well, right now NASA gets directed to spend half its money on a new decade-long project every 5 years. A little bit of long-term political focus couldn't hurt.

  10. Re:Back to the Future... on Russia Wants a Hypersonic Bomber · · Score: 1

    The SR-71 was derived from the YF-12 which was an armed interceptor.

    Also, to cope with heat expansion the fuel tanks don't seal on the ground. It always has to refuel after take-off, so there's no point in filling the tanks. You fill it with just enough fuel to get off the ground and get up to speed (and heat).

  11. Re:I love my country on Another LulzSec Member Arrested · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In the US, generally the maximum penalty for killing someone is death, which I think most agree is more severe than 15 years.

    As a matter of course, most people convicted of killing someone else don't get the death penalty, and neither is this man is likely to face 15 years in prison. Those are both the maximum penalty.

  12. Re:There is no attack on science or reason on A Call For Science Policy Debate Among Presidential Candidates · · Score: 1

    It was Eisenhower, not Kennedy or Roosevelt, who started desegregation.

  13. Re:If this article... on Apple Is Now the Most Valuable Company In History · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The thing about trends is they never end, until they do. Just because some people were wrong about Apple years ago, doesn't mean they're wrong about Apple today.

    Apple may be extraordinarily successful, but its success is based upon a product line that is:
    1. Almost entirely consumer driven, and
    2. Incredibly undiversified.

    That's an incredibly risky strategy. Most companies build successful long-term business by establishing well diversified product lines, or by building product lines and business relationships that establish long-term cash flow. Apple's bet their success on their ability to stay cooler than the competition. So what's a more likely scenario for 2022: that the world is still addicted to Exxon's oil, or that the iPhone 10 is still the hottest product on the market?

  14. Re:What Innovfation? on Who Cares If Samsung Copied Apple? · · Score: 1

    1920 x 1080 x 24fps is 50 million pixels per second. Recent CPUs from Intel top 100GFlops, which is 2000flop/pixel, and recent GPUs from NVidia are topping out around 4000Gflops, or 80,000 flop/pixel.

    Throw in enough geometry and you can cause problems, but that's more than enough horsepower to draw a simple scene in realtime.

  15. Re:Makes me happy on Apple Is Now the Most Valuable Company In History · · Score: 1

    But I do think one way to economic recovery is to make truck loads of money, then spend it.

    That's the only way to economic recovery.

  16. Re:Actual communism on Bill Gates To Develop a Revolutionary Nuclear Reactor With Korea · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's how communism fails in small groups, but do you really think the Soviet Union's economy collapsed because they were all lazy?

    No, the real reason why communism fails in large scale is because it doesn't have a good decision making mechanism. A successful economy is an efficient economy: efficiency frees up resources to be used for other purposes. The capitalist system is one in which major decisions are made on a financial and monetary basis, i.e., the value and costs of any action can be quantified.

    In any sort of command economy, there are political considerations; there are many examples of the Soviet Union making desperately bad economic decisions for political reasons. But there is a greater problem: under communism, optimal decision making is an intractable problem. The economic decision problem grows exponentially with population size.

    But what about capitalism? Under capitalism the decision about whether, for example, to shut down a factory for upgrades and maintenance is economic, not political. But more importantly, financial markets operate as a clever information summarization mechanism which reduce the decision problem from exponential to polynomial.

    No, communism doesn't fail because people are lazy. Communism fails because running an advanced society is - like most human endeavours - a lot harder than it looks. The devil is in the details, and oh boy are there a lot of details when you're trying to satisfy the needs of a hundred million people. A small fact that most political philosphers overlook.

  17. Re:What Innovfation? on Who Cares If Samsung Copied Apple? · · Score: 1, Informative

    It's been quite a while since a 'normal' PC couldn't do realtime raytracing. Nobody does it because unless you're going for photorealism, rasterization gives you more bang for your buck.

  18. Re:natural gas doesn't make CO2? on US Carbon Emissions Hit 20-Year Low · · Score: 1

    Yeah, like the GE LM500, a purpose designed turbine specifically for electrical generation, except for the fact that it's a minor derivative of the J79 jet engine.

    Turbine design is a very high cost process. Most turbines are derivatives of jet engines, because it's a lot cheaper that way. You can't just put a military jet engine directly into a power plant, but the conversion process is usually not expensive.

  19. Re:natural gas doesn't make CO2? on US Carbon Emissions Hit 20-Year Low · · Score: 2

    And the core of a gas plant is a gas turbine. The US has thousands of mothballed jet engines sitting in the Mojave dessert that can be inexpensively repurposed into gas generators.

  20. The law that the UK is threatening to use was created in response to the murder of Yvonne Fletcher.

  21. Re:The NYSE shouldn't reverse trades. on Knight Trading Losses Attributed To Old, Dormant Software · · Score: 1

    And frankly, that's fair. A small business is a very risky investment, which also demands an enormous amount of time.

    If you get your broker to buy you some shares in Hershey's, then spend one weekend a year doing your taxes and rebalancing, there's no reason why you should get the same kinds of return that a small business owner would expect, who is taking a large risk and investing 70+ hours a week.

  22. Re:And who will they be watching? on Grumman Building Football Field-Sized Robotic Surveillance Blimp · · Score: 1

    The Taliban doesn't have high altitude SAMs.

  23. Re:The NYSE shouldn't reverse trades. on Knight Trading Losses Attributed To Old, Dormant Software · · Score: 1

    Inflating your way out of sovereign debt (i.e., printing money) is considered by most to be a default.

  24. Re:i hope never on Could Flying Cars Actually Be On Their Way? · · Score: 1

    A blimp big enough to carry a person around is enormous. It's also a giant sail, and navigating one in any wind, with any sort of traffic, would be very challenging.

    Consider Top Gear's experience with DIY blimping: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlzQq3nOj5c

  25. Re:Stock trading robots are destroying the markets on Knight Trading Losses Attributed To Old, Dormant Software · · Score: 2, Informative

    That is the most out-of-context thing I've ever seen on slashdot. You took the quote that the article was disagreeing with, and presented it as the article's thesis instead. For the curious, here's the final paragraph of the article linked:

    Whether increased participation from HFTs is a good or bad thing is up for debate, as is whether steps need to be taken to limit the activity of HFTs. And that's a debate that needs to happen, but it needs to happen based on solid facts and a good understanding of what's really going on.

    This particular graphic, however, was assigned meaning that was never actually there. To me, this suggests a high level of fear (whether warranted or not) of HFTs, a lack of understanding of what HFTs are doing, journalistic laziness, or, probably, a bit of all three.