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User: khallow

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  1. Re:Quote by Karl Popper on Anonymous Declares War Over Charlie Hebdo Attack · · Score: 1

    So how do those words justify the bank robber's use of force?

  2. Re:Indicative of General Attitudes on Fewer Grants For Young Researchers Causing Brain Drain In Academia · · Score: 1

    The "Me" Generation aren't lazy entitled bums.

    Which generation is the "Me Generation" again? And how can I tell them apart from all those other generations with the same issues?

  3. the oil price "collapse" is temporary, soon as opec drives alternative drilling methods like fracking bankrupt, prices will rebound back to all time highs.

    They can't really make fracking bankrupt. Fracking will resume once the price increases. This sort of large fluctuation in price is common in the industry.

  4. Re: Pretty bad design on Virgin Galactic Test Flights To Restart This Year · · Score: 1

    At a glance, the "procedural controls" aren't best here. The copilot merely released the tail lock a few seconds early (the difference between mach 1 and mach 1.4). I gather if they had waited a few seconds later, then they might as well not bother unlocking the tail until just before entry several minutes later, and hope it works.

  5. Re: Quarterly forecast on Fewer Grants For Young Researchers Causing Brain Drain In Academia · · Score: 1

    But basic research is R&D and it is part of that massive spending.

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

    The Government / NEA doesn't (usually) commission specific pieces of art, but rather gives grants to artists so they may pursue their craft (with some measure of freedom of expression). If we limit grants to only those artists that produce art pleasing to everyone, that offends no one, or simply placates the common denominator, than what does that gain us as a society?

    I think the obvious solution is don't do it at all. Then people can status signal with their own money.

  7. Re:Bar fucking barians ... on In Paris, Terrorists Kill 2 More, Take At Least 7 Hostages · · Score: 1

    From my point of view this applies to most of the American Republican party and the entire Tea Party movement (except almost all of the latter are way beyond the fringe already).

    The difference from your point of view and reality being that the "beyond the fringe" groups are getting people elected and the Republicans are one of the two dominant political parties in the US. That makes them not fringe in reality.

  8. Re:Rock paper scissors on Researchers "Solve" Texas Hold'Em, Create Perfect Robotic Player · · Score: 1

    The way to oppose it is to learn how the bot plays under those circumstances, exploit it to learn what is in the bot's hand in the initial betting rounds (pre-flop, flop and turn) and then use your river bet to make the bot react in a way that is favourable to you. The above is actually rather simplified, but even a "perfect" bot cannot play optimal poker against a foe that alters his game to take advantage of the bot's strategy.

    Here's the thing. There's nothing to learn. The strategy doesn't use any information about your play style and hence does not react. Instead you'll get the same distribution of possible plays to every state of the system. It's not trying to fool you. It's just a generic optimal strategy no matter what you do. Your best strategy would be to employ the same strategy the robot uses.

  9. Re:Fundamentally unread arguments on Why We're Not Going To See Sub-orbital Airliners · · Score: 1

    We are clearly discussing suborbital versus conventional flight

    If we really are "clearly" discussing suborbital versus conventional flight, then we need to discuss suborbital technology and its actual costs and benefits. It is a necessary precondition. You can't just dismiss it with completely bullshit arguments about security and inconvenience. As I've repeatedly noted, that's what Charles Stross did.

    And in a scenario of cheap energy, the difference in cost between conventional and the various alternatives declines. What doesn't decline is the value of peoples' time. That implies to me that in a cheap energy scenario, suborbital and hypersonic flight would become more attractive than they are now;.

  10. Re:Fox/henhouse on FCC Says It Will Vote On Net Neutrality In February · · Score: 1

    No, what you said is irrelevant. Whether you can act independently doesn't change the fact that your rights are still your own. Your rights are still yours even if you're born crippled.

    The analogy doesn't work for corporations. Their owners and employees have a control over the corporation that would be illegal for people to have over each other. A typical example is ending the corporation outright. Even a complete vegetable of a human has more protection against being killed than a corporation does.

    Treating a corporation as a separate entity is a legal fiction like corporate personhood. It is not done to protect the corporation from its owners, but rather to help prevent the owners of the corporation from absconding with assets leaving uncovered liabilities.

    ...you're conflating "business" with "corporation". They're not the same. You can have a business that isn't a corporation. Removing corporations doesn't mean businesses suddenly lose all power to counterbalance government.

    You're starting to get it. There is a reason for that conflation. Corporations are only a big deal because that's by far the most popular form of organization for a large, powerful business. Nobody cares in the least about incorporated small businesses or non profits. And many, if not most, of the complaints about corporations are really complaints about large businesses.

    Corporations, I hate to remind you, existed well before modern governments and division of power. They didn't even try to counterbalance government. Some of the biggest corporations in history were created BY government to further the interests of government. East India Company comes to mind.

    And yet I remain correct. The British East India Company did despite its origins act with a considerable amount of independence of the United Kingdom and thus act as a counterweight to UK government power.

    There are means, but one that is NOT a mean is corporations, as corporations are created through government power.

    Driver's licenses are also created via government power. But that doesn't stop you from driving to a protest. Or merely just driving where you want. Being created by government power doesn't imply government control. You have to approach such situations with common sense not make it worse.

    Here, the whole thing about corporate personhood is to provide a legal mechanism for a strong constraint on how governments can control corporations. Undermine that and you increase the actual degree of government control.

  11. Re:As a proportion of the budget... on Should We Be Content With Our Paltry Space Program? · · Score: 1

    None of these things (particularly 1 and 2) prove Obamacare is (present tense) a disaster.

    I consider it like a landslide. The disaster starts some time before people start dying and property starts getting buried. There is a point when disaster and the harm it causes is inevitable. I believe we are past that point for Obamacare now.

    You've really got to stretch credibility to argue that a program that is perfectly sustainable during a massive recession will magically become unsustainable in the next decade.

    It's "perfectly sustainable" in that a) large portions of the program have been deliberately delayed in implementation, and b) most of it which has been running, has done so for only the past year. Calling a system which hasn't quite fallen apart in its first year "perfectly sustainable" is an abuse of the English language.

    There are a number of dynamics which are ignored here. First, that the subsidies perfectly insulate from the cost of the insurance. Once you've chewed through the deductible of the insurance, you have no further reason to care about reducing the cost of your healthcare.

    Medicaid provides similar insulation, but it has the cost control feature that health care can simply be withheld either directly or by various games such as delaying service or making the act of getting service more onerous.

    As health care and health insurance costs continue to rise (since most people don't actually have incentive to consume less health care no matter how expensive it gets), then we get to the next dynamic, a strong incentive to dump more people onto Medicaid. But those people vote. The bigger that group gets the harder it'll be to cut back on service.

    Insurance companies meanwhile have an assortment of incentives encouraging them to aggressively take on risk. The ones who make poor risk choices will be subsidized by those who didn't.

    I think that's going to encourage a headlong rush into bankruptcy for a bunch of insurance companies. But not in a way that fails in the first year of operations.

    Can you name single country which has actually had either a) universal health care, or b) a manned space program without the government footing the bill?

    The US. You're playing semantics games with the terms, "universal health care" and "manned space program". For example, paying for your own health care is just as universal as any government scheme. You just don't like the level at which service is set for those who can't or won't pay for their health care. Similarly, we already have a number of private manned space programs in the US. They just haven't yet put people into space. That strikes me as a strong indication that we'd have many of these even in the absence of NASA money.

  12. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. on The Luxury of a Bottomless Bucket of Bandwidth For Georgia Schools · · Score: 1

    I notice you do this a lot, ignore what people are saying that is very relevant,

    That's because people make a lot of irrelevant observations. I explain below why your post fell into that unfortunate category.

    but you have completely ignored my observations twice now.

    Comcast serves a different sort of market. And there are private services which are far better fits for a comparison.

    Sure, it's similar enough to make a misleading comparison, but it's a bit like comparing a fancy restaurant to a fast food restaurant. Which is better depends on how you weight their respective services, quality, cost, speed of service, etc.

    But I think everyone would agree that I'm not making a fair comparison, if I claim that no one can provide as fine a meal as my fancy restaurant merely because the fast food choice doesn't compare. "My restaurant is better than McDonald's therefore it's the best in the world." In fact, I doubt anyone would find that claim even remotely useful to determine just how good my food is.

    Comcast provides cheap combination cable TV/internet services to residences and businesses. It's not in the business of providing high bandwidth backbone services like what Peachnet provides. So you claim that because Peachnet is superior to Comcast, then it's superior to any private network solution out there in the world - while ignoring actual private services that actually do the sort of thing that Peachnet does far better than Comcast could. That just isn't saying anything useful or interesting. Hence, this is why your observation is irrelevant.

    Now, why should I pay lip service to an argument that doesn't go anywhere? How does that help anyone?

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

    There's a supernatural agency (the invisible hand of the market)

    The dynamics are quite visible. The "invisible hand" is not that invisible.

  14. Re:Starivore? on The Search For Starivores, Intelligent Life That Could Eat the Sun · · Score: 1

    That's what a Dyson Sphere does.

    No, it doesn't.

    After a few billion years, when the star goes dim, they will most likely loot the star for fusible material.

    Which is not a Dyson sphere thing.

  15. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. on The Luxury of a Bottomless Bucket of Bandwidth For Georgia Schools · · Score: 1

    Comcast doesn't serve this sort of market. Look for a backbone provider like AT&T or MCI. And you have yet to address even one of my observations.

  16. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. on The Luxury of a Bottomless Bucket of Bandwidth For Georgia Schools · · Score: 1

    Peachnet's budget for 2014 was 25 million to support 80 Colleges and Universities plus the 6,000 K-12 schools. Do you know anything about corporate IT budgets?

    Peachnet is not an IT department. Those colleges and schools still need to provide their own IT. And if any of those parties fail to provide adequate IT support, it's no skin off their teeth.

  17. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. on The Luxury of a Bottomless Bucket of Bandwidth For Georgia Schools · · Score: 1

    What's your link speed? ping? Do you have a bandwidth cap? What's your monthly rate for internet? What's your uptime%? How's your customer service? This system beats any internet service anyone has inside the USA, save for other municipalities who have also made their own ISPs.

    "Beats" in what way? I notice several obvious flaws with your argument: no consideration of cost, no consideration of peculiar economics of scale of a considerable university system, and no basis of comparison.

  18. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. on The Luxury of a Bottomless Bucket of Bandwidth For Georgia Schools · · Score: 1

    And proves pretty well, that the government can and does do things better than private corporations.

    Ok, what is being done better here?

  19. Re:Why is this shocking to anyone? on Bill Gates Endorses Water From Human Waste · · Score: 1

    Just remember, don't drink those water molecules that have been next to poop molecules.

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

    If all it takes to be considered supernatural is to have theories that haven't been validated yet,

    Such as not having yet experimentally proven the existence of a omnipotent and omniscient god? Good luck with that.

  21. Re:Starivore? on The Search For Starivores, Intelligent Life That Could Eat the Sun · · Score: 1

    I gather the "starivore" actually consumes the matter of the star in addition to its energy. So it might not even intercept all that much energy from the star.

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

    But not the same "too many" as Islam has killed over that same period.

  23. Re:islam on Gunmen Kill 12, Wound 7 At French Magazine HQ · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Marxism is not a religion in any way.

    I don't buy that in the least. It's a dogmatic, organized belief system with formal ways to worship the belief system. And they require supernatural agency as well, both to suspend disbelief about actual human behavior and to explain why things aren't working as expected (imaginary kulaks, counterrevolutionaries, capitalists, etc are always holding us back). They check off all the boxes.

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

    Islam, fascism, and communism have each killed more people. That includes the genocides of the New World (most which weren't religion-based BTW).

  25. Re:Fox/henhouse on FCC Says It Will Vote On Net Neutrality In February · · Score: 1

    How is it not relevant? He has shown that you are wrong about legal rights. A corporation's legal rights are not merely its owner's rights. Corporations are a separate legal entity, with a set of legal rights of their own. That set of rights isn't just decided by what legal rights their owners have, but by the whims of government.

    Again, this is irrelevant. The corporation can't act independently of its owners and employees. It is merely a tool of their interests.

    When you ban the speech of a corporation, you're banning the speech of people acting on the corporation's behalf and hence, violating those rights. When you seize corporate property in violation of the respective amendments, you are violating the rights of the people who own that corporation. That is why there is corporate personhood in the first place.

    False dilemma. You're not stuck between corporations and government doing all those other horrible things, nor would the disappearance of corporations automatically lead to those horrible things.

    Nonsense, a key precept of modern governance is division of power. If no party or entity has control over most of the power in a society, then no party can act as a tyrant. Businesses informally provide a counterweight to government power and hence, create a division of power not explicitly recognized in constitutions of democracies.

    Corporations are just a convenient way to organize businesses. To do away with them would be to destroy one of the greater counterweights to government control of society. Even to just void selected rights of corporations is to upset the balance in a very unhealthy way.

    If it only did that, it would be a proprietorship, not a corporation. Again, a corporation is more than just a legal instrument. It's a legal instrument that depends on government. When you depend on government, you become a political tool. Government can dangle privileges to encourage or coerce behavior.

    Just like governments dole out driver's licenses? "I'm sorry, Mr. AC, but you voted for the wrong party in the last election. Your privilege to drive has been revoked." There are means for preventing governments from using their power for abuse.

    And I find it interesting that you use government abuse of power as an excuse to increase government power. That's irrationally suicidal, but typical of people who don't understand the dynamics or risks at all.