Slashdot Mirror


User: Stirling+Newberry

Stirling+Newberry's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
658
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 658

  1. Re:Defintion of Pyramid Scheme on Is Bitcoin Mining a Real-World Environmental Problem? · · Score: 1

    The phrase you are looking for is path dependent rent.

  2. Re:Conversion on Is Bitcoin Mining a Real-World Environmental Problem? · · Score: 1

    It's not because there is a real economy of drug users, tax evaders, and sex tourism operators that need it. Bit coin is trying to replaced the unmarked C note or 500 E note as the gold standard for elicit commerce.

  3. 3..2..1 on Mendeley Acquired By Elsevier · · Score: 1

    Converting everything today. The content mafia is a racket.

  4. Re:'fake'? on Fake Academic Journals Are a Very Real Problem · · Score: 1

    The word for a legitimate business that is involved with criminal activities is "racketeering."

  5. The purposes of the TSAs on Fighting TSA Harassment of Disabled Travelers · · Score: 1

    1. Make being in cattle class more acceptable. 2. Sell value add to not be subjected to it.

  6. Should You Use the Betteridge Cliche? on Can Innovation Be Automated? · · Score: 2

    Is the correct formulation here.

  7. Re:90% of new solutions ... on Can Innovation Be Automated? · · Score: 3, Insightful
    An idea is joining two things which seem different, but can be shown to actually be the same. By providing possible reapplication, that is part of the way to "something new," depending on how far afield. If you look at many "new" ideas, the parts and their origins become obvious. The "new" part will often be the means of moving the solution to its new context.

    Take, for example the derivation of the Lorentz contraction from a description of the movement of light in aether. Lorentz simplified the mathematics by inventing the idea of local time, to move equations meant for kinematics to this new context of Maxwellian radiation. Poincare recognized that "local time" was an ingenious idea, but did not quite get to what we think of as relativity. The Lorentz contraction, and "local time" are then moved, essentially wholesale, into Einstein's kinematics.

    New isn't always the elephant, it is the ability to visualize the elephant where it has never been before. Since innovation is not a completely black box problem, aiding visualization of it can be valuable.

  8. Re:somebody refresh my memory... on 9th Circuit Affirms IsoHunt Decision; No DMCA Safe Harbor · · Score: 1

    If by few you mean 1, then yes. However, black hat hacking was going on by the 1970's. 1988 saw the Morris worm, which is basically the first script kiddie kind of attack, just enough knowledge to be destructive. The Cukoo's Egg details attacks from 1986, and was published in 1989. This was before the deregulation of the internet.

  9. Re:somebody refresh my memory... on 9th Circuit Affirms IsoHunt Decision; No DMCA Safe Harbor · · Score: 1

    Since the US government created arpanet. For a long time the general public did not have access.

  10. Blazingly dumbest thing written today. Blogging was over-run with war trolls. Look at who, personally, won: war supporters. Virtually without exception, warthogs did fine personally as columnists. We would just have been treated to a massive social media push. Twits of War, does, however, have sort of a ring to it.

    Reality: we've been moving towards an nastier society for some time. Americans wanted a war, against a largely hapless target. And the people who pimped for the war are still grinding out column inches. Twitter can't even get rid of the zombies of Iraq, let alone stop the war itself.

  11. Slime City on Electronics Arts CEO Ousted In Wake of SimCity Launch Disaster · · Score: 1

    He was fired because his financial results sucked. The projections on the launch were higher than actual sales, and the perception is the problems with launch were at the root of it. As much as one would like to say he was fired for being a DRM pimping grease ball, the reason he went down is because he could not execute well enough on being a DRM pimping grease ball.

  12. Re:Errant twaddle on How Beer Gave Us Civilization · · Score: 1
    "The hypothesis is about fermented beverages, not beer specifically"

    You are welcome to present evidence for regular fermentation from the Younger Dryas settlements. But you won't find any.

  13. Re:Errant twaddle on How Beer Gave Us Civilization · · Score: 2
    That is, where there is large consumption of milk as a staple, the genes for lactose tolerance are selected for heavily. The same would be true of alcohol: there would be adaptations that correspond to civilized areas. For reasons of my current research, and can state categorically that we don't see a good overlap between early domestication of grain, and alcohol digestion, this would include maltose tolerance, alcohol tolerence, adaptations of insulin response, and so on. Lactose selectivity is extremely high, if beer were the water of early cities, we'd expect similar levels of selection for the same reason.

    The "birth of consciousness" error isn't new: several authors have labelled some particular recent reductive change as being "what makes us modern humans." So far, we have not found any good genomic evidence for this. It may be there, we've missed big things before, but this one makes undergraduate levels of blunder and is being pushed out with out even a basic filter.

    Beer is SEO friendly, what can I say.

  14. Errant twaddle on How Beer Gave Us Civilization · · Score: 5, Informative
    Domestication of grains starts 2000 years, at latest, from the earliest brewing of beer. The "beer hypothesis" also lacks skeletal evidence, and also genomic evidence. More interesting is the rapid spread of later lactose tolerance, which has an extremely high selective index. Also contradicting the reductive understanding of the role of beer is the lack of pottery containers for it in many early cultures, or lack of evidence for brewing in places such as China, even though rice and grain cultivation were quite early there.

    So summary: beer is late, it is missing from many cultures, and the genomics would support a much higher selection for digesting of it –as they do with milk –if a small area invented brewing and this was the core civilizing agent.

    further, linguistic convergence argues for language being close to 100,000 years old, and cultural progressions, that is "fashion" are as much as 70,000 years old. The understanding of band organization - that is groups smaller than tribes that do not produce a surplus, and there fore have little to no "state" apparatus or long term castes - is not the placid realm before angst. The Australian aboriginal mythology is filled with a sense of angst as their climate changed, and they are band organized.

    There are many better hypotheses for the role of intoxication in human history. Far more likely beer takes off as soon as agriculture becomes intertwined with water, because over the long term the water becomes fouled. It also has an important role when economic castes in settlements start to become forces in themselves. It may have been used as part of combat, as the only medication they had.

    This doesn't even pass a simple date match of events to create a timeline.

  15. They aren't free loaders on Why Freeloaders Are Essential To FOSS Project Success · · Score: 1

    They are potential value add customers.

  16. Re:I'm not even a fan, but on Orson Scott Card's Superman Story Shelved After Homophobia Controversy · · Score: 1

    Incorrect.

  17. Re:I'm not even a fan, but on Orson Scott Card's Superman Story Shelved After Homophobia Controversy · · Score: 1

    Equality before the law is a principle that is even more intrinsic than the constitution.

  18. Re:current law favors same sex marriage on Orson Scott Card's Superman Story Shelved After Homophobia Controversy · · Score: 1

    Divorce is a dissolution, not a breach, of the marriage contract.

  19. Re:I'm not even a fan, but on Orson Scott Card's Superman Story Shelved After Homophobia Controversy · · Score: 1

    They didn't but bigots, theocrats, and racists, wish they did.

  20. Re:I'm not even a fan, but on Orson Scott Card's Superman Story Shelved After Homophobia Controversy · · Score: 1
    No where is the Federal government declared to be a republic and not a democracy. There are statements from people who could be called "the founders" on both sides of the issue, precisely because the words then have a different meaning from now.

    It's most frequent use is by racists.

  21. Re:I'm not even a fan, but on Orson Scott Card's Superman Story Shelved After Homophobia Controversy · · Score: 0
    Yes let's also count them as 3/5 of a person for congressional representation. Call it a new kind of citizenship.

    DOMA and its ilk are abominations, and it is revealing that when it comes to equal marriage the libertarian hoards, who demand the right to have weapons that slaughter, are nowhere to be found.

  22. Re:News! on Curiosity Rover On Standby As NASA Addresses Computer Glitch · · Score: 1

    Sometimes 'nothing' is news. As in this case. Apparently the locals want more bloviation threads, and not news threads. I'm sure that they will get their wish.

  23. News! on Curiosity Rover On Standby As NASA Addresses Computer Glitch · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Can we haz more news pleaz?

  24. Almost every crime involves people on Nearly Every NYC Crime Involves Computers, Says Manhattan DA · · Score: 4, Funny

    This anthrocriminal element is taking over I tell you.

  25. Re:No one has given up TV on Did Steve Jobs Pick the Wrong Tablet Size? · · Score: 1

    What the corporate system always wanted was TV 2.0. And, until input devices get better, they have it.