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  1. Re:The question is still absurd... on 2 In 3 Misunderstand Gas Mileage; Here's Why · · Score: 1

    Poorly explained, sorry. I meant in the first case, the 10mpg car is using 10gal to go 100mi. So you can save, at best, 10 gal. In the second case, you are only ever using 3 gals, so no matter how much you improved that car, you could only save 3 gals. Thus there are seriously diminshing savings returns in increasing the mpg measure.

  2. Re:The question is still absurd... on 2 In 3 Misunderstand Gas Mileage; Here's Why · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The point is that the number of miles driven is assumed fixed. Say you drive 100 miles, then in the first case you could potentially save 10 gallons. In the second case, you can save at most 3 gallons.

  3. Re:Basically on Hooked On Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price · · Score: 1

    So you didn't read the article. there is a whole section entitled "The Myth of Multitaking" quoting research that shows your argument to be total shit.

  4. Re:Gizmodo is not Journalism on Gizmodo Not Welcome at 2010 WWDC · · Score: 0

    Yeah, they probably write things like "usage of the language" rather than "use of the language." Terrible.

  5. Re:Don't visit NC on Guess My Speed and Give Me a Ticket, In Ohio · · Score: 1

    The wrong type of vehicle thing is a red herring. Police often get things like that wrong and if you could dismiss a case on a little mistakes like that, it would be unreasonably hard for the police to do their job.

  6. Re:from the depends-how-you-count dept on New Estimate Suggests 5.5M Species On Earth, Not 30-100M · · Score: 1

    But 1 is not a prime number

  7. Re:will they pay ? on BP Prepares Complex "Top Kill" Bid To Plug Well · · Score: 1

    I dont think that BP can unilaterally raise the price of gas given that some competition exists.

  8. Re:I can't wait. on Toyota Partners With Tesla To Make Electric Cars · · Score: 1

    There are sleeping bags that are -60 rated so you'd be fine. My point was that there while are loads of reasons not to get an electric car, fear of dying of the cold is not a very good one.

  9. Re:I can't wait. on Toyota Partners With Tesla To Make Electric Cars · · Score: 1

    Or keep a warm sleeping bag in your car for such eventualities.

  10. Re:Yay for Google on Looking At Google's Flashified Chrome · · Score: 1
    I trust Google infinitely more than I trust Microsoft.

    So what exactly do you think Microsoft is going to do that Google won't?

  11. Re:Worse than nuclear fallout? on How Bad Is the Gulf Coast Oil Spill? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The leaseholder of the well has a legal responsibility to clean up any mess emanating from the well. Legally, it is BPs fuck up. Morally, it is their fuck up because they hired the company and were in a position to specify what safety measures should be taken. An argument like yours would mean that a large company basically never had to take responsibility for anything just by subcontracting stuff out.

  12. Re:Especially since someone has implemented it.... on MATLAB Can't Manipulate 64-Bit Integers · · Score: 4, Informative

    We are talking about 64 bit integers. Matlab has 64 bit floating point arithmetic. This means you can do exact integer arithmetic up to 2^53. I'd say mathworks has a pretty good idea of the demand for 64 bit integers and it is not that great -- it's not like it is a huge job for them to implement it so they would surely do it if their customers wanted it.

  13. Re:Especially since someone has implemented it.... on MATLAB Can't Manipulate 64-Bit Integers · · Score: 4, Informative

    The point is that very few engineers currently want or need this functionality -- if they did, the Mathworks folks would surely be on to it. The native type is defined, abstract methods are waiting there to be defined, and someone who needed it has implemented it and made it available. Incidentally, that package has had 38 downloads since july, perhaps indicating the level of demand. From this thread, it looks like the company is waiting for the demand before implementing it themselves.

  14. Especially since someone has implemented it.... on MATLAB Can't Manipulate 64-Bit Integers · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you really want this support, get the user contributed package from matlab central. That wasn't too hard was it?

  15. Re:Article needs a course in experimental design on The Data-Driven Life · · Score: 1

    The guy doesn't need to prove causation to give up coffee, he just needs to show strong correlation with what he want's to achieve an giving up coffee. The actual, physical cause may be interesting to find but is not what the guy is aiming for -- he just wants to concentrate better. In many cases correlation provides a very good proxy for causation.

  16. Re:Pimp My Disaster on Can Oil-Eating Bacteria Help Clean Up the Gulf Oil Spill? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    First, there isn't around 10000 barrels of oil coming out of the Mississippi every day in any sort of concentrated form. Second, 5000 barrels a day for 30 days is 150,000 barrels, comparable to the 250k barrels spilled by the Exxon Valdez. Finally, they've no idea how much oil is really coming out (the wsj says today possibly 25000 bpd are coming out) and BP says it will take between 55 and 90 days from now before they can attempt to plug it, even then it is only an attempt. So this is quite likely going to be the worst oil spill ever in the USA. I'd say it'll make quite a significant difference to quite a large area for quite a long time.

  17. Re:Do it without the $130 device on DIY 80GB iPod Touch · · Score: 1

    because your ipod only has 8gb of memory.

  18. Re:This looks familiar on MIT Finds 'Grand Unified Theory of AI' · · Score: 1

    It's not just lisp. From a paper describing the language: "Church is based on the Lisp model of lambda calculus, containing a pure Lisp as its deterministic subset. The semantics of Church is defined in terms of evaluation histories and conditional distributions on such histories. Church also includes a novel language construct, the stochastic memomizer, which enables simple description of many complex non-parametric models." This extension is the crucial part, as it makes it easy to encode probabilistic statements and do probabilistic inference.

  19. Re:I don't see the problem on Journalism Students Assigned To Write On Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    It's very accurate for all sorts of subjects. Look at the article about the Israel-Palestine conflict or articles about political figures. It's great how these things often reach an equilibrium where both sides of a debate or opposing views are presented.

  20. Re:Dear Seringhaus, see the movie Gattaca on Yale Law Student Wants Government To Have Everybody's DNA · · Score: 1

    At least read the summary - Gattaca was based on the idea that phenotypes (physical traits) can be extrapolated from genotypes (the genetic code). The genotypic information stored under this proposal is virtually nil (counts of repeats in "junk" DNA) and the amount of phenotypic information that could be inferred is exactly zero.

  21. Re:Hmm... on FCC Asks You To Test Your Broadband Speeds · · Score: 1

    Sure, the housing bubble burst, that caused a massive financial crisis because banks had heinously overexposed themselves to unsustainable risk, credit stopped, people and companies stop spending. Recession. Government spending is not trying to reinflate a bubble. It is ensuring that the economy returns to producing somewhere near its capacity. The important number to look at is the cost of debt repayment as a proportion of GDP. While borrowing is quite high at the moment, interest rates are very low, so the cost of servicing the debt is not prohibitive. And if the economy returns to full production soon (eg, those unemployed return to employment), we'll see a quick growth in GDP so the ratio of debt to GDP will quickly reduce (see what happened to the massive public debt after WWII). The whole point of fluctuating exchange rates are to stimulate production where necessary - a weak dollar would be very good for the economy right now. And to answer your question, can I afford a $130k debt? Well, seeing interest rates are around 1-2%, I could easily pay off the required interest. But public debt and personal debt are different - I dont personally owe a portion of the public debt and neither do you. Start worrying about real things like lack of public services and unemployment rather than macro-economic measures like public debt.

  22. Re:Hmm... on FCC Asks You To Test Your Broadband Speeds · · Score: 1

    Stopping spending is exactly what caused the that massive recession that may or may not be over. Right now, we and the government need to spend. The government spending is replacing spending that should be happening anyway but is not because businesses have stopped. Ever notice that there is 10% official unemployment out there? Why do you think that is?

  23. Re:The whole world loves us now! on Edward Tufte Appointed To Help Track and Explain Stimulus Funds · · Score: 1

    The telegraph is a conservative paper, there is nothing impartial about it. If you look at the coverage of the US election campaign over there, you'll find people were taking sides just like anywhere else.

  24. Re:Rather pointless on Students Build 2752 MPG Hypermiling Vehicle · · Score: 2, Informative

    The point is to use less fuel. The gallons per mile measure makes it clearer how much fuel will be saved for an average trip, or how much fuel will be saved by by getting the more efficient vehicle. The GP is obviously aware that the ratio is simply inverted but most people wouldn't recognize this.

    A similar situation exists with sunblock cream, where effectiveness is currently advertised as sun protection factor, or SPF. This is just the inverse of the amount of UV the gets through the cream - so SPF 50 means 98% of the UV is blocked. A doubling of SPF in this case would mean a very slightly more effective suncream. SImilarly, a doubling of MPG for a very efficient car means a very small amount of fuel is saved.

  25. Re:An interesting way to summarize the data ... on Firefox 3.5 Now the Most Popular Browser Worldwide · · Score: 2, Funny

    that is the ugliest plot i have seen in a long, long time.