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User: Whatsisname

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Comments · 224

  1. Re:Non-lethal instead! on Smart Guns To Stop Mass Killings · · Score: 1

    You are still not understanding. Both 'to wound' and 'to kill' are incorrect. You shoot to stop the threat. That may result in the target being killed, sure. But if you fill a guy with five holes, he collapses onto the floor and lays there motionless, but alive, you are not allowed to finish him off, which is what your claim of "always shoot to kill" would say you do.

    "Always shoot to kill" might have been acceptable for police because they are behind the wall of blue thugs.

  2. Re:doesn't go far enough on Smart Guns To Stop Mass Killings · · Score: 1

    Voight-Kampff Test - watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umc9ezAyJv0

  3. Re:statement pulled from ass? on Hagfish Slime Could Make Super-Strong Clothes · · Score: 1

    That's not all that astounding of a claim, there are many such organisms that have not changed much for many tens and hundreds of millions of years. They are often called Living Fossils. Examples include the nautilus, crocodiles, horseshoe crabs, and the hagfish as in TFA.

    They determine this by examining fossils from a wide range of geological time frames and see that present day organisms are virtually unchanged from whats in the fossil record.

  4. Re:Not all roses... on Inside an Amazon Warehouse · · Score: 2

    There are in the scientific literature published algorithms that produce approximate results well in the "good enough" range, 2-5% larger than optimal, to be worthwhile. For large and small datasets, with millions of points.

    Furthermore, it doesn't matter that the warehouse has millions of items, the complexity of the problem depends only on the size of the order, or the sizes of how many orders can be fit in your rolly bin.

  5. Re:What could possibly go wrong on New Small Fission Reactor For Deep-space Missions Demonstrated · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's wouldn't be objectively any nastier than the other toxic substances such as hydrazine that would be sprayed all over the place in an explosion. "Dirty bombs" are not something to be taken seriously. Blowing up an equal mass of mercury would be more dangerous than the uranium, and the damage uranium would pose is more that it is a heavy metal than due to it being radioactive.

  6. Re:Just another way to bash someone's success on Could Testing Block Psychopaths From Senior Management? · · Score: 1

    There are people with empathy that can still make the hard decisions, as opposed to the psychopaths in TFA that consider only themselves. Not all people with empathy are blubbering idiots.

  7. Re:Not Exciting to the General Public on What "Earth-Shaking" Discovery Has Curiosity Made on Mars? · · Score: 4, Informative

    The ketchup comment was in response to Zare's 1996 claims of organic compounds on meteorites found in Antarctica. NASA's discovery is something different.

  8. Re:Question: on Massachusetts May Soon Change How the Nation Dies · · Score: 1

    Not all policies, many will still payout on suicide. Sometimes there are conditions, like the insured has to have the policy for a certain amount of time before its in force, often 2 years, but either way, the claim "All life insurance policies become void in case of suicide" is false.

  9. Re:If your views are not popular opinion... on 72% of Xbox 360 Gamers Approve of "More Military Drone Strikes" · · Score: 1

    What makes you think leaving is going to make the terrorist organizations flourish? We are their best recruiting tool. It's a lot easier to recruit people to fight against an enemy, when that enemy is flying drones around constantly blowing shit up and murdering people.

    We are absolutely creating more terrorists than we are killing. The US is going to have a far worse 'terrorism' problem on its hands in 10-20 years if this shit continues.

  10. Re:Why is the water "gone"? on For Much of the World, Demand For Water Outstrips Supply · · Score: 2

    It takes a seriously long time for water to get back into the aquifers. If you are drinking a glass of water from a well, it could have easily been 50 or 100 years since that water was last above the surface. If you're pumping the water out faster than its being replenished, the ground can sink, and close up the voids resulting from extraction. Over time, that will reduce the aquifers total capacity. And this change is not reversible.

  11. Re:Wait a minute on For Much of the World, Demand For Water Outstrips Supply · · Score: 1

    Except it is also a physical problem. The subsidence of land, as a result of groundwater extraction, is not reversible. In some places, such as the San Joaquin Valley, the ground has literally sunk nearly 30 feet. Those aquifers require geologic periods of time to form. The aquifers in that valley will never again be what they used to be.

    The destruction of ground water systems is a classic tragedy of the commons.

  12. Re:Absolutely! on Ask Slashdot: Is Outsourcing Development a Good Idea? · · Score: 1

    Fighting harder is not what is important. What matters is fighting better, and that will usually go to whoever is the best trained and has the best equipment.

  13. Re:To be fair.... on NY Judge Rules IP Addresses Insufficient To Identify Pirates · · Score: 1

    from your link:

    What went wrong

    They Split the 8 digits into 2 sets of 4. All that has to happen now is the first 4 have to be found first. 4 digits only have a 10,000 possible number combination. Once the first 4 numbers are found, the router proclaims "You've found the first four" giving, in essence, a checkpoint at which to save the progress before finding the last 4. So instead of having to guess an 8 digit combination, all that has to be guessed now is two 4 digit combinations and that takes considerably less time. So we've now gone from taking 6.3 years down to about 1 day. But of course, in some cases it gets worse. Some routers do not even go into a lock-down state for 60 seconds after 3 failed attempts; it allows as many guess as can be thrown at it. This means someone could potentially connect and compromise your secured WiFi network in less than 1 day.

    How on earth did anyone think the 4 digit confirmation was a good idea?!?!? Wow.

  14. Project Pluto on Coming To a War Near You: Nuclear Powered Drones · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The United States started work in this field back in the 60s, trying to build cruise missiles that would be able to fly around continuously.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

  15. Re:Falls for the "Mythical Man-Month" trap on Bring Back the 40-Hour Work Week · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The lesson of Mythical Man-month is more that you can't make up for bad scheduling by throwing more people at the project in the middle, that adding more people to a late project will make it later. It especially focuses on productivity with respect to time.

    If you throw more people onto a project from day one of a year+ long project, you sure can expect more productivity.

    10 engineers can be 10 times as productive working for a year as 1 engineer. What fails is if you have 1 engineer working for 11 months, then adding 99 more the last month, and expect to equal the productivity of the 10 engineers working for a year solid.

    9 women can't make a baby in a month, but 9 women can make 9 babies in the same amount of time it takes 1 woman to make 1 baby.

    It is better to have 5 engineers rather than 4 overworked ones, if they all start projects together.

  16. Re:Torture on Journalist Gets Blasted By the Pentagon's Pain Ray — Twice · · Score: 2

    My guess is most people probably simply haven't though about it.

    http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_coleman_the_moral_dangers_of_non_lethal_weapons.html

    A highlight of this video is a datapoint from Australia, when pepper (OC spray) was introduced. Officers were specifically instructed that it was to be used only when the officer would have otherwise been required to use lethal force. The years before the OC spray was introduced, there were about 6 people shot to death by the police year. The two years after the spray was introduced, in a trial, there were 2226 usages of the spray.

    Surely, had OC spray not been available, that the police would not have shot 2226 people.

  17. Re:No, you don't have an excuse on Classic Nintendo Games Are NP-Hard · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This post isn't correct. It's just as hard for humans as computers, if you are searching for the optimal solution.

    You're claiming it's easier for humans because we don't actually need the optimal solution, which changes the problem.

    When you change the terms of the problem to accept a "good enough" solution, there are also computer algorithms that can find "good enough" solutions very quickly and are very useful for problem sets that are out of the realm for a human being to solve in a reasonable amount of time.

  18. Re:MOD PARENT DOWN... oops, it's the story on Dutch Supreme Court Sees Game Objects As Goods · · Score: 1

    It will be interesting to see if someone attempts a lawsuit later if a threat and stealing take place entirely within the virtual world, e.g. some PvP game, and whether this ruling will be used as precedent.

  19. Steal the customers money, obviously on Ask Slashdot: To Hack Or Not To Hack? · · Score: 2

    I would recommend stealing as much money as you can, because you are going to need it to hire your lawyers when the FBI comes looking for you, now that you've identified yourself to them.

  20. GPS does not equal mapping. on How Does GPS Change Us? · · Score: 2

    From the summary:

    My own experience is that GPS has made me much more aware of location, by showing me the bird's-eye view, and letting me instantly compare alternate routes.

    You apparently don't know what GPS actually is, because GPS has nothing to do with bird-eye views nor comparing alternate routes. All GPS does is tell you the time and where on the planet you are.

    Routing and mapping are not exclusive to GPS.

  21. We don't need a spec on Saudi Arabia Constructing World's Tallest Building · · Score: 3, Interesting

    From TFA:

    The final details of Kingdom Tower’s design are yet to be worked out, but construction is to begin immediately.

    We all know how well that impacts budgets and schedules for software projects!

  22. Re:Quit whining on US Patent Regime Is Absurd · · Score: 1

    Inventions that are "completely new" are virtually non-existent. Virtually all progress is incremental improvements over what already exists.

    Microsoft Office was hardly an "original". Excel took most of its ideas from Lotus 1-2-3 which took its ideas from Visicalc which took its ideas from paper spreadsheets. Other Office products have similar histories. The NCSA web server started as a clone of the CERN http web server.

    The patent system operates from a fundamentally improper idea of how invention takes place: that inventions are unique "eureka" type moments. That's not how they actually come into existence.

  23. Re:Make them pay more! on The Cost Of Broadband In Every Rural Home · · Score: 1

    No they don't. The majority of the people in the sticks and suburbs drive into the cities every morning to work.

  24. Re:You could knock me over with a feather on Time To Close the Security Theater · · Score: 0

    The private industry probably would do better. They would take a look at the odds of anything happening, and say "fuck it" to dealing with anything beyond metal detectors.

    And that is the absolute right choice. We don't need this absurd "security".

  25. Re:Translating corporate-speak on Sony Delays PlayStation Network Reactivation · · Score: 1

    I don't believe that is true. Merchants are generally not held responsible for fraudulent charges, otherwise the card issuers would have absolutely no motivation to even bother preventing fraud.

    It is against the merchant agreement of pretty much all cards to require any verification beyond the signature on the back of the card, so it would be completely unreasonable to stick Walmart with the bill.