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Comment Pseudoscientific nonsense (Score 2) 106

Yes, fitting a random person into a full body rig will have zero impact on the false positive/false negative rates. No problem.

They tested this on 75 volunteers. This is an example of the kind of bogus "proof" that is used to justify the utility of polygraphs in the first place.

It's in the same territory as drug companies excluding tests that show problems with their drugs. I'm sure if they ran enough small groups that they could find one with better then 90% and report only that.

Why do polygraph advocates lie so much?

Comment Sony views this as primarily a PR problem (Score 4, Insightful) 138

They clearly are more concerned about the publicity aspects of the hack then anything else. Any other issues, like exposure of employee data, don't mean a damn to them.

That's why there are the DCMA takedown notices and the threats to sue. They figure that if they can keep it out of the press then it will soon be forgotten and they won't have much to worry about.

This might work for the general public, but in Hollywood it's not going to be that easy. Besides the powerful individuals that they trashed, it's now obvious that that they also engage in routine conspiracies to get what they want. That's what the Google maneuver was about. A lot of players are going to realize that Sony had done a lot of dirty deeds already, and some will see that previous problems may be the result of underhanded tactics. Not that anyone else is better, but having confirmation effectively raises the stakes.

Personally, I enjoy looking forward to some real pain in Sony land. They have a bad reputation among the Hollywood rank and file, so there will be a lot of schadenfreude in the new year. It's long overdue.

Comment Traditional funding vs. individual billionairs (Score 3, Insightful) 235

What are the alternatives? Who will fund things like deep sea diving or space launch systems? (Big game hunting is just a stupid troll.)

There are only two groups outside of individual rich people who can fund these endeavors: governments and normal investment. Governments are already in the game. India just launched their first heavy lift vehicle, for example.

Regular investment will never take that kind of risk. Perhaps in the past you could have raised money on Wall Street or the equivalent, but these days big financial institutions expect government subsidized guaranteed profit. It's so much easier to buy legislation, manipulate the system and control regulators then invest in long term innovation. Acquisitions and mergers along with zero interest prime rate funding lines their pockets without any bothersome "investing". Why bother with risky space investment, for example?

So it's fine if big egos go after these kinds of things. There are a lot worse ways that the ultra rich spend their wealth. Would you rather see Musk with Tesla and SpaceX, or Ellison with his billion dollar yacht?

By the way, you are subsidizing Ellison's yacht and purchase of the island of Lanai in Hawaii. He took out a loan against his stock in Oracle, so the interest he pays defers his income taxes. To quote another rich asshat, "taxes are for little people."

Comment Re:Time to divert investment away from China? (Score 1) 145

Apple is part of the US oligarchy. Just like European royalty in the 18th and 19th century, today's oligarchs often have more in common with each other then they do with the people of their own country. That's why nothing is likely to happen with Apple in China.

If you're going to play the oligarch card, trying to cast primary blame on the peasants/consumers avoids the real issue. There is class warfare going on, but only one side knows it's a war. Right now the peasants are clueless, so they always loose.

Comment Re:Hope it is blocked. (Score 1) 145

2) KKK may be "monitored", but they are allowed to speak, demonstrate, organize, and so forth as long as they commit no actual crimes (arson etc).

In the US the KKK is really close to the government. They, and other right wing advocates of violence, get away with a lot of stuff that would end up in big trouble for non-right wingers.

For example, the incoming House Whip, Steve Scalise, gave a well received speech to a white nationalist group in 2002

(Reuters) - U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, gave a speech at a conference of white nationalists when he was a state lawmaker in 2002, the Washington Post reported on Monday, citing his spokeswoman.

Spokeswoman Moira Bagley said Scalise, the No. 3 Republican in the House of Representatives, was not familiar with the ideology of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, or EURO, when he attended the event in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, the Washington Post reported.

EURO was founded in 2000 by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan who served in the Louisiana House of Representatives and ran a high-profile race for governor of the state in 1991.

Given the name of the group, and the participation of David Duke, his claim he was unaware of the white racist nature of the gathering are not credible.

As for toleration of right wing threats of violence, there's an ongoing problem in Utah with people with guns threatening Bureau of Land Management employees

(Reuters) - A pair of motorists in a pick-up truck brandished a firearm and flashed a threatening sign at a federal land management agent in Utah, officials said on Thursday, about a month after a widely-publicized armed standoff with a rancher.

...

Crandall said a BLM employee was driving an agency vehicle on Interstate 15 near Nephi, about 90 miles south of Salt Lake City when two motorists whose faces were covered pulled alongside him and made an obscene gesture.

The suspects pulled away but returned minutes later, flashing a gun and a hand-scrawled sign that read: "You need to die," Crandall said.

She said the incident was reported to the Utah Highway Patrol but the BLM agent could not provide investigators with a license plate number because it appeared to be covered with duct tape.

So imagine if some non-honkies in masks threatened a federal employee with guns. There would be a 100 person team from the FBI on the case immediately, and someone would be arrested shortly whether they were involved or not. Not many resources were spent trying to find the perps in this case. Since it's Utah, all that happened is the the BLM has removed insignia from their vehicles.

So not all terrorists are created equal. It counts less if you are white and Christian.

Comment Pretend capitalism (Score 1, Offtopic) 275

You realize this has nothing to do with capitalism, at least of the free market variety. They conflict is over who is going to get the money when they raise the rates. It's essentially which group of crooks is going to get to gouge customers.

The primary beneficiaries are the upper management. No big corporation is run for the clients, stockholders, or employes who do the real work. It's all intended to enrich the people at the top.

It's how things are right now: no democracy, no capitalism, no freedom. Nothing to see here, move along.

Comment He's gonna git in trouble (Score 2, Funny) 156

He's doomed as a Republican because he supports that science stuff. If you support science, then you are obviously in cahoots with them liburuls, so you are on the side of evil with evolution, anthropogenic climate change, and the earth not being flat.

His only hope is to turn NASA and space into a faith based program, at least as far as the Republican base is concerned. Some possibilities are going to outer space to find Jesus in heaven, replacing rockets with prayer, proclaiming that God wears a space suit and teaching in school that a flat earth is a reasonable alternative the round earth theory.

Comment Harris Ranch is a well known stop (Score 1) 133

There's a restaurant/coffee shop and hotel. They have their own brand of beef, and a beef feed lot just up the road. You can buy steaks at a butcher shop to take with you.

This makes a lot of sense as a pilot project location for Tesla. A lot of people already make it a stop going between Southern and Northern California and there are a lot of Tesla owners in the state. I think that many Tesla drivers will just stop to take a break anyway and that would give the swap facility more flexibility to schedule their stations. It's a smart move.

Comment Re:Finally! (Score 2) 51

T-Mobile's market capitalization is $21.35 Billion. A $90 million fine is a joke.They spend more then this for office supplies. And they won't have to pay nearly $90 million, because they will game the system so that very few people get the refund. The corrupt asshats who are responsible went home this weekend, had a drink and laughed the heads off over how useless the FCC is. It is a near certainty that they still came out ahead on the deal.

You want a fine that will make them take notice? Fines for companies that do large scale interstate commerce should be scaled to the worth of the company. The pretend $90 million figure is 0.4% of their market capitalization. Make the fine 1% or more of their market capitalization and I guarantee they will pay attention. Make it 2% or more and there might even be a turnover of the CEO and board of directors, which is what should really happen. Remember that they willingly participated in fraud to the tune of $67 million. The fact that no one is exposed to any jail time for this is a measure of how corrupt our pretend capitalistic system has become.

Comment It's built by Boston Dynamics (Score 2) 45

Given their track record, it will probably work. They did the Big Dog and Cheetah quadrupeds and the PETMAN and Atlas humanoid robots.

Boston Dynamics is now owned by Google, so Google is now a direct provider of equipment to the US military. Maybe this means their motto has been modified from "Don't do evil" to "Don't avoid evil."

Submission + - Bitcoin is the worst investment of 2014 (qz.com)

Required Snark writes: According to Quartz, Bitcoin is the worst investment of 2014. Year to date it is down 52%. Reasons given are it's relation to "dark web" sites like Silk Road, the collapse of Mt. Gox, and the possibility that it is dominated by speculators.

An interesting observation is that nationally sponsored currencies have a built in advantage.

Money derives much of its value from its government support, in that the government has the power to make it legal tender. That is, the government says not only that currency can be accepted, but it must be accepted. That political choice is what ensures that the currency has an actual utility, that is, it can be used widely for actual transactions. That’s what makes a currency useful.


Submission + - Sony leaks reveal Hollywood is trying to break DNS, the backbone of the internet (theverge.com) 1

schwit1 writes: A leaked legal memo reveals a plan for blacklisting pirate sites at the ISP level

Most anti-piracy tools take one of two paths: they either target the server that's sharing the files (pulling videos off YouTube or taking down sites like The Pirate Bay) or they make it harder to find (delisting offshore sites that share infringing content). But leaked documents reveal a frightening line of attack that's currently being considered by the MPAA: What if you simply erased any record that the site was there in the first place?

To do that, the MPAA's lawyers would target the Domain Name System (DNS) that directs traffic across the internet.

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