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Comment Re:Informative winners list (Score 1) 180

by Prune (#47724539) Attached to: The 2014 Hugo Awards
Your post only shows that you're too stupid to understand that average can refer to mean, median, or any other central tendency metric (not to mention that, since intelligence is roughly normally distributed, mean and median in this particular case happen to be the same). Gotta love it when someone tries to show how smart they are by criticism, only to crash and burn, the way you did with this post.

Comment Lossless (Score 1) 71

by Prune (#47707859) Attached to: YouTube Music Subscription Details Leak
Apologies in advance if this was answered in TFA, but are they planning to provide lossless formats as an option? I'm hoping to avoid having to rip my large CD collection to FLAC due to the amount of time that would take, and would gladly pay decent prices to a service or sale that offers lossless. Recommendations are welcome.

Comment The problem is hipsterism, not engineer culture (Score 1, Interesting) 262

by Prune (#47651065) Attached to: Silicon Valley Doesn't Have an Attitude Problem, OK?
This should concern everyone, because this attitude reflects itself in the products.

We have now had an entire generation of programmers raised on walled garden apps, cookie-cutter scripting libraries, and above all a wave of cheap VC funding and hardware. How many people are left out there that can build the likes of Bittorrent, Bitcoin, a language like C, a game like Elite, or even a site like Slashdot? How many people, young people, are there who can write an OS kernel, design a basic circuit, and at a more pertinently serious level, reliably write software to implement mathematical encryption algorithms. Reading this I'm inclined to believe that recent meme post about how the programming/silicon valley community has been taken over by "brogrammers", "hipsters" and "neckbeads", which to my mind are simply constitute cultural re-skinnings of the infamous Visual Basic programmers of old. I worry that the unglamorous, mostly uncompensated, and largely intellectually driven practice of pure software programming and creation has been left behind in recent years. I personally have noticed little progression and indeed in many areas a general regression in the quality and reliability of software since approximately 2006/7. While I would attribute this to my general "civilization is in decline" zeitgeist worries, my frustrations with software, UIs, and websites in particular has undoubtedly increased manifestly in the last 2-3 years or so. Maybe I'm just getting old -- or maybe programmers really are getting worse.

-- ObsessiveMathsFreak

Comment 3D printing has too many problems (Score 2, Insightful) 32

by Prune (#47575261) Attached to: NASA's JPL Develops Multi-Metal 3D Printing Process
Many of those problems will not be resolved. The most important one, and one that will always be worse in the case of 3D printing compared to traditional mass manufacturing methods, is the extreme energy inefficiency. For example, when printing with plastic, a 3D printer uses 50-100 times more electricity than an injection molding machine making the same part, not to mention that it wastes a lot of material left in the print bed that's not recyclable as feed for the printer because its properties have been corrupted. Home and office use should also be discouraged because of the emittance of ultrafine particles. Want your place of living/work's air even more polluted? Source for these: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/3d...

There are other problems as well, including cultural ones. From the article:
3D printing might someday encourage a new kind of pollution: rapid garbage generation. Engineers being trained to respect their raw materials are taught "Think twice, cut once." When people get ahold of easy production tools, however, it’s easy to not heed that wise old adage.
Like we don't have enough of a throw-away culture as it is.
3D printing should only be used to manufacture objects which cannot be made by other methods.

Comment Re:But was it really unethical ? (Score 1) 619

by Prune (#47509403) Attached to: Experiment Shows People Exposed To East German Socialism Cheat More
Right after posting, I realized that my mention of bounded rationality might be misinterpreted to mean that I was referring to a subset of the population who would be "too dumb" to reliably use a consequentialist approach. But that is not the case; it applies to everyone, albeit to a different degree. Bounded rationality was seriously approached first in the field of economics, but it's scope is far larger. From neuroscience we see ever more how deep the integration between reasoning and emotions is (for example, Damasio's somatic markers). From cognitive psychology we see that the brain is so constrained by its finite processing speed (as a result of the biological pressures of its caloric cost and its size requiring hips so wide for childbirth that, were they any wider, humans could not walk upright) that it uses fallible heuristics as information processing optimizations. In this context, value ethics and deontology ethics have significant practical advantage over the more analytical consequentialism ethics because values and rules (principles), and not only because they're easier to process (less time, effort, and caloric expenditure), but also because, once taught and instilled, they have a more direct connection to an emotional response, which gives them more power when an individual is trying to make a choice where ethics conflict with other considerations.

Comment Re:But was it really unethical ? (Score 1) 619

by Prune (#47509317) Attached to: Experiment Shows People Exposed To East German Socialism Cheat More
Funny enough, the value- and rule-based approaches can themselves be justified by consequentialism, for reasons of pedagogy, and because humans are boundedly rational. It can be impractical due to finite reasoning ability and time constraints to carry out a full analysis of every ethical situation one encounters, and thus applying consequentialism directly may be too burdensome. Many would, as a result, not have the impetus and discipline to apply such an approach to ethics consistently. The first two approaches, on the other hand, are simpler to apply, and thus easier to teach, easier to demonstrate and market by anecdotes and role models, and easier to keep in mind and apply consistently. Thus, on the whole over a population, they are likely to result in producing more of the consequences of ethical behavior than actual consequentialism ethics.

Comment Can be used foor true 3D display (Score 1) 129

by Prune (#47444783) Attached to: Nano-Pixels Hold Potential For Screens Far Denser Than Today's Best
Currently we do have auto-stereoscropic displays (no glasses), but they only account for stereopsis, not accommodation (different focal distances for the eye). In current 3D displays, the 3D cue of stereopsis conflicts with the information from accommodation to a flat plane, and the 3D effect is significantly diminished (and can even cause discomfort or headaches). With an ultra high pixel density display base, lightfield displays become practical, and they can reproduce both stereopsis and different focal depth per image element. Current prototypes I've seen at SIGGRAPH have been very low resolution, as you need a patch of 2D pixels under each microlens (lightfield displays are based on a microlens array with multiple pixels under each lens). I imagine a 1920x1080 microlens array with 32x32 pixels under each microlens. If the display is also high-dynamic range and with extended color gamut, it would be the ultimate visual equivalent to a window into other worlds.

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