Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Hmm (Score 5, Informative) 857

Oh, please. How desperate.

Obamacare - Government run health care because the Government knows better than you or your Doctor.

This is not true. The Affordable Healthcare Act did not produce "Government run health care". It mandates that everyone must have health insurance, without expanding any of the state-run programs at all. This means the private insuance companies which lobbied for it make more money. No hospitals, other than those already run by the VA, have or will be taken over.

Bailouts of GM. et al, i.e. government ownership.

This is not socialist. Socialist would be full-on nationalization, like British Leyland, British Steel, British Telecom, British Coal, and British Rail prior to their privatization. There are no government-appointed board members on any corporate board that took bailout money.

Support of Unions over the best interests of the country - Specifically SEIU.

What on earth are you talking about? First, what support of Unions, "specifically SEIU", that favors any union over the best interests of the country, and whose view of best interests?

Second, do you have a problem with Unions - associations of people, of citizens, of wealth producers, organizing to protect their interests? Do you really think it's wrong for people to unite to protect their common interests? Do you have a problem with "We the people, in order to create a more perfect Union..."? In fact, to quote Lynne Cheney, why do you hate America? ;)

Comment Re:Renewable or infinite? (Score 5, Informative) 835

The tl;dr on the Pacific Institute paper "Hummer vs Prius" is:

1. Someone else wrote a paper called "Dust to dust" that claimed the lifetime energy cost of a Hummer was less than that of a Prius.
2. The "Hummer vs Prius" author disputes the "Dust to dust" paper's conclusions because they used arbitrary figures for lifetime mileage, energy used in manufacture, and so on.
3. The "Hummer vs Prius" author claims a quick recalculation shows the lifetime energy cost of a Prius is, indeed, lower than the Hummer.

Comment Re:Broken window fallacy (Score 3, Informative) 264

The Hoover dam does more than just make electricity: it is part of the system of dams that control the Colorado's propensity to flood uncontrollably, and this control allows a stable agricultural system to flourish, which feeds tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people. You know, rather than the fields being wiped out every ten years, or permanently flooded like the Salton Sea.

Lake Mead is named for the genius from the Bureau of Land Management who made this happen. He was from the government, and he was there to help.

Comment Re:Build a mouse brain first. (Score 1) 116

There used to be much enthusiasm for neural nets, but it turns out that modern machine learning techniques do better on the few problems neural nets can do. The modern approaches are all matrix algebra, and you usually work in Matlab. Much of that stuff is parallelizable, and what you want is more like a GPU than neurons.

Since the stated objective is to simulate a brain, I doubt that marix algebra is going to cut it.

Comment Re:Before we start the flame wars (Score 1) 962

And I disagree with you, because of the signature you are using, and because it is not true that to know that there is no god requires omniscience. I am not omniscient, but I know there is no God and I know there is no God because God is unknowable. The postulate that there is a God has been thoroughly investigated over the centuries, and (as your signature implies) every phenomenon that could be attributed to a God - any God: Thor, Athena, Ba'al, Shiva, Jehovah, Caligula, Jesus, and so on - can more readily be attributed to other causes, including being products of human imagination and fantasy, because they do not stand the test of falsifiability. But let's suppose you're right, that your post and signature are correct.

First, to restate your signature, it is "probably impossible" to unambiguously ascribe any natural phenomenon as being caused by a God: this includes answering prayer, being the creator of the universe, or the "divine spark" behind all life. In other words, it is not necessary to postulate an omniscient being, a quality you yourself claim is only for Gods, to explain anything that actually does exist, or anything that happens, for that matter.

If such a universe were created by an omnipotent, omniscient God, where does God appear? You say: "probably nowhere" (probably). But at least, by your ouw admission, God is an improbable hypothesis, and useless for making predictions about outcomes, or else there would be evidence one way or the other, and it would no longer be "probably impossible" to know. At this point, I can state unequivocally that God is not a falsifiable hypothesis, and therefore not part of any reality that we participate in: and that is our test for existence. Therefore God does not exist.

So, you see, no omniscience is required. I don't know your eye color, and didn't need to.

Comment Re:Ham Sandwich Theorem (Score 1) 170

The centers of mass do not have to be aligned, if by aligned you mean that they lie on a straight line. They just all have to lie on a plane, which is always true of any three points - unless they all lie on a straight line or coincide, and in either of these cases there is an infinite number of planes that bisect.

Comment Ham Sandwich Theorem (Score 2) 170

The Stone–Tukey version of this theorem is a generalization of a simple case.

Consider a ham sandwich, with two slices of bread around a slice of ham. Each of these components has a center of gravity, and if you slice any one of these with a plane that passes through the center of gravity, then the two halves will be equal in mass.

Three points in 3-space define a plane, so the unique plane that passes through the three centers of gravity divides both slices of bread and the ham in half.

The general case states that you can divide n finitely measurable objects in n-space with an n-1 dimensional hyperplane.

Comment Re:The lefties were right, yet again! (Score 1) 302

Choose between the idiot on the left or the idiot on the right of the ballot.

That hasn't been the choice for a long time, not, perhaps, since 1988, when the candidates were George Bush Sr and Michael Dukakis, who Bush successfully tarred as "liberal". Since then, because of that use of "liberal", the options have been Right and Center-Right, with the Right-wing candidates becoming more extreme with each election.

On the left, Progressives view Obama as being to the right of Reagan.

Comment Re:Crypto isn't the main problem (Score 1) 75

... Also, it wouldn't solve a damn thing, as it would merely shift the focus from eavesdropping to more ... direct methods of obtaining the required information, since a cypher is only as strong as the weakest point, in this case the carriers operating the networks between the human endpoints.

FTFY.

Comment Re:No More Deregulation (Score 2) 551

That is one part of the legacy of Enron. They lobbied hard for the free market system you have in Texas, it was the brilliantly intelligent part of what they did, the core business. The clever-but-incredibly-dumb part was the three-card monte debt hiding scheme they used to inflate their profits from loss-making projects: that was what brought them down and destroyed their employees' pension plans.

Slashdot Top Deals

Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"

Working...