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Comment Re:Ethics (Score 1) 840

dystopian movies about two-class societies emerging from genetics.

How about 2 class societies emerging from corporatism, corrupt politicians, and "old boys" networks. Reality is not much better for the lower classes than in those movies.

Little social mobility: check
Limited freedoms for those on the bottom: check
Different set of rules/application of laws for those on top: check
No power for majority to change this without complete upheaval: check

Comment yay for software patents (Score 3, Insightful) 404

here we go again...

when will someone get the balls to hit the destruct button on the broken patent industry. I'm tired of reading about it, yet alone trying to keep abreast of it.

PS haven't RTFA but I am assuming this is another trivial software patent (although with MM there is a chance it is a valid hardware patent)

Comment Re:Is it true that Chinese girl pass all drug test (Score 1) 559

swimming which is the only sport measured to the thousand-of-a-second.

umm... short memory. I recall a long debate on slashdot 48 hours ago, about the timing accuracy of the starting gun in running events and detecting false starts down to the accuracy of 10,000th's and finer.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/08/01/079234/speed-of-sound-is-too-slow-for-the-olympics

Comment here's an idea... (Score 1) 233

Just an armchair expert (on the other side of the world no less) but...

maybe try pass an amendment stating that no amendments can be considered if not directly related to the bill (or infrastructure etc needed for it's enforcement). Seems it would fix an awful lot of problems. Allow the public to decry individual evils without harming the occassional good bill.

Comment finally - better input (Score 2) 39

everyone has always known, garbage in garbage out.
If we can get better quality inputs into robotics, it will make the processing steps much easier.

The amount of information that comes from touch... being deaf or blind is a disadvantage, but having no sense of touch would be absolutely crippling for a human!

I have great hope that this will be a huge leap forward when it goes into production.

Comment Who said anything about competing? (Score 1) 190

The online uni brigade are trying to differentiate themselves with some kind of "qualification" at the end (a mostly worthless certificate at this stage).

Kahn academy is trying to educate purely for learning purposes (no recognition for knowledge gained).

Evidence that they can co-exist:
I recently enrolled in a Udacity course for fun. The pre-req learning list was a bunch of kahn videos
as opposed to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXNqEURmKtA&feature=related ... sorry couldn't resist that last bit

Comment That is awesome but... (Score 1) 278

It would have been better if the judge could have

1. specified it to be the FRONT page (or default page) associated with the iPad.
2. made Apple disclose the many instances where their products have been "copies" (some would say refinements) of other existing products just to ram home the point of them being hypocritical asses

Comment Public still working out where the line is... (Score 3, Insightful) 116

This basically boils down to something we have seen countless times over the years.

A new law came in, in response to something awful happening, someone who is being harrassed (via the internet) to the point that they commit suicide.

The police were doing what I think was the appropriate thing, realising that it was probably youths that were more at risk, started a campaign to educate them about the fact that online harrassment can be criminal. So far so good...

But society doesn't change overnight. It takes time. Right now we are at the point where we are accepting of the fact that it is indeed wrong. We are accepting of the fact that there is some line that when crossed makes it criminal. If it does not reach that line, it is still frowned upon but we should not report it to law enforcement. In people's mad dash to be politically correct and overly sensitive, they are reporting stuff that should merely be frowned upon and gotten over. Eventually they will find the appropriate equilibrium and in the mean time the police have told the public they need to push that line towards the more serious occassions of cyber-bullying.

Other examples are when sexual harrassment gained widespread acceptance people would threaten to call police over once off jokes, or a glance held for a second too long. We as a society have now (MOSTLY) worked this out, using other means of punishment, in that sexual harrassment is still frowned upon but police aren't deluged with frivolous instances.

The only bit I don't understand is that we already had harrassment laws. Why do we need a seperate law for "harrassment on the internet"? But then again I don't understand why we need separate patents for "(existing process) on the internet" either

Comment Re:Then buy NZ music (Score 2) 469

More and more I am liking NZ.

The countryside is awesome. The people are laid back. They haven't bought into a lot of the world's bullshit.

If there was more job opportunities there, and their economy wasn't in the toilet (compared with Aus... although we could be about to cliff dive ourselves) I would be looking to pack up and get over there.

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