Comment Sea of Glass (Score 2) 1365
by Barry B. Longyear
Comment Re:Remember: (Score 1) 474
... I have no idea where people came up with the notion they have some inalienable right to not be offended.
Moral relativism run amok. Since each individual decides what is right for themselves, and we have the right to be secure in our own possessions, and our mind is our greatest possession, you don't have the right to upset the world I've constructed in my head. In other words, we've confused feeling good with being good.
Comment Re:On valentine's day (Score 1) 293
Lot's of techie folks have DVRs. In fact, I just used my iPhone to instruct my DVR to record these Jeopardy episodes.
Comment Re:Yes, Thank Turing We're Not the Media Hype Mach (Score 1) 293
Watch tonigh and prepare to believe a machine can think.
Being able to answer a certain class of questions (ok, determining a correct question from an answer) does not demonstrate self-awareness. I'm not sure that extrospection without introspection qualifies as thinking, at least, not in the human sense.
Comment Re:Porn. (Score 1) 319
Oh, lookie... Moderators that disagree. Isn't that cute? I love me some abusive moderators. This is slashdot's strength, ladieez and gentlemen; hiding posts the mods disagree with. C'mon, mod me down some more. No, no, a little to the left. There you go. Ah!
And thus, the "modded TSA" tag was born...
Comment Re:System is rotten (Score 1) 426
The feeling is mutual. The politicians want to get rid of you.
Nothing like biting the hand that feeds you.
What's worse is that we keep voting for these idiots.
Comment Re:ahh, the "singularity"... (Score 1) 830
Maybe that's why it doesn't work as well...
Comment Re:What is the issue? (Score 1) 319
There are some people who enjoy going to the same live show multiple times. They relish in what is the same as well as what is different in each performance. A synth is not even close to a live performer. A recording gets mundane to those who go to multiple showings.
There's no reason that a synthesizer has to generate the same performance each time. I'm sure someone will come up with heuristics to give a synthesized performance a "live" feel.
Comment Re:Obvious abuse of power (Score 1) 1123
Of course you don't subdue them with impact forces. You use impact to get them down so that you can try to restrain them. And when someone goes on a rampage in short quarters, you use what's at hand. I am not a cop, and I'm relating a real-life incident from an officer that I happen to trust. And the incident was 10-15 years ago, so my memory may be faulty. YMMV.
Comment Re:One Fundamental difference: (Score 1) 1123
There's a lot of reasons why you can't point a gun at a cop.
I'd write a Law & Order episode where a suspect reached for a camera, the cop thought it was a gun and shot the suspect. It was dark, the area was poorly lit, and the officer is acquitted. Has it already been done? Well, it doesn't matter now that L&O is off the air.
Comment Re:Obvious abuse of power (Score 1) 1123
Ever tried to subdue someone on PCP? Six police with batons sometimes can't slow them down.
Comment Re: A police officer's view (Score 5, Insightful) 1123
Right. That's why cops have video recorders in their cars. That's why cops have flashlights with video recording capability.
Sauce, goose, gander.
Comment Re:What if... (Score 1) 191
Why couldn't the particle stay the same, but the whole universe oscillates around it?
Did Spock come from the future to tell you that you discovered this?
New Method for Random Number Generation Developed 395
Science Daily is reporting that a German team has developed a new method of random number generation that they hope will improve security. "The German team has now developed a true random number generator that uses an extra layer of randomness by making a computer memory element, a flip-flop, twitch randomly between its two states 1 or 0. Immediately prior to the switch, the flip-flop is in a 'metastable state' where its behavior cannot be predicted. At the end of the metastable state, the contents of the memory are purely random. The researchers' experiments with an array of flip-flop units show that for small arrays the extra layer makes the random number almost twenty times more 'random' than conventional methods."
Comment Re:You cannot compare... (Score 1) 346
There's nothing particularly difficult about understanding this, and nothing special, or evil about the rich doing it. The vast majority of us peons would do the same given the opportunity. If not for yourself, then for your children. No? Don't you believe in evolution, and survival of the fittest?
You've run afoul of Hume's Guillotine. What "is" (survival of the fittest) does not imply what "ought" to be (the strong preying on the weak).
