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Comment Re:OPEC to subsidize its demise? (Score 1) 385

This.

The subsidies for fossil fuels by first-world western nations (and China) (those in a position to fund green energy technologies) are a small percentage of the total. Most fossil fuel subsidies are done by oil producing nations as a form of population pacification. The idea that these funds are available for redirection is ludicrous.

Comment Re:It's Intended (Score 3, Insightful) 137

in some cases they're no better than gambling (ie: buy tokens to feed into this jackpot like system to win a random digital item!)

Not that I disagree with you, but what part of the gaming industry isn't preying off of exactly the same neurons as gambling? Nearly every game, be you buying the game itself, in-game purchases, or DLC, is getting its revenue almost entirely due to exploiting pleasure-seeking behavior.

Comment Re:How did this get modded up (Score 1) 187

I love how on Slashdot how threads frequently go, Poster A:"Well, this is true (with not citations)" Poster B: "No, that is wrong (with no citations)." Poster C: "No, B is wrong because they provide no citations (still no citations for A or C)". No one is providing concrete numbers or citations. You chew someone out for not being concrete, but then turn around and still are no concrete yourself, making vague comparisons because the word "argument" gets used in a lot of places that have no relevance to the issue. I would assume that most people who actually cared about the subject would take a quick Google search because it is a heavily researched topic.

You're not a victim of anything, as much as you wish to draw it that way.

As poster B, if you feel poster A needed held to account then do so - but two wrongs don't make a right. What Poster A needed was to be ignored. The post wasn't modded up, it was drawing no attention until you used it as a springboard for your totally offtopic ranting about taxes in general. If anything you gave it the credence you were attempting to deny it.

And despite your chest-inflating portrayal of the situation as the poor misguided bearer of light into this quagmire of no proof and faulty assumptions as to which arguments I "like", you really have no idea.

I can't help that my OT rant was modded up +2, but then again somehow so was yours. /. has become the land of easy OT karma it appears.

Comment Re:Only in America (Score 4, Insightful) 187

Your bullshit would be more compelling if only more concrete.

A lot of argument already suggests the taxes are disproportionate to any impact.

A lot of argument suggests the morning after pill causes abortions. A lot of argument suggests homosexuality is a choice. A lot of argument doesn't make it so.

Are the taxes disproportionate to impact or not? Say something real.

Comment Re:aha! infinite repeating sound required for Nyqu (Score 1) 217

Now it suddenly makes sense to me, I "get it". Infinite samples of a repeating function will create a unique pattern.

You're getting closer.

You seem to be forgetting that the signal is bandpassed before encoding. Thus any frequency below the Nyquest limit maps to a unique pattern.

A sound recording of duration 1/R second will generate one sample. The value of that single sample tells us virtually nothing about the sound.

Obviously,
For that signal has a period twice the lowpass frequency.

Since real-life sounds are not infinitely long repetitions, samples of real sounds can be pretty good approximations, only.

But you know what? The ear can't distinguish those either. What does a sub-cycle-length 21 Khz tone sound like?

It doesn't sounds like a continuous 21 Khz tone.

Such signals, in the context of hearing exist only in theory.

Comment Re:reduce the amount (Score 1) 983

There is an increasingly large number of devices (just about every lower power device of the last 5-7 years) which will play h.264 and not divx. Since the era of the iPod 5th gen ("iPod Video") the trend has been for h.264 hardware decoders paired to relatively weak CPUs.

Comment Re:Resolution (Score 3, Informative) 118

Seems to me like the current pics have pixels thinner than 0.5 meters... I feel like I am missing something?

In many (most?) developed western areas the images are from planes, not satellites. There is a great deal of high-res aerial photography on the open market and Google has used much.

The development being discussed in the article will benefit outlying areas and places where having temporal density is useful.

Comment Re:Will increased exposure make the market rationa (Score 1) 140

At that point, the people with the massive computing power are going to have incentive to throw at least some of these Bitcoins into the market just to generate more trade volume.

Bitcoin's exchange rate against the USD has no bearing on its utility as a token of exchange.

With fast enough exchanges and sufficient enough liquidity ("enough" being the key word) the total amount of Bitcoins in circulation doesn't even have a large impact on trade volume. Bitcoins don't get consumed in the process of trading.

Therefore I don't see how those with massive computing power (for generating income through transaction processing) benefit by selling previously-hoarded coins. If anything they benefit by not selling their coins, maintain artificial scarcity and thus high exchange prices since they get paid in coin.

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