Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment As a Florida homeschooling dad myself ... (Score 1) 294

I have to chuckle at reports like this, because I'm often told my homeschooled kids are not in the "real world" and aren't being properly "socialized".

Why would any child or parent object to fingerprinting?

Coercion and regimentation in government schools is just the *real world*, to wit:

Riding buses of a kind that nobody else rides except in prison or at boot camp, painted a special DOT color that other vehicles are not allowed to use, that travel under special traffic rules that nobody else is allowed to use.

Eating food provided by the government, served in a facility with famously odd personnel, none of which would be patronized if offered to people as a free choice.

Forced to endure unwanted company that inflicts physical assaults and social harassment that would be criminal or tortious if acted by adults.

Required to submit to government employees who are 100 percent unionized and paid twice what they're worth in the free market, who work 3/4 of each day for 3/4 of the year. (For those of you who learned public school math, that's 3/4 x 3/4 = 9/16, or about a half time job for double a full time annual wage.)

Etc.

The real world?

Comment This story repeats a stupid fallacy (Score 1) 330

"... white light is a mixture of colored rays that can be recombined with a lens".

White light splits into colors because of dispersion in the prism. Passing dispersed rays through another prism just disperses them more, it does not recombine them. This fallacy is famously repeated in public school science textbook diagrams of paired prisms. Newton never performed any such demonstration. He was able to demonstrate recombination in Opticks, but with something much more complicated than a pair of prisms.

Comment "Neutrality" is a phony, lying term (Score 1) 702

"Net neutrality" consists of government force applied to private entities to coerce certain behavior that would not occur freely.

Like any government "regulation", as the liberal fantasy wants to label all such schemes, ultimately it comes down to, "you and your network assets do what we say, not as you like, or men with guns will come and make you."

Comment Repeat after me (Score 1) 117

Beware the "radiant heat" fallacy.

The solar flux consists of electromagnetic radiation. Electromagnetic radiation is not heat. The sun does not radiate heat.

This novelty looks remarkably like just adding a thermocouple, which has never been any good at turning heat into electricity.

Comment Absurd (Score 1) 316

That's a ridiculous cost of 12 euros per watt, which is about 100 times the cost of a conventional power plant.

5 MW times 10 hours/day (?) is worth about 2500 euros/day wholesale.

So basically you have invested EU 60 million to earn EU 2500 per day, for a gross ROI of 1.5 percent, before expenses and depreciation.

Which is to say, this thing will have earned back its carbon cost in about 100 years.

This must be a very durable plant, what with the MOLTEN SODIUM CHLORIDE and all.

Environmentalism: expensive, shoddy, deadly [Schwartz].

Comment Re:I have a big problem with everything (Score 1) 952

... Even in my living room, watching a Bluray at 1080p, I still see the pixels from 10-12 feet away on the couch.

Liar.

Human visual acuity resolves about 1 minute of arc. 1080p on a 55 inch HDTV is about 40 pixels/inch, which is about 40 seconds of arc per pixel from 10 feet away.

You might be seeing coarser pixelation such as compression artifacts, but not the actual pixels.

Comment My simple interview question. (Score 1) 441

I ask how you would solve Jumble puzzles from the newspaper, given a vocabulary text file. Exhaustive search is not the answer, but given that the glut of CPU power and storage has fostered brute-force approaches to everything, this is surprisingly a quite common proposal.

The solution is quite obviously a hash lookup, but you would be surprised how few "programmers" come up with that.

Comment My simple interview question (Score 1) 224

I ask how you would solve Jumble puzzles from the newspaper, given a vocabulary text file. Exhaustive search is not the answer, but given that the glut of CPU power and storage has fostered brute-force approaches to everything, this is surprisingly a quite common proposal.

The solution is quite obviously a hash lookup, but you would be surprised how few "programmers" come up with that.

Slashdot Top Deals

"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." -- Dave Barry

Working...