Comment Re:It won't be long (Score 1) 325
There are a lot of unsupported assumptions being made all around.
Moderated "Flamebait".
Classic Slashdot.
Comment Re:It won't be long (Score 0) 325
It is an avoidable risk, in that we can tell idiotic humans to stop flying quadcopters near planes, you fools!
I've only read TFS not TFA, but how do we know that this wasn't a government drone and/or operated by or at the government's direction? Either as part of some unrelated police or intelligence/surveillance operation, or even possibly as a "false-flag" operation to provide the government public opinion leverage for heavily restricting/licensing and/or banning regular citizens from owning/operating drones.
Another point, TFS quotes an altitude of 700 feet for the aircraft. That would mean that a drone would not need to be operated at a very high (or technically 'illegal') altitude to be "near" the extremely low-flying aircraft.
There are a lot of unsupported assumptions being made all around.
Strat
Comment Re:Yep (Score 2) 103
That's right! Hand over power to the states! Because unlike the fed, state government officials are totally immune to power grab and corruption!
If you have all the other states along with federal executive/judicial/legislative branches that are not so corrupted to the degree they are currently, the problem would self-correct. The Rule of Law instead of the Rule of Men would prevail.
It's like a computer network; A system built from independent machines with a varied 'ecosystem' of software, hardware, and security systems is a much harder 'nut' to crack than a single machine that operates a network of 'dumb' terminals.
In a very real way, those who wrote the US Constitution were network design geniuses. It makes little difference whether one is discussing a computer network or a government. Whether it's a network for data or for government power, many of the basic principles governing their operation, behavior, and security remain identical.
They were the ones introducing the new & disruptive concepts of their age, like all rights and powers originating from and by the People, and that government exists at the People's pleasure to protect and defend those rights equally, and has only those powers loaned to it by the People, and those powers may be altered or abolished by the People as described in the Constitution as they see fit.
Go and read the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers and the associated letters exchanged between the authors of the US Constitution if you want to understand these concepts. Of course if you're already fixed in your beliefs, then you may as well save time & bandwidth.
Strat
Comment Re:Yep (Score 1) 103
Because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So, remove the over-reaching power.
The republic was never designed for a federal government with so much power. That was one of the basic tenets of it's design, to not allow the central government too much power.
Break it up like Ma Bell of old. Do away with the unnecessary/harmful/unconstitutional parts, and allow the states more control.
Note; I am not advocating doing away with a central government. Just reducing it's size, scope, power, and cost to more closely resemble what the founding documents say it should look like.
Nobody is going to pay off an official who hasn't enough power to accomplish the goal(s) of the pay off. It's also hard to politically influence a federal agency/department/bureau that does not exist.
Strat
A Common Logic To Seeing Cats and the Cosmos 45
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Quanta Magazine:
"Using the latest deep-learning protocols, computer models consisting of networks of artificial neurons are becoming increasingly adept at image, speech and pattern recognition — core technologies in robotic personal assistants, complex data analysis and self-driving cars. But for all their progress training computers to pick out salient features from other, irrelevant bits of data, researchers have never fully understood why the algorithms or biological learning work.
Now, two physicists have shown that one form of deep learning works exactly like one of the most important and ubiquitous mathematical techniques in physics, a procedure for calculating the large-scale behavior of physical systems such as elementary particles, fluids and the cosmos. The new work, completed by Pankaj Mehta of Boston University and David Schwab of Northwestern University, demonstrates that a statistical technique called "renormalization," which allows physicists to accurately describe systems without knowing the exact state of all their component parts, also enables the artificial neural networks to categorize data as, say, "a cat" regardless of its color, size or posture in a given video.
"They actually wrote down on paper, with exact proofs, something that people only dreamed existed," said Ilya Nemenman, a biophysicist at Emory University.
Now, two physicists have shown that one form of deep learning works exactly like one of the most important and ubiquitous mathematical techniques in physics, a procedure for calculating the large-scale behavior of physical systems such as elementary particles, fluids and the cosmos. The new work, completed by Pankaj Mehta of Boston University and David Schwab of Northwestern University, demonstrates that a statistical technique called "renormalization," which allows physicists to accurately describe systems without knowing the exact state of all their component parts, also enables the artificial neural networks to categorize data as, say, "a cat" regardless of its color, size or posture in a given video.
"They actually wrote down on paper, with exact proofs, something that people only dreamed existed," said Ilya Nemenman, a biophysicist at Emory University.
Comment Re:Setting aside that old Constitution (Score 1) 446
And America's modern right often argues that portions of the US Constitution can be safely ignored because CommunistsXXXXXX terrorists.
No, those are Progressives who are in both camps (Left-Right, Republican-Democrat).
Progessives are the problem. As their name suggests, they want government to "progress" past the limits of the Constitution. Progressives are the ones who push for the "living" Constitution that allows "creative" re-interpretations of the limits on government scope & power which enable government abuses and corruption.
Stop electing Progressives in either major Party and things will get better. Keep electing the same Progressives in the major Parties, and things will continue to get worse.
Strat
Comment Re:Value your prefrontal cortex? (Score 2) 233
Do you like the capabilities your pre-frontal cortex gives you, like executive functions, impulse control, etc?
Then don't play football.
Avoidable brain damage is stupid. Avoidable mechanical brain damage twice so.
But...but...where will we get future cops and politicians from, if there are no more government-indoctrinated violent and aggressive brain-damaged.individuals being turned out by schools?
Strat
Comment Re:*sigh* (Score 1) 115
I agree, you're the first one besides myself I've seen mention this.
They have already been used to present evidence of corporate wrong doings.
1 example.
http://consumerist.com/2012/01... [consumerist.com]
Yes, they are a force multiplier for people against both public and private sector corruption, criminality, violence, and tyranny.
That's why unelected bureaucrats creating regulations with the force and criminal penalties of a Federal felony are an unconstitutional abomination and a clear assault on individual freedom and civil rights, plus accomplishing further destruction of the separation of powers between the Executive and Legislative branches of the US government.
Strat
Comment Re:*sigh* (Score 1) 115
Funny how this revelation comes out just before they are about to release their regulations for "drones".
The biggest dangers that drones present from the perspective of those in government are that drones in civilian hands are a force-equalizer and also hamper the ability of those in government to operate without being observed.
Any other reasons for government regulation of drones are secondary to those primary motivations and also serve as a smokescreen to cover for those primary motivations.
Strat
Comment Re:Oven Tech (Score 2) 145
Surely there's better tech than what we use today to prevent our automobiles from becoming lethal ovens.
Certainly there is. You can just cook your kids and pets at home, no need to waste the gas going out at all. Home ovens have been large enough to do this for decades now. People are so wasteful!
--Hannibal
Now, see!?
That is the kind of straightforward and direct, logical, practical, problem-solving engineer-style thinking
Bravo Sir, bravo!
Strat
Mathematicians Study Effects of Gerrymandering On 2012 Election 413
HughPickens.com writes Gerrymandering is the practice of establishing a political advantage for a particular party by manipulating district boundaries to concentrate all your opponents' votes in a few districts while keeping your party's supporters as a majority in the remaining districts. For example, in North Carolina in 2012 Republicans ended up winning nine out of 13 congressional seats even though more North Carolinians voted for Democrats than Republicans statewide. Now Jessica Jones reports that researchers at Duke are studying the mathematical explanation for the discrepancy. Mathematicians Jonathan Mattingly and Christy Vaughn created a series of district maps using the same vote totals from 2012, but with different borders. Their work was governed by two principles of redistricting: a federal rule requires each district have roughly the same population and a state rule requires congressional districts to be compact. Using those principles as a guide, they created a mathematical algorithm to randomly redraw the boundaries of the state's 13 congressional districts. "We just used the actual vote counts from 2012 and just retabulated them under the different districtings," says Vaughn. "If someone voted for a particular candidate in the 2012 election and one of our redrawn maps assigned where they live to a new congressional district, we assumed that they would still vote for the same political party."
The results were startling. After re-running the election 100 times with a randomly drawn nonpartisan map each time, the average simulated election result was 7 or 8 U.S. House seats for the Democrats and 5 or 6 for Republicans. The maximum number of Republican seats that emerged from any of the simulations was eight. The actual outcome of the election — four Democratic representatives and nine Republicans – did not occur in any of the simulations. "If we really want our elections to reflect the will of the people, then I think we have to put in safeguards to protect our democracy so redistrictings don't end up so biased that they essentially fix the elections before they get started," says Mattingly. But North Carolina State Senator Bob Rucho is unimpressed. "I'm saying these maps aren't gerrymandered," says Rucho. "It was a matter of what the candidates actually was able to tell the voters and if the voters agreed with them. Why would you call that uncompetitive?"
The results were startling. After re-running the election 100 times with a randomly drawn nonpartisan map each time, the average simulated election result was 7 or 8 U.S. House seats for the Democrats and 5 or 6 for Republicans. The maximum number of Republican seats that emerged from any of the simulations was eight. The actual outcome of the election — four Democratic representatives and nine Republicans – did not occur in any of the simulations. "If we really want our elections to reflect the will of the people, then I think we have to put in safeguards to protect our democracy so redistrictings don't end up so biased that they essentially fix the elections before they get started," says Mattingly. But North Carolina State Senator Bob Rucho is unimpressed. "I'm saying these maps aren't gerrymandered," says Rucho. "It was a matter of what the candidates actually was able to tell the voters and if the voters agreed with them. Why would you call that uncompetitive?"
Comment Re:Howdy (Score 2) 22
I am on Slashdot! Holy crap! I am so excited!
Nice to see that even Apu reads
Strat
Jackie Chan Discs Help Boost Solar Panel Efficiency 194
wbr1 writes Apparently the pit pattern on a blu-ray disk is great at helping trap photons, rather than reflecting them. Applying this pattern to the glass in a solar panel can boost efficiency by 22%. Researchers at Northwestern tested this system with Jackie Chan discs. From the article: "To increase the efficiency of a solar panel by 22%, the researchers at Northwestern bought a copy of Police Story 3: Supercop on Blu-ray; removed the top plastic layer, exposing the recording medium beneath; cast a mold of the quasi-random pattern; and then used the mold to create a photovoltaic cell with the same pattern....The end result is a solar panel that has a quantum efficiency of around 40% — up about 22% from the non-patterned solar panel."
Hacker Threatened With 44 Felony Charges Escapes With Misdemeanor 219
An anonymous reader writes: It's no secret that prosecutors usually throw every charge they can at an alleged criminal, but the case of Aaron Swartz brought to light how poorly-written computer abuse laws lend themselves to this practice. Now, another perfect example has resolved itself: a hacker with ties to Anonymous was recently threatened with 44 felony counts of computer fraud and cyberstalking, each with its own 10-year maximum sentence. If the charges stuck, the man was facing multiple lifetimes worth of imprisonment.
But, of course, they didn't. Prosecutors struck a deal to get him to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge, which carried only a $10,000 fine. The man's attorney, Tor Eklund, said, "The more I looked at this, the more it seemed like an archetypal example of the Department of Justice's prosecutorial abuse when it comes to computer crime. It shows how aggressive they are, and how they seek to destroy your reputation in the press even when the charges are complete, fricking garbage."
But, of course, they didn't. Prosecutors struck a deal to get him to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge, which carried only a $10,000 fine. The man's attorney, Tor Eklund, said, "The more I looked at this, the more it seemed like an archetypal example of the Department of Justice's prosecutorial abuse when it comes to computer crime. It shows how aggressive they are, and how they seek to destroy your reputation in the press even when the charges are complete, fricking garbage."
Comment Re:Pathetic (Score 0) 1128
It's ok to be a thug who roughs up old shopkeepers to steal form them, and then punch a cop and try to grab a gun? I'm supposed to feel sorry at the death of that kind of low life?
Brown was just trying to "spread the wealth"!
Then an obviously-racist cop stopped him (Wilson is white and Brown was black, so racism on Wilson's part is automatically a fact). Brown was simply defending himself against being prevented from "sharing" more of other people's hard-earned wealth. Brown is a warrior of Social Justice and an obvious victim of racism!
The cognitive dissonance displayed here by Brown supporters is stunning. The reality-distortion field generated rivals that of Apple/Jobs.
Strat
