Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Just a higher tech version of what cops already (Score 5, Insightful) 180

Ok, so first, if the crime doesn't happen, how do you know you prevented it? Maybe it just didn't happen.

.

You don't look at individual crimes, you take a selection of areas with similar crime statistics, implement the prediction system in some of them, then see how the crime rates change.

Second, doesn't this seem like there will now be a market for anti-prediction? That is, find out where the cops think the crime will occur, and do the crime somewhere else. Because the cops will be somewhere else, your chances of getting caught are less

Perhaps there will be a market for anti-prediction, but the types of crimes that this aims to prevent (or even just be more response to calls about) aren't usually done by sophisticated criminals. Any anti-prediction system would first have to be able to aggregate crime statistics then apply the prediction algorithm, then find areas outside the predicted zones. If you have all that already, you might as well just sell the prediction algorithm to the police rather than make an unethical program that has a very small (and secretive) user base that wouldn't pay much for your system in the first place.

Comment Re:Just a higher tech version of what cops already (Score 4, Interesting) 180

Unfortunately individual police officers were drawing from a much smaller pool of data which was then put through their personal biases. If an officer had a racial or cultural bias then they may perceive an area as having more crime, when the actual statistics don't match.

Comment Re:Um... (Score 1) 277

My suggestion is to switch to GWT whenever you can. Google Web Toolkit lets me write and debug in java but the end product is in JavaScript with no plugins required.

I used to use flex and gwt is superior in my opinion.

Comment Chinese Subsidies (Score 2, Insightful) 415

Maybe the tariffs are because the Chinese have been subsidizing their solar exports in violation of the trade agreements?

Part of the problem will of course be that photovoltaics aren't reliable. Concentrated solar onto molten salt and wind are much more reliable than photovoltaics. Or we could just go nuclear.

Comment Re:Dreams of the future past (Score 1) 182

afaik the current limitations with plasma torch garbage disposal is not the power, but the plasma degrades the materials making up the furnace too quickly. If the input is general waste then the process produces as much energy as it takes. It needs energy to start or if the input doesn't have enough hydrocarbons.

Comment Re:The other question should who wants own the rig (Score 1) 129

Except some crashes are impossible to prevent. There will be some ambulance chasers that try to cash in on these crashes, regardless of whose fault it actually is. A likely outcome is that the lawyers trying to get money from autonomous car makers will change the question from "whose fault was it?" to "Why didn't your car prevent the crash?". Even if none of the lawyers win, the makers still have to spend a lot of money defending themselves.

Comment Re:BART really doesn't like dissenting voices (Score 1) 196

It's more like this:
The objective of the BART group is to run the trains, safely and on schedule.
A train station is a dangerous place during a protest. Protests, being large relatively immobile crowds have the possibility of pushing people into places where they shouldn't be. Between an enclosed space causing crush problems, the electrical lines for the trains, and the trains themselves, I wouldn't want to be in a train station during a protest.

Probably they decided to shut down the stations for two reasons: So that nobody would get hurt (which would then be blamed on BART's response) and so that hopefully the protesters would get bored and leave sooner so they could resume service.

Comment Re:So much for the safety of nuclear energy (Score 1) 752

Well they can blow up conventionally. Chernobyl exploded because the reactor's graphite moderation rods caught fire and the uranium fuel produced so much heat that the structures covering the reactor became pressure vessels and exploded.
Chernobyl didn't have a massive containment building like all western reactors do.

Comment Re:If this comes to market... (Score 1) 293

You're giving the computer too much credit. The choice that the computer makes is dependent on how it was programmed. No computer at the application level is purely logical.
An AI isn't going to be driving your car, an automated driving program is. The driving program won't even consider your worth compared to the 7-year old. It's likely that it will be programmed to chose paths which will cause the least damage while prioritizing some types of damage.

Having an AI driving your car is silly, I don't want my car to have an existential crisis while on the freeway. Having an automated driving program driving a car would be fantastic.

Comment Re:Use UV light and shift back up afterwards? (Score 1) 163

The story goes on that he was then able to destroy specific virii (including cancerous) by using a highly modulated RF carrier, where the modulation frequency (ie not so much the specific carrier frequency but rather its amplitude modulation frequency).
Then the consipracy theories start, where his machine threatened the cancer establishment (AMA), and all his work, machines and lab were maliciously destroyed/discredited.

Cells are cancerous, but virii can cause a cell to be cancerous. A virus itself cannot be cancerous, because it cannot reproduce alone. More importantly, this magical technique can tell the difference between a healthy cell and a cancerous cell, which might only be two or three switched genes out of trillions? And this will work over my entire body, despite any reflection and other interference?
Virii are a bit more believable, but still, the difference between two virii could be only a single gene swap.

Maybe the reason he was discredited was because it didn't work?
Considering this technique could wipe out all viral, bacterial and fungal infections, as well as all cancers... I'm inclined to believe that it didn't work.

Slashdot Top Deals

The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.

Working...