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Comment: Re:Reviewer is not a photographer (Score 1) 90

by Marc Madness (#42754375) Attached to: Yes, PlayBook Does Get BlackBerry 10 Update
Framing the picture differently affects how the exposure settings are chosen by the auto-exposure algorithm since the sample points will be distributed differently in the scene than with the other cameras. If one of the exposure sample points happens to be significantly brighter than the others, then the sensitivity of the sensor could be tuned down to ensure that the picture is not saturated (the upper right of the image seems brigher than the rest of the image). This calls the validity of the test into question.

Comment: Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score 1) 1862

by Marc Madness (#42592889) Attached to: 3D Printable Ammo Clip Skirts New Proposed Gun Laws

New Hampshire has a lower murder rate than France.

This is irrelevant because murder rate is not the same statistic as the rate of gun violence. The latter would be a more useful comparison.

And where is the most murder in the US? In the places with the most gun control, like Chicago. Places like New Hampshire prove unequivocally that you can have freedom and low murder rates at the same time.

This demonstrates correlation, not causation. In fact, you confirm this and contradict the premise of your argument (that gun control does not decrease the occurence of gun violence; either that or you changed arguments half way through) in the sentence that follows:

The problem of violence is not one of tools (guns, knives, hammers or plain old hands and feet) but one of economy. The most violence happens in the poorest places, this is UNIVERSALLY true, in every city, state and nation. It doesn't matter if the homicides are gun-induced or not.

What is the rate of poverty in Chicago vs. that in New Hampshire? Not to mention the fact that you're comparing an entire state with a single metropolitan area. If you're going to accuse someone of being disingenuous, at least use a more coherent argument. Gun control alone won't stop people from murdering each other. Reducing the divide between rich and poor would likely be a more effective solution. However, I suspect this idea would be rejected as "socialism" by a large number of the US electorate.

Comment: Re:We'll probably still do it (Score 1) 179

by Marc Madness (#41780403) Attached to: Algal Biofuels Not Ready For Scale-Up
As far as I know, the energy input of sunlight in fossil fuel is ignored because that energy was input millions of years ago when the fossil fuel was organic matter. So it's probably fair to omit this factor when doing an analysis of the energy yield of ethanol (assuming of course that its total contribution is equal in all cases).

Comment: Re:Dawkin's is a piss poor social scientist (Score 1) 862

I would be interested to see more evidence, other than the "god gene", as to the genetic basis for religion. From my understanding, the genetic predisposition has more to do with determining whether or not someone is susceptible to believe in religion, but does not predicate what that belief is. If religious belief was largely predicated on genetics, we would probably see a more random distribution of belief systems.

Most of us do have a genetic predisposition to adopt a sexual orientation, it is possible that social influence is a factor in deciding what that orientation is. However, I believe the body of evidence points to genetics as the determining factor.

Comment: Re:Valve finds Intel's driver to be great. (Score 1) 159

by Marc Madness (#41194383) Attached to: Valve Finds Open Source Drivers To Be Great
Their main business is not consumer graphics cards. I believe their focus is on building specialized imaging hardware for industrial systems and providing the associated image processing software (ML if I recall correctly). I imagine the margins are far greater than what they were getting building consumer GPUs.

Comment: Re:news? (Score 1) 133

by Marc Madness (#41139707) Attached to: Stanford Researchers Discover the 'Anternet'
I had the same initial thought that you did. However, I didn't realize that harvester ants do not rely on pheremones which makes their approach slightly different than the typical Ant-Colony Optimization algorithms (which have been applied to routing). It would be interesting to know how the harvester ants communicate geographic information when they touch thier antennae. Something that may be revealed once I have the chance to read the rest of the article (beyond the abstract).

Comment: Re:Uh (Score 4, Informative) 161

by Marc Madness (#40629971) Attached to: Microsoft Kills Windows Gadgets Via Security Update
The featured article explains with a much less confusing use of pronouns:

"An attacker who successfully exploited a Gadget vulnerability could run arbitrary code in the context of the current user," company officials said in an advisory issued Tuesday. "If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take complete control of the affected system."

Comment: Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score 1) 372

by Marc Madness (#40564035) Attached to: Apple-Motorola Judge Questions Need For Software Patents

Drug discovery is hard. Immensely hard. Failures are often and expensive and government is poorly equipped to make entrepreneurial decisions. That's why we currently rely on private companies to make the decisions on who is a good research and who is a bad researcher when a company in total only makes two or three really profitable drugs every decade. We can allow those companies to fail if they can no longer produce. It's a lot harder to let a government program "fail" like that.

I don't think the fact that the private sector is better equipped at making enterpreneurial decisions has been adequately proven by evidence (however, neither has the converse). One big problem with allowing private, for-profit, companies to be the decision makers in matters of public health has one major flaw: medications that yield high profits don't necessarily address real health problems (I'm thinking of Viagra and Cialis here), and medications that address real health problems will not necessarily yield high profits. The private sector has little interest in addressing health problems that are not profitable.

Comment: Re:Well, duh (Score 1) 305

by Marc Madness (#40454931) Attached to: On Orbitz, Mac Users Offered Pricier Hotels First

... if I make $1 a year and you make $255,999 a year together we "average" $128,000.

Your example would be more illustrative if you said 4 people make $1/year and one person makes $639,996/year, the average is $128,000 with only a single outlier (Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg subscribes to Linux Journal). The quoted statistic also doesn't account for the potentially more numerous Linux users who are too broke to subscribe to the Linux Journal.

Try to get all of your posthumous medals in advance.

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