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Comment Itâ(TM)s irrelevant (Score 1) 347

Punishment and reward works and is necessary because people respond to incentives. Whether the will involved in peopleâ(TM)s response to such incentives is free or not is a nice philosophical problem that you can debate with your friends, but has no bearing on the morality or utility of punishment and reward.

Comment Re: Patents (Score 1) 206

Absolutely. People say you need millions to defend your patent or it's worthless. Not so. If your patent is good, then there is a commercial market for it. Maybe you won't be able to afford to defend it, but if say Boeing and Airbus both want it, they would pay good money to keep the other one from getting it.

Comment Re:Peer review with paywalls breeds corruption (Score 1) 123

Instead of peer review, a measure of value of a publication could be as simple as counting how many times a publication is referenced.

Referenced by whom? Other papers that have been published the same way? I'm pretty sure there's a loophole somewhere in that scheme.

Comment Cost (Score 1) 133

The reason why chips are so cheap despite the large number of components on them is that all the components are produced at the same time. It's a complicated process with many steps using ludicrously expensive equipment for sure, but it's a single iteration through the production process. If you want to scale vertically, you have to increase the number of iterations. The production costs will asymptotically approach proportionality with the number of components on the chip.

Comment Re:Content (Score 2) 113

This keeps getting repeated whenever the topic is the comparatively poor price/performance ratio of American ISPs. Sure, the average EU population density is higher than that of the USA, but if that was enough to explain the difference, you would expect European prices to vary by population density, since European ISP markets are national. There are several EU countries with lower population densities than the USA. Sweden has a 40% lower population density than the USA and usually scores near the top on rankings of ISP price/performance.

Comment Because of links. (Score 1) 172

Literally. That's what the article says if you click through the summary and rewrite to actually read it. To quote: "What the Google founders recognized about search on the Web was that information about LINKS could be added to the algorithms." Which isn't wrong, of course, but if you call yourself a nerd you already know a hell of a lot more about the page ranking algorithm than this already.

Comment Real-world case (Score 1) 258

In the parliamentary elections of September 2013, more than 250 000 Norwegians in selected municipalities were able to vote from home. They were taking part in a national trial of Internet voting, building on an advanced cryptographic protocol. Follow the link below for a talk about the technology behind it, presented at the last Chaos Computer Conference by Tor E. BjÃrstad http://media.ccc.de/browse/con...

Comment crt (Score 2) 175

The age of the square, visible pixel was actually a pretty short period between blurry CRTs and retina LCDs. Pixel art was originally created for CRT, which blurs the pixels. Artists developed techniques to take advantage of this.

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