Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:well... (Score 1) 774

My Norwegian is pretty bad and my English is even worse, but I'll attempt to translate the relevant parts, because I'm bored and someone might find it interesting:

Time after time a father of young children from Lillehammer logged onto the Internet to look at child porn. He has told the police he did this intentionally. He was driven by curiousity and excitement. Some of the pictures were of very young children. The pictures showed adults and children together or children alone engaged in sexual activities.

The police have documented that he looked at at least 110 pictures, because these were found stored in his browser cache. They managed to track him down, because he had used his credit card to pay in the porn store online. He even admits this. Yet, the court still found him not guilty.

The reason is a hole in the law: Only possession is illegal. Since he has only looked at the child porn, that isn't enough. He must have physically downloaded it to his computer. But since the browser does this automatically for all images you look at while surfing, legally this doesn't count.

A court ruling from the year 2000 determined that it is not a criminal possession to look at child porn without downloading it to your computer.

[A representative from] "Save the Children" says to the local paper that a new proposal now going to the justice department will be able to strengthen the legislation in this area. This could happen before 2011.

Comment Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score 1) 981

Chance of having two boys: 50% * 50% = 25%
Chance of having two girls: 50% * 50% = 25%
Chance of having a boy and a girl: The remaining 50%

He can't have two girls, so that's 1/3 chance he has two boys and 2/3 chance he has a boy and a girl.

Comment Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score 1) 981

So if a man comes up to you on the street and says: "I have two children. At least one of them is a boy. What are the odds that I have two boys?", you'll go:

Well, you can have (boy, boy), (boy, girl) or (girl, boy). But we should count (boy, boy) twice, so that means there's 2/4 = 50% chance that you have two boys.

Of course there isn't!

Here's another example: What are the odds of getting two sixes when rolling two dice? Well, most people would say 1/36, but then we're only counting (6, 6) once. You would say we should count that twice and so the odds are 2/36. This is completely wrong.

If a man comes up to you on the street and asks you the question about having two children, at least of them being a boy who's born on a Tuesday, it doesn't matter if he does have two sons who are born on Tuesdays. It's still just one man. You wouldn't count him a hundred times in your statistics if he had a hundred boys, at least I hope you wouldn't.

Comment Re:Quantum Entanglement does not "transfer" anythi (Score 1) 114

Correct, otherwise there would be no "spooky action at a distance", as Einstein put it.

A lot of people explain it like this: You write two notes, one has the letter A on it, the other has the letter B on it. Then you put them in envelopes and mail them to two different people. When one of them gets the envelope, they instantly know what the other person got.

This explanation is incorrect, because there is no letter A or B until either is observed with quantum entanglement.

A better explanation would be: You put two pieces of magic paper in envelopes, without looking at them, and mail them to two different people. When the first person opens their envelope and looks at the note, it will switch from random to display either the letter A or the letter B. The instant it does, it magically instantly tells the other piece of paper to show the other letter. It really does transfer its state faster than the speed of light, we just can't use it to transfer information faster than the speed of light.

Slashdot Top Deals

An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.

Working...