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Comment: Re:nonsense (Score 1) 460







Comment: Re:Sigh (Score 1) 748

by prgrmr (#47704287) Attached to: News Aggregator Fark Adds Misogyny Ban
You were kicked out of kindergarten as a child for not playing well with others, weren't you?

Or, if you require a religious analogy, if worship is an act of volition (i.e., you have to chose to worship God), then approval also has to be an act of volition; as opposed to tolerance, which simply involves a choice to ignore behavior that doesn't otherwise interfere with your personal choices. Or do you not believe in or not understand free will?

Comment: Re: Now thats incentive (Score 2) 564

The average human is only of average intelligence, and average intelligence isn't all that smart.

If we ever get to the point where there are self-aware machines, it is infinitely more likely they will be borg-like with a collective consciousness than not, which means no one machine needs to "know" or be able to "remember" everything, just to know where in the network to access the knowledge repository.

And saying "only natural" about artificial constructs completely invalidates your conclusion, as does thinking humans optimize. People, in general, follow the path of least resistance. See my first sentence above for why.

Comment: Re:Fear Mongers Didn't Want to Let Cassini Fly (Score 1) 45

by prgrmr (#47399933) Attached to: Cassini's Space Odyssey To Saturn
It's more complex than that: Cassini has 3 RTGs, plus a dozen or so pellets in the Huygens probe to keep its instruments from completely freezing during the 7 year trip to Saturn. The ultimate "doomsday" scenario would have to have the entire spacecraft vaporizing less than a mile over a major metropolitan area, scattering plutonium dust as it goes. However, I would be much more concerned if it exploded over a fresh-water lake or reservoir, tainting the water supply. Given that 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by water, an ocean landing would have been much more likely had it crashed. The biggest risk was the launch: 1 in 40 rocket launches blow-up on the pad or before maximum velocity is reached.

Comment: store credit (Score 2) 162

by prgrmr (#47350045) Attached to: California Legalizes Bitcoin
Store credit has always been legal. Stores allowing customers to use credit from other stores it has a reciprocal agreement with for honoring store credit has always been legal. As long as a place of business is willing to accept US dollars, it can accept whatever other form of credit, discount, or voucher that it wants. And given that the federal constitution declares that the US dollar is the currency of the nation, the state law was, at best, redundant.

Individual states weighing in on bitcoin doesn't make it any more or any less valid or relevant in the market. When the IRS, SEC, and US Treasury finally make definitive policy statements specifically mentioning bitcoin, then you'll have your validity, or invalidity, as the case may be.

Comment: fraud by the LECs (Score 1) 534

I haven't yet looked for it, but I suspect the law that authorizes the creation of the LECs in the first place would implicitly preclude them from filing for non-profit status in the first place, so the LECs have committed fraud by doing so, and should be prosecuted in Federal court accordingly.

Comment: The JSA (Score 2) 165

by prgrmr (#47202149) Attached to: Recommendations For Classic Superhero Comic Collections?
If you really want to understand comics, get and read "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America". It's a part of American literary history that shouldn't be forgotten, and is indispensable for understanding the evolution of comic books. And then get a hold of every Justice Society of America comic, omnibus, and reprint that you can and starting reading from there through the 60s and 70s related titles. You will never look at modern comic books the same way again.
User Journal

Journal: my response to slashdot beta

Journal by prgrmr

If the beta becomes the new, permanent interface, and the "classic" view is completely done away with, I will simply delete my account. I urge others who dislike beta to do the same.

Comment: Re:Information paradox? (Score 1) 193

by prgrmr (#46178087) Attached to: New Type of Star Can Emerge From Inside Black Holes, Say Cosmologists
The 2nd law isn't violated as whatever falls into the black hole either becomes part of the singularity/Plank star, or is expelled during the transition via Hawking radiation. Your question on entropy doesn't make sense, as the cosmologists are postulating that the Plank star *is* the black hole.

Comment: Re:Ah, yes... but... FUCK BETA! (Score 1) 573

by prgrmr (#46177033) Attached to: HTML5 App For Panasonic TVs Rejected - JQuery Is a "Hack"
I don't care what they do with beta, but if they get rid of classic, I will simply delete my account and stop reading slashtdot at all. Although, I suspect it will take a massive number of other people voting with their feet and leaving to get Dice to repent from pulling an ebay and "fixing" it until they break it.

Comment: mercy killing (Score 1) 308

by prgrmr (#46140725) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Do You Do If You're Given a Broken Project?
Find reasons, both technical and financial, to make the most professional recommendation that you can to kill the project. This means just the facts, and no name calling (actual or implied), no editorializing about the lack of quality or organization of the project's goals, parameters, or guidelines or lack thereof--although anything obviously absent should be noted. Take a moral stand, if necessary, about your resolve to not take money under false pretenses, and that continuing the project would be just that. Implying that anyone else taking money for the project, contractor or employee, would be equally doing so falsely, may be either the exact needed thing to do, or the exact most wrong thing to do, depending upon your audience.

Comment: rigged tests are unimpressive (Score 1) 114

Lets see the test done with the human hand held still in front of the robot hand and not waving around or flying toward the robot to signal the start of the game, and the gesture not overly-dramatically done, and have the robot triggered from a verbal cue just like the human. Yes, I get that the Japanese love robot tech. But this isn't good robot tech, and it's certainly not good science, it's just rigged pseudo-drama.
