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Comment: Re:Basic Statistics (Score 1) 312

by EMeta (#45973161) Attached to: Why Standard Deviation Should Be Retired From Scientific Use
Which is why we should teach statistics to every high schooler. Mostly everyone in the US education system gets trig and not stats. WHY? All of them need to have a decent understanding of statistics to be a useful voter and citizen. Very few of them need trig, and it doesn't enhance their mind in some way that their geometry class didn't. If you don't have space for a stat class after Algebra 2, cut that & put statistics there instead. There is no more important mathematical skill for everyone to have.

Comment: Re:ask a mechanic (Score 2) 672

by EMeta (#39128679) Attached to: Have Bad Cars Gone Extinct?
The main difference with cars 'not lasting as long now-days' is the cost of mechanics vs new vehicles. You can find cars of any arbitrary age if you go to Canada or Mexico, etc. where the a mechanic's time is worth relatively less in relation to newer vehicles.

In the US, the efficiencies involved in car manufacture and distribution are amazing. You're really paying for steel and workers' healthcare when you buy a car, and that's about it. Industrial automation makes actual assembly almost a rounding error to the vehicle's cost. Advanced distribution logistics mean that storage and transportation are pretty insignificant as well. Mechanics, on the other hand, are relatively pricey, needing to support the American cost-of-living for an educated laborer.

In Canada, the ratio shifts a little bit, especially as you go farther from the major train hubs. In Mexico, where labor is a minuscule cost, the ratio is distorted such that you see cars on the road from pretty much every year in the last four decades. Take a 10 year-old 110k-mile mid-range car in Ohio. Give it some easily traced electrical or mechanical fault that deploys the airbags. You've just totalled it. The cost of putting the airbags back in is going to be close enough to the value of the car (say $6k) that you insurance company would rather give you that value than pay to fix it. The car then gets junked & sold for parts.

This doesn't happen in Mexico.

Comment: Re:And Yet (Score 1) 336

by EMeta (#38602442) Attached to: China Cuts 'Excessive Entertainment' From TV
I'm confused. What are they giving us analogous to free fish that they could later withhold? There's very little manufacturing or textiles done in China that isn't done by its neighbors. We still do buttloads of manufacturing in North America that they don't have even vaguely regional control over, much less Europe. Further, a China without 100s of Billions in exports to the west is a pretty weak country.

After some googling I see that our trade deficit to them is around $250B, which is about a third of their entire federal budget. And that's just us, not the rest of the west.

Comment: Re:Duke TIP (Score 1) 116

by EMeta (#36851822) Attached to: Fond Memories of Nerd Camp


Comment: Re:Naive Parents (Score 1) 561

by EMeta (#36427404) Attached to: Why Doesn't 'Google Kids' Exist?
To be fair, there is a [declining] number of smaller libraries that only have Children's and Adult sections, and different libraries treat those lines differently.

Also, while the YA section was mostly skippable while we were those ages, it has an increasing amount of truly excellent material now. I happily read The Bourne Identity and Sphere at 13, but I'd happily recommend a dozen YA books to read along with those to any similar 13-y.o. now days. Furthermore, there's a significant amount of reassignment of previously adult books to the YA shelves: Ender's Game, LotR, Fahrenheit 451, etc. (YLMV)

Otherwise, of course, I completely agree with you.

Comment: Re:Bad analogy using libraries (Score 1) 561

by EMeta (#36427240) Attached to: Why Doesn't 'Google Kids' Exist?

Well it's still illegal to show pornographic content to underage teens and children is it not? I'm no expert on law, but I find it reasonable to believe that the librarian could be held responsible for allowing children to wander into a pornographic section.

The only legal directive librarians follow is CIPA:'s_Internet_Protection_Act, which basically instructs them to give due diligence in filtering computers children have access to. That's it. They only need to follow that if they get certain money from the federal government. Librarians (outside of conceivable special programs) don't have any other requirements with regards to what kids do in libraries. As previous posters said, they're not babysitters. If a parent leaves a child anywhere in a library unsupervised, then that creates an unsupervised child in a library.

Most children's librarians I know (which is a fair number) wouldn't have a problem actually helping kids find any material in the library they asked for, no matter the obscenity level. Some do, but none of the libraries I've lent from have even restricted R-rated movies from anyone who wanted them. It's ALA policy for no books to be restricted by age, and yes, many libraries carry some very racy stuff.


US Congress Tries To Cut Body Scanner Funding 241

Posted by Soulskill
from the bin-laden-is-dead-so-terrorism-is-over-right dept.

Comment: Re:Overvalued ... (Score 1) 146

by EMeta (#35976340) Attached to: News Corp. Looking To Sell MySpace
To be fair, MySpace (flawed as it was) had a significant chance of cleaning its ugliness up & getting into the position that Facebook is now. While FB's value is still quite arguable, from current profits alone it's certainly at least an order of magnitude above the $600M paid for MySpace. And I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that at least shortly before that purchase, MySpace still had a 10% chance of becoming that big. FB had a lot more savvy people at the helm and was far less afraid to keep making big changes, but that's a hiring issue more than anything else.

Japan Raises Nuclear Plant Crisis Severity To 7 673

Posted by Soulskill
from the bad-to-worse dept.

Comment: Re:More tolerent of human error (Score 1) 510

by EMeta (#35725396) Attached to: Google's Driverless Car and the Logic of Safety
You're over-complicating it. The answer is for the auto insurance companies to pick up the liability, like they're already doing. You get a driverless car and operate it properly (there will be enough sensors & cameras to know if you're doing something wrong), then the insurance company pays up and settles on its own with the car company, with whom they would have preexisting agreements. Allstate (et al.) would love it because it means they pay a lot less than with human drivers, and they have a lot more documentation to prove their side of events. They're already in court all the time for this kind of stuff. If someone doesn't have insurance, well, that's his fault & his liability.

So: drivers pay less insurance on driverless cars, 'cause some of the savings is passed on to them as an incentive to switch. (Okay, it could be more expensive, with the incentive just being that you don't have to drive, but whatever, incentives are still there.)
Auto insurance companies pay a lot less due to less accidents and recordings of accidents.
Car companies don't sell driverless cars unless you have the special auto insurance covering it. Actually you'd probably need a law to make this happen, but I don't see that being particularly controversial.

Where's the difficulty?

Comment: Re:Well they could take that out... (Score 1) 344

by EMeta (#35579076) Attached to: <em>Duke Nukem Forever</em> Multiplayer Mode Predictably Controversial
Ah, I see. Women who have gone through college (and probably have much more debt for it) are finally making more money than men who haven't. That's the conclusion from the article you linked. Well, bully for them. However if you account for education, women are still making 75% of what men do: So forgive me for not celebrating yet.

Comment: Re:This is gonna be very rant like (Score 1) 622

by EMeta (#35430448) Attached to: Is Software Driving a Falling Demand For Brains?
Limits Shmimits.

We need to subsidize birth control to the point where it's effectively opt-out. Start hugely funding male birth control, and make it cheaper than free for women. Because here's the thing, if you only take out unplanned pregnancies, you fix much of the problem. If you delay pregnancies in women's lives, you fix even more of the problem.

And get this: it's cheaper than free to do this! Planned children cost the government enough (a few thousand in tax subsidies each year, plus a low rate of WIC and welfare expenses). Unplanned children have a much higher rate of being subsidized with entitlements, to the degree that paying women to take birth control will save thousands of dollars per woman. Even if all this program does is delay pregnancy a few years for each child, just that alone will provide the parent(s) more time to amass resources they can invest in their children. And do you want to make any guesses about the crime rates as committed by wanted vs. unwanted children?

It's possible that these steps wouldn't be enough, but they'd sure be a lot. And with negative cost, why not start here?
