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Comment: Re:What's the point? (Score 2) 148

by jsvendsen (#40140829) Attached to: Autonomous Road Train Project Completes First Public Road Test
You didn't read what he wrote. He didn't say it would be any worse than human drivers, he said it would be unacceptable. And he's right. A road fatality is just a road fatality, while a fatality under automated driving is some poor guy getting killed by that newfangled computer that they want to put in your car! Ban, baby! Ban! I try to be fairly data oriented, but I have to admit this particular irrational bias would affect me as well. Barreling down the freeway at 120 km/h with some taxi driver I've never met in the driver's seat? Nothing. Doing the same thing under automated driving? I'd be pretty scared.

Comment: Re:Those are not the questions he took! (Score 1) 845

by jsvendsen (#38398608) Attached to: Are You Better At Math Than a 4th (or 10th) Grader?
Wow, late reply.

The accepted range accomplishes that the result of the following process is marked as correct:

  • 1. Calculate ratio of wedge to disc using calculator: 40/360=0.11111...
  • 2. Round the ratio to some strictly positive number of significant decimals: R in {0.1, 0.11, 0.111, ...}
  • 3. Apply ratio to mass: 0.27 <= R*27 < 0.3

You'll notice that applying any ratio in [1/10, 1/9] will be marked as a correct response. This seems reasonable since the students are not using a scientific calculator and have probably been instructed to round in most cases.

Choosing 0.27 as the "example of a correct answer" was probably not optimal, though.

Comment: Re:It's not "terror" (Score 1) 401

by jsvendsen (#36866520) Attached to: Terror Attack On Norwegian Government

- it's still not terrorism. It's a random act of crazy killings.

Extremely, emphatically, wrong. Documents published by the suspect show that this attack, which he has been working towards for 9 years, was planned in excruciating detail, was specifically targeted against the Norwegian political establishments, was implemented with specific goals for changes in policy and society in mind, and was designed to accomplish these goals specifically by instilling fear in the minds of the general public. He considers himself a soldier, and explicitly considers terror his weapon of choice.

- If you would kill people who do this, they won't do it again.

There must surely be other, almost equally effective, ways to prevent a known perpetrator of a crime like this from "doing it again". His days of blending in are over. Additionally, martyrdom is a powerful force, (And also stated explicitly as an element in the suspects plan as an effective way to advance his cause) and while this guy can't do it again, those people that adopt him as their hero certainly can.

- Thanks for bringing up "150 kids" because if we can't boil it down to an argument about Nazi Germany or "the Children will Suffer" than truly we'll never be able to reach a conclusion. (Godwin's law.)

You're letting your rhetorical agenda run away with you again. I'm not here to argue for tighter security or surveillance "for the children", I personally specifically oppose those things. I'm just stating a fact: the youngest attendants at the Labour Youth camp were 14, the average age of the final list of victims is likely to be well under 20. I find "kids" to be a pretty accurate description of that group, and I assume that whether 150 of them were shot is not in debate. Again, I'm not debating, I was giving you a friendly (OK, not so friendly) suggestion to think before you post, because words can hurt and I'm sure that's not what you intended.

Comment: Re:It's not "terror" (Score 1) 401

by jsvendsen (#36865630) Attached to: Terror Attack On Norwegian Government

I'll keep my cheek to myself, thanks. Giving up and giving in is not the same as having to retaliate every aggression, answer any attack with a counterattack. Damn right we don't practice death penalty. What would one more dead body possibly buy us? Prevention, are you kidding? I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that this guy went out to do what he did with a pretty strong expectation of ending up dead, death penalty or no.

Nah, we'll punish this guy in the worst way he could possibly imagine. We'll take some time to grieve our dead, and then we're going to get up, brush off, and go back to doing what we fucking do.

Anyway, since you apparently didn't catch it the first time, the "fuck you" wasn't about how much we peed our pants, how hard we're hit. It was about you coming in here with your piece-of-shit know-it-all agenda, spouting off about what is and isn't terrorism, about who were and were not scared, without having all, or even any, of the facts. At the exact moment you were taking time out of your day to do that, other people were taking time out of their day to die in the street, or psyche themselves up towards gunning down 150 kids. So there's that.

Comment: Re:math and diagrams; shopping for classes (Score 2) 174

by jsvendsen (#36809580) Attached to: Amazon Lets Students Rent Digital Textbooks

For what it's worth, I've bought kindle books (Wakker on prospect theory, for instance) that inlines math using images, so it is definitely possible. Of course, that sucks as much as math-as-images always does, so YMMV. Diagrams that are simple enough to not require color and small enough to comfortably fit on the screen are legible just fine. Also note that when you're buying a book for your kindle, you're also buying it for your nice, big, clear computer screen. Some material might be more legible using the different Kindle for $OS implementations.

Anyway, you are right in that mobi on kindle is a pretty poor format for mathematical content, but if it is done well it is at least workable.

PS: When I buy a DRM'd book, I do so with the explicit knowledge that I can back it up and strip the encryption off of it whenever necessary. I can see this argument in principle, but in practice the problem only exists if you can't be arsed to fix it.

Comment: Re:Axis of Awesome (Score 1) 243

by jsvendsen (#36646116) Attached to: Is There a Formula For a Hit Song?
Now, I'm no huge fan of the slashdot interface, but that's just bullshit. A quick test verifies that link to be left and right clickable with the expected results in FF, Chrome and Safari on OSX at the very least. If you've got your browser stuffed full of page-modifying extensions you probably shouldn't be making statements about what works, what doesn't or what someone else has 'fucked up'.

Comment: Re:Worst. Article. Ever. (Score 1) 143

by jsvendsen (#36575216) Attached to: "Do Not Eat iPod Shuffle": 30 Dumb Warning Labels

Court documents or it didn't happen. Quoth snopes.com

Although there have been a few verifiable cases of pets subjected to microwaving, each of them were deliberate acts of cruelty, perpetrated by twisted souls who knew all too well what they were doing. Micropoochings arising from a lack of understanding of the technology, however, are still incidents of lore only.
