Messages

1

General Comments / Re: My conflicted NATO

« on: July 13, 2018, 10:51:11 AM »

The people that kill them, obviously.

2

General Comments / Re: What could Trump do to cause his supporters to vote against him?

« on: July 12, 2018, 10:33:47 AM »

I think you've already run this troll.  http://www.ornery.org/forum/index.php/topic,425.0.html

3

General Comments / Re: A 100% access, super-strict liability approach to guns in America

« on: March 05, 2018, 06:06:31 AM »

Greg, I suppose parents should be criminally liable if their adult children commit crimes then?

4

General Comments / Re: Release the memo

« on: January 29, 2018, 03:29:49 PM »

They showed the Memo to Wray yesterday.  This Morning McCabe resigned.

5

General Comments / Re: Net Neutrality 2.0

« on: December 14, 2017, 11:30:03 AM »

Here's a pretty good article from WSJ with some arguments from both sides of the debate.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/net-neutrality-for-and-against-1513195805

6

General Comments / Re: Russia and US politics

« on: October 18, 2017, 12:58:05 PM »

I don't think this is what the media typically refers to as an anonymous source.

7

General Comments / Re: Russia and US politics

« on: October 18, 2017, 12:44:07 PM »

Apparently an FBI informant has come forward saying he was blocked from informing congress about what he witnessed by the Obama DOJ .

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/355937-fbi-informant-blocked-from-telling-congress-about-russia-nuclear

8

General Comments / Re: Charlottsville

« on: August 17, 2017, 10:21:59 AM »

The idea that the car being driven into the crowd somehow makes everything that led up to it invalid is what is ludicrous.  This was not some isolated event, it was the culmination of a day full of violent conflict. Everyone involved should be doing some soul searching about how it got to that point.

9

General Comments / Re: Charlottsville

« on: August 17, 2017, 09:47:31 AM »

Trump was completely justified in condemning both sides.

The problem with this statement is that the general confrontations were not the primary story.  Trump had no problem calling out Islamic terrorists and attacking London's mayor in June when a truck plowed into pedestrians.  We wouldn't even be talking about C'Ville still if not for Heather's death and the other 19 injured by Fields.

No one is asking him to condone the violence between protesters but there is a significant difference between a few street brawls and the crimes committed by Fields.

Virtually everyone is asking him to Ignore any antifa violence while simultaneously insisting that any politician that does not come out and explicitly denounce Trump (since many are currently ignoring all the outrage about this) and if they don't they are defacto condoning what he said.

10

General Comments / Re: Military Ban on Transgender

« on: July 26, 2017, 02:26:06 PM »

Veteran here,  The list of medical conditions that will keep you out of the Military is longer than your arm.  Wet the bed anytime since you turned 13?  Take daily medication (for any reason)?  Ever been treated with medication for depression?  Have asthma? ADHD? Have braces?  Are you less than 5ft tall? Have Allergies?

I think you get my point.  The side effects of the hormone treatments should be enough to disqualify anyone on them.

11

General Comments / Re: Unsung inventions

« on: July 10, 2017, 02:20:30 PM »

Newspaper is the best for washing your windows without leaving streaks.

12

General Comments / Re: An innovative proposal

« on: May 11, 2017, 02:18:49 PM »

Now that women are allowed to serve in combat roles there is no reason they should not be mandated to register for the draft.  Anything else would be discriminatory.

13

General Comments / Re: Predictions for the Trump Administration as of October 2018

« on: November 16, 2016, 11:39:05 AM »

D.W. said:

When Hillary talked about Trump's "basket of deplorables," she was not referring to all Trump supporters, either.  But it was taken that way by many, if not most, of them. 

You're right, she was only referring to half of them.   

14

General Comments / Re: Reality sets in

« on: July 18, 2016, 02:27:00 PM »

What's your source?  The only comments on the police union request from the trump campaign I can find are in support of the 2nd Amendment.

15

General Comments / Re: The shootings of Philando Castille and Alton Sterling

« on: July 11, 2016, 11:43:44 AM »

A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police.

But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias.

I read another article about a comment by Huckabee that more white men than black men are shot by the police.  That's nominally true, but ignores that you are more likely to be shot if you are black because of the disparity in the white/black populations.

What does a comment by a politician have to do with the scientific study discussed in the NY Times article?  Are you trying to imply that the study makes the same mistake?

16

General Comments / Re: The shootings of Philando Castille and Alton Sterling

« on: July 11, 2016, 10:54:26 AM »

So we now have some data to evaluate the notion that black people are more likely to be shot by cops than white people are.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html

Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings

A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police.

But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias.

“It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than a thousand shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California.

The result contradicts the mental image of police shootings that many Americans hold in the wake of the killings (some captured on video) of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Laquan McDonald in Chicago; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Walter Scott in South Carolina; Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La.; and Philando Castile in Minnesota.

In officer-involved shootings in these cities, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been carrying a weapon. Both of these results undercut the idea that the police wield lethal force with racial bias.

I think this somewhat hurt's Pete's "Suicide by Cop" theory.

My whole take on these two particular shootings is that if you are Interacting with the police while carrying a weapon, legally or not, you are at much greater risk of being shot. It's your responsibility to make sure the Police Officer has no reason to believe you are a threat to him or anyone nearby.

17

General Comments / Re: AlphaGo just beat one of the 5 best Go players in the world

« on: March 10, 2016, 04:05:38 PM »

Not to be silly, but don't you think the complexity actually makes it easier for the computer to beat the human?

No, because the exponential explosion of complexity completely frustrates traditional methods of computer intelligence. A computer can always win or force the result to a draw for tic tac toe, because it can easily search all possible outcomes and pick the best. Deep Blue eventually won chess because memory capacity finally increased to the point that it could process every possible chessboard configuration in reasonable time.

The possible board configurations for Go vastly exceed the capacity of computer memory and reasonable search time. That means that computers that try to play it must operate in a more human mode- using evaluation heuristics and something approximating intuition about how the game will go, rather than brute force computation to force the game to stay on paths that ensure the computer wins. That's something that has not yet managed to be well simulated on such a scale until now.

In fact, even deep blue did not evaluate every possible move. There are just too many of them.  Chess playing software pretty much universally uses a algorithm called a minimax search with alpha-beta pruning.  Essentially they use a heuristic to evaluate each position in the search tree and give it a score.  They then use these scores to minimize the number of lines that need to be evaluated.  For Chess we are able to create very useful scoring heuristics.  The problem with Go has been the difficulty in doing this positional analysis.  Even the strongest human players have trouble explaining why any given move/position is superior to another.  The revolutionary thing about this AlphaGo program is that it's using machine learning to do this position evaluation.

18

General Comments / Re: The theory that Dems want to ban guns

« on: January 27, 2016, 03:57:53 PM »

http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-standoff/2016/01/bundys_in_custody_one_militant.html#incart_big-photo

Fiore, a vocal supporter of the Bundy family, said that Ammon Bundy told his wife that Finicum was cooperating with police when he was shot.

But sources told The Oregonian/OregonLive that Finicum and Ryan Bundy disobeyed orders to surrender and resisted arrest. No other details were available.

Hands up, Don't shoot, right?
I bet they weren't even armed.

19

General Comments / Re: Hillary: Too risky a candidate (cont'd)

« on: January 22, 2016, 12:24:01 PM »

A Former Attorney General explains why she should be charged.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/clintons-emails-a-criminal-charge-is-justified-1453419158

20

General Comments / Re: Hillary: Too risky a candidate (cont'd)

« on: January 21, 2016, 05:03:07 PM »

She didn't have to write the emails to be breaking the law.

21

General Comments / Re: Hillary: Too risky a candidate (cont'd)

« on: January 21, 2016, 04:57:29 PM »

Al argues that Seriati's sources are invalid because they are biased and then produces a biased source of his own.

Here Al.  I spent 30 seconds and found an article from CBS.  Happy now?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-had-emails-on-server-more-classified-than-top-secret/

22

General Comments / Re: So about this moon shot...

« on: January 15, 2016, 11:04:31 AM »

It shouldn't be a surpise, he's made the same promise twice already.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/01/14/obama-state-union-address-biden-cure-cancer-column/78753580/

23

World Watch / Re: Where is this?

« on: December 22, 2015, 10:05:06 AM »

Definitely Salem, MA.  It's the Essex County Probate Court to be exact.

Street View URL:
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.5230007,-70.8967802,3a,75y,265.86h,78.25t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sDvPyEB3XQMK9rmX41cXZNQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656