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User: DrXym

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  1. Re: here's the benefit on Has the Bitcoin Foundation Run Out of Cash? · · Score: 1

    Which is of course why the exchange rate tanks every time one of these supposedly secure exchanges collapses or disappears with your money. It doesn't matter how fastidious with your own bitcoins, their effective purchase power is still fucked over by all the cons, scams and general incompetence. People lose confidence in the system and bailout.

  2. Should be opt-in on Verizon Subscribers Can Now Opt Out of "Supercookies" · · Score: 1
    Opt-out is a pathetic concession. Most people don't even know they're being tracked and of those only a small fraction would bother to opt out. I would not be surprised that even with the option 99% of people are still tracked. It's probably why Verizon did it - a sop to those complaining without materially affecting their bottom line.

    This is the sort of thing that should be covered by privacy law. This would be the case in Europe where data protection laws would require explicit consent and services would have to be opt-in, not opt-out.

  3. Re:I don't get why there needs to be anything to b on Australian Government Outlines Website-Blocking Scheme · · Score: 1
    It's FAR harder to block a magnet link. When you click a magnet link it doesn't resolve to an HTTP request - instead your bittorrent client launches (or you paste the link into it) and it does a distributed hash table lookup to find the content. This can be encrypted so the ISP isn't in a position to block it even if they were to sniff your traffic.

    They can't even block the site which provided you with the link because there are so many trivial ways to hide it - e.g. writing it as an image, or inserting it client side with some JS, or just encrypting it in an HTTP connect.

    Given how popular a search app would be, it's likely that bittorrent clients would integrate with one. e.g. you paste a magnet, check the "web application" box, and perhaps the "keep updated" box and hit download. When the app downloads, the client hosts it through a http port so you can see it from a browser. Magnets are hashes so how the app is kept up to date is certainly an issue and also how it does its search, but neither is an insurmountable one.

  4. I don't get why there needs to be anything to bloc on Australian Government Outlines Website-Blocking Scheme · · Score: 2

    The Pirate Bay could reside on the end of a magnet link. It could be a web app that you download and which has distributed search function as a backend. Why exactly does it even need to be a domain that ISPs can block in the first place?

  5. Re:And now, things get Ugly. on Uber To Turn Into a Big Data Company By Selling Location Data · · Score: 1
    Well they should if they don't want to be on the receiving end of massive fines. It's not like their cab service where they're fighting cities and towns.

    Europe has strong and clear-cut data protection laws that require explicit consent and limit the data that may be kept on a person to that needed. If Uber sell or aggregate data without good cause in the EU they'll be digging their own grave.

  6. Re:Nice on GNU Nano Gets New Stable Release · · Score: 1

    When some inexperienced Linux user has to edit some file in some form of Linux and there is no gui available, I point them to nano, because it behaves pretty closely to what they expect from a text editor (which tends to be something like notepad...sigh).

    By which you mean it behaves in a relatively straightforward, least surprising way.

  7. Re:And now, things get Ugly. on Uber To Turn Into a Big Data Company By Selling Location Data · · Score: 3, Informative

    Starwood are a predominantly US chain but they and Uber had better be damned careful not to share info in the EU. It's not illegal for companies in the EU to do it, but they must obtain explicit consent and even then there are limits on the data they can share or aggregate and rules on how the data is managed.

  8. Re:And now, things get Ugly. on Uber To Turn Into a Big Data Company By Selling Location Data · · Score: 2

    This is not what big data is, this is just selling customers' information. And Google, despite being listed in the summary, never does it BTW.

    No, and not for reasons for privacy either. They're simply holding onto it because it's more valuable for them to do so - for similar reasons that casinos and supermarket loyalty schemes might - to mine and profit from the information, layer services on top of it and deny that info to competitors.

  9. Doomed to fail on Ask Slashdot: What Happened To Semantic Publishing? · · Score: 1
    I remember a few years back attending a conference presentation from some university types trying to convince my company the future of the web was semantic and RDF. I found it hard to take seriously because a) RDF really sucks to read or write, b) it's a pain in the ass to imbue content with semantic information, c) it's largely irrelevant since web engines do a better job anyway.

    If someone produce an uber simple semantic language - just plain text - that could be tossed into a page or link and utilised with some popular js library then maybe it might gain traction, particularly if it was a micro dsl for highly specific jobs (e.g. stock quotes). Or if an organisation maintained an enormous repository of documents that had to be categorized and linked in a way for people find them. But beyond that, forget it. And you might as well be pissing into the wind to think anyone would willingly use RDF.

  10. Losing weight is simple on Hacking Weight Loss: What I Learned Losing 30 Pounds · · Score: 1

    Stop eating so much and exercise more. And at a societal level stop normalizing obesity.

  11. So the obvious question on Bring On the Boring Robots · · Score: 1

    Do they have a "pleasure" model?

  12. Re:Youtube? on Pixar Releases Free Version of RenderMan · · Score: 1
    The only way they could do it would be to watermark the image or video stream in some fashion so that even if it were muxed with audio or edited that the watermark might survive in the content. Then they could potentially scan videos in some random fashion and flag up any that contain the free licence for review.

    It's still incredibly time consuming and potentially people might notice the watermark and generate a lot of bad publicity. I suspect Pixar would just hope that users would pay for the commercial licence if they were making enough money to be able to afford one. $500 isn't a huge amount.

  13. Re:Why? on Microsoft Releases Windows 10 SDK · · Score: 1

    3% does not translate to the number of people who will use your app. And porting an app to another platform is a NON-TRIVIAL task. Even if an app is written with a cross-platform tool (e.g. Cordova, Unity etc.) and relatively small it must still be tested, packaged, signed, uploaded and approved on the other platform and supported. This is a time sink and unless it pays off in terms of revenue it simply isn't worth it.

  14. Re:Last week I tried to write a Win8.1 universal a on Microsoft Releases Windows 10 SDK · · Score: 1, Informative
    Which is great if you use Windows 10 and only Windows 10. Not so great if you want to target other versions of Windows, or other operating systems. Sadly, the lowest common denominator for that kind of work is HTML+CSS with some kind of wrapper such as Cordova.

    Microsoft is their own worst enemy. They're trying to break into mobile apps and this is now their THIRD set of APIs for doing it. This amount of churn is extremely annoying and frustrating for devs. At least when Google produces new Android APIs they tend to be incremental and where necessary they'll even backport them.

  15. Re:Youtube? on Pixar Releases Free Version of RenderMan · · Score: 1

    I guess you'd just have to hope that Pixar don't have the time to minutely analyse every single crappy CGI video on YouTube to see if any are produced with their free version and are in violation their licence. Chances are that anybody capable of producing a vid worth watching of commercial value wouldn't be using the free tool in the first place.

  16. Re:Mandatory doesn't sound all bad to me on Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting In US · · Score: 1

    I didn't say how the questions were asked. With an electronic voting machine there is no reason they couldn't be presented via audio, or braille, and/or text in a range of languages.

  17. Re:Mandatory doesn't sound all bad to me on Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting In US · · Score: 0

    I think mandatory voting should come with 2 or 3 simple multiple choice questions that test the voter's grasp of democracy, the state they live in and the USA as a whole. Nothing that could possibly disenfranchise anyone except morons. The vote is weighted by how many questions the person gets right. All right and you get 100%, none right and you get 30%.

  18. Re:Buggy whip makers said automobiles aren't... on Lyft CEO: Self-Driving Cars Aren't the Future · · Score: 1
    1. Ah I see. So you have evidence that this is solved? You know like a paper demonstrating the capability of a car to read a sign, upload this to the web (never mind the bandwidth issues hey?), be told it's a diversion and magically follow all the other diversion signs.

    2. So you have evidence that a self drive car can determine intent? Oops no.

    3. Superior sensing? I get it now - You're a fucking idiot.

    etc.

  19. Re:Buggy whip makers said automobiles aren't... on Lyft CEO: Self-Driving Cars Aren't the Future · · Score: 1

    Utter nonsense. These are all examples of intractable problems that no self drive car would figure out without screwing up enough to annoy the driver, other road users or pedestrians.

  20. Re:Buggy whip makers said automobiles aren't... on Lyft CEO: Self-Driving Cars Aren't the Future · · Score: 1

    Because there is nothing to say a human driven car can't contain collision avoidance software for such an eventuality. As some cars already do. It's not self drive car or nothing.

  21. Re:Buggy whip makers said automobiles aren't... on Lyft CEO: Self-Driving Cars Aren't the Future · · Score: 1

    Assuming the car behind is using Google's self drive protocol and not Tesla's and assuming that the latency, bandwidth and compute power of this hypothetical cloud of cars is sufficient to avoid such a collision.

  22. Re:Buggy whip makers said automobiles aren't... on Lyft CEO: Self-Driving Cars Aren't the Future · · Score: 1
    It'll blow even for every day use. Does the car know that the street is closed and there is a diversion is in place? Or that the car in front is reverse parking into a space and not nudge up his ass while he does so? Or that the street lights are faulty and how to navigate safely in such an event? Or how to obey a cop's hand signals (and not some crazy guy's)? Or see the temporary stop/go signs some roadworkers put up? Or to signal to the pedestrian that we'll wait for them to cross the junction? Or give priority to the oncoming driver in a narrow road? Or what a pothole is and how to avoid it? Or not to drive through dangerous parts of town? Or how to drive and navigate through a tunnel, carpark or other area where GPS or radio is down?

    Even if the car were able to come to some reasonable solution 90% of the time it would still blow for the 10% of the time when it didn't. It also rules out any chance that we'll see cars where the driver can sleep (or be passed out), or there is no human passenger at all. Because cars will get stuck and will need extrication.

    The most likely place I see self drive occurring is vehicles shuttling people around airport terminals or between hotels and conference centres on closed tracks. A predictable, relatively contained system where the number of variables is limited and manageable. Even then there is probably a guy in a booth whose job it is to extricate the car when its sensors are confused by a leaf or a piece of junk and refuse to move without a human to override the system.

  23. Re:Trojan horse on Microsoft Offers Pirates Amnesty and Free Windows 10 Upgrades · · Score: 1

    The gotcha in this case is so blazingly obvious that I fail to see why anyone is arguing over it. Microsoft have stated time and again they want to move to a subscription model and they want to monetize Windows 10. Given those facts it is easy to think of ways they intend to do it and there is plenty of precedent around the web, and in service platforms to have a pretty good idea.

  24. Re:Trojan horse on Microsoft Offers Pirates Amnesty and Free Windows 10 Upgrades · · Score: 1

    Once you have upgraded to Windows 10 you won't have to pay a cent to keep using that OS on your PC. It will never expire and revert to a subscription system, because if they did that it would be a PR nightmare for Microsoft with allegations of turning the OS into ransomware.

    I never said it would. I'm quite certain it will be free for its lifetime and will work in a basic form whether you pay or not. But that doesn't mean it won't wall off certainly functionality, or nag you to upgrade, or throw banner / interstitial ads all over because that's probably what it will do.

    So yes, it is FUD.

    No it isn't. They've already stated their intentions and constructing a straw man of my words doesn't change that.

  25. Re:Trojan horse on Microsoft Offers Pirates Amnesty and Free Windows 10 Upgrades · · Score: 1

    Microsoft have stated their intention of monetizing the platform and it's quite clear they want it to become a subscription service. So no it's not FUD.