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User: The+Cynical+Critic

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  1. One of the professors at my old university once went to a conference and tried to demo an application he had recently written only to find that it would hang immediately upon launch. It had worked flawlessly when he had been debugging it a few days earlier and run the exact same build the day before. Turns out one of the APIs the application used would "call home" as part of the setup function even when none of the network functions in the API were used.

    Needless to say he ended up with some proverbial egg on his face on top of what you usually get when you're called "Jerker" (Swedish male surname) and try to present something in an English speaking country.

  2. Re:Bigger memory limits on Linux 4.14 Has Been Released (kernelnewbies.org) · · Score: 1

    Now let's not get ahead of ourselves here... We're still some way off being able to do non-trivial stuff with firefox.

  3. Sample size on Study Finds Robot Surgeons Are Actually Slower and More Expensive (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I hope that I'm not the only one puzzled with the number of surgical procedures being evaluated here. A single procedure done carried out using 3 different methods is hardly going to produce enough data to make any kind of assessment as how the different methods compare. Sure, you can talk about how they compare for this particular procedure, but even at that we're talking about footnote-level importance here.

    Hell, I'd even go far as to argue that the real story here is how something as insignificant as this was given this much attention and how badly it's very specific conclusions were over-extrapolated to make a headline as eye-catching as possible.

  4. Re:Method; Meet Madness on DOJ: Strong Encryption That We Don't Have Access To Is 'Unreasonable' (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Figuring out how he got the assault rifle when he should have been banned from doing so? Analysing his pattern of behaviour more so that incidents like this can be predicted and prevented in the future? There's clearly legitimate reasons why they FBI and local police would want to look at the contents of his phone if you actually think about it.

    There's plenty of things that count as erosions of privacy the government can already do (like bugging things and places, putting trackers on stuff, bugging phones, getting your email and social media activity, intercepting and going trough your physical mail, following you around, bugging your un-encrypted internet access, etc.) so I really don't see how this is such a huge deal.

  5. Re:Method; Meet Madness on DOJ: Strong Encryption That We Don't Have Access To Is 'Unreasonable' (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Sure, modern encryption algorithms are technically breakable, but only in the same way I have a chance to date Angelina Jolie. Sure, not metaphysically impossible, but impossible from any kind of practical perspective. With anything on par or better than AES 256, the only realistic decryption method is good old fashion rubber hose cryptography, but that's not exactly an option when the person with the key or knowledge where to get the key is deceased.

    Also, just spare me the usual conspiracy theorist "Teh gubmit!!! They be EEEEVIL!!!" nonsense because there's plenty of cases where decrypting information and communications is useful in investigating things like terrorism, organised crime, violent crime and financial crime. In this case I can think of figuring out how exactly he got his assault rifle when he should have been banned from owning one to ensure that people like him can't get them in the future and being able to analyse his behaviour so that this pattern of behaviour can be studied and future instances can be predicted and dealt with ahead of time. Thus the whole "they've got nothing to gain from his phone" argument doesn't hold water either.

  6. Re:Fingers Crossed... on Star Trek: Discovery Will Return On January 7th, 2018 (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Knowing how many people have been accused of sexual harassment so far and how big the cast for a show like ST:D is, it's probably only a matter of time before at least one of them is accused of it. Doesn't matter if it's true or not (just look at what happened to Kevin Spacey when he tried denying the accusations made against him in a diplomatic way that didn't involve going on the offensive), just an accusation is enough to wreck someone's career and the continuation of any show they can't be edited out of.

  7. Method; Meet Madness on DOJ: Strong Encryption That We Don't Have Access To Is 'Unreasonable' (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2

    I'm probably going to annoy some people by saying this, but his frustration with the current situation on encryption is completely understandable.

    There are completely legitimate cases where law enforcement should be able to access the contents of devices and communication s between individuals and like any investigative technique, it can be abused. However the fact that something can and is being abused does not make the legitimate use cases for something go away. Don't get me wrong, the fact that weakening encryption and installing backdoors into devices, applications and protocols is not lost on me and I fully understand that this can lead to the additions being exploited by unscrupulous members of law enforcement and other parties. However I can understand why someone in law enforcement and government would ask for them and I don't consider these people to be morons for doing so.

    The way I see it, encryption is one of those "peace in the middle east" type topics that are incredibly complicated and nobody has anything that even resembles a good answer...

  8. This is even slightly funny when you remember how a number of the NSA documents Snowden leaked talked about how the NSA liked Yahoo for the reason that they didn't really keep their software up to date and thus made hacking them much easier than hacking their competitors.

    Kind of funny how corporate CEOs always characterize their own failures, large or small, the fault of someone else. Makes you wonder if this complete lack of humility and introspection is part of the reason why they've risen to the position CEO in the first place.

  9. Re:Is every single IT person in management in the on Intel Recruits AMD RTG Exec Raja Koduri To Head New Visual Computing Group (hothardware.com) · · Score: 2

    Those are some pretty heavy handed generalizations you're making there... Being a bigoted oaf in response to a bigoted oaf really doesn't do much other than make yourself look just as bad as them.

    Mind you, I'm not American so I have no stake in this personally, but in my experience this generalization really doesn't apply white people who work in the tech sector and at least on the executive level whites still hold about 70% of positions (which incidentally is almost the percentage of whites in the U.S population). As for other groups asians do hold a disproportionately large percentage of tech sector executive positions (about 20% for about 5% of the population) while the remaining 10% is shared by blacks and hispanics+lationos (about 13 and 16% of the population respectively).

    Won't speculate as to the reasons why, but your bigoted generalization really doesn't seem to hold any water.

  10. I think your information about the Arduino partnership is a bit out of date here... They had a few Arduino-compatible boards/products that came out of a partnership with the company, but they weren't what you'd want to call a roaring success so Intel scaled back the IoT business in a major way few months ago. Laid off 140 people and moved how knows how many people to work on different things while doing that.

  11. Re:IP, Licensing, and Parts on Qualcomm Set To Reject $130bn Bid From Broadcom (ft.com) · · Score: 1

    It might hurt the stock price, but Qualcomm should halt all modem shipments to Apple today.

    Yes it may hurt the stock price, but more importantly it's going to drive pretty much all of their customers, including the SoC ones, into the arms of their competitors. What this would show is that anyone who falls out of line and tries to negotiate for more favorable terms and rates can be on the receiving end of a complete production halt to all their devices using Qualcomm parts. No sane company is going to use any hardware from them when there's a risk of something as serious as this hanging over their head. With IP you at least have to go trough the courts to get a sales ban.

  12. Re:It's all cost/benefit analysis on The Disappearing American Grad Student (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't mean to come off rude, but this post just sounds like someone bitter about how they couldn't afford to go to College trying to insist that College isn't that useful anyway (i.e just a case of sour grapes).

    The point of College isn't just to get people to read textbooks and other material at their own pace, which is what self-study is all about, but rather be a more structured way of learning things and ensuring that students actually learned what was taught and didn't just skim read the material for an incredibly surface level understanding. In my experience purely self-taught (College includes supervised self-teaching so you can't say self-teaching is exclusive to no-College) people tend to understand applications pretty well, but be pretty much clueless about the underlying theory, so they end up in a very bad spot if asked to go outside of their personal expertise. This "all-rounder" knowledge thanks to knowing both the theory and applications is the main advantage of college graduates compared to purely self-taught people.

    Apart from that there's also the networking aspect that not all College students fully understand. Getting to know and working with other people in the same field along with people and organizations hiring in the field is a great help in getting hired post-graduation.

    Don't get me wrong, the value proposition isn't what it used to be with the way a bigger percentage of people getting an education and Colleges have starting to behave more and more like businesses and less and less traditional educational institutions. However if we had paid colleges the way they do in the U.S (from one of those countries with free tuition you see) I'm pretty sure I'd get a higher education anyway seeing how I'm in a relatively well paid STEM field.

  13. Re:The law of economics on Ask Slashdot: Can Smart TVs Insert Ads Into Your Movies? (gigaom.com) · · Score: 1

    As I said, the higher you go up the range, the less "dumb" TVs you're going to find and try to remember that size and resolution are not the only specs you want to look at. With 4k content becoming more and more common there's not much of a reason to not go for a 4k TV unless you can't afford one or if it's for someone so old they probably won't live long enough to see broadcast content move to 4k (which is why I wouldn't buy one for my grandma).

  14. Re:Exactly - they already had negative pnl on New Victims in the 'Billionaire War on Journalism' (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    Only problem with this is that like any business, it takes quite a lot of capital to get it going and journalism not exactly being a very high paying field anymore getting that capital is going to be an issue. Sure, business loans and investors do exist, but with per-click advertisement revenue having gone down the toilet and people just not wanting to actually pay for their online news after news organizations have been giving it out for free for so many years both of those are going to be an issue. Investors are going to be very hesitant if they're interested at all and the same applies to banks, so if they can get any external funding at all that is.

    The long and the short of it is that the journalists are screwed. Trying to start a news business in this day and era is like trying to sell refrigerators on the north pole or space heaters in death valley and trying to get work elsewhere is getting harder and harder after the misstep that was the news industry thinking the purely ad funded model for online news was sustainable in the long term.

  15. Re:The law of economics on Ask Slashdot: Can Smart TVs Insert Ads Into Your Movies? (gigaom.com) · · Score: 1

    Only problem with this is that by the time low end TVs have the mid/high end specs you wan they're probably going to be "smart" TVs as well. When smart TVs first came out they were all high end models and have since then only been filtering down across model ranges and there's really no reason to believe this won't continue.

  16. Re:The law of economics on Ask Slashdot: Can Smart TVs Insert Ads Into Your Movies? (gigaom.com) · · Score: 1, Informative

    Only problem is that just about all TVs in the mid-range and up are smart TV's these days. Plenty of dumb TV's in the lower end of the market, but they get more and more scarce the higher you go. Apart from really cheapo brands that often use panels that are LG and Samsung quality control rejects, I don't think anyone makes an OLED panel TV that isn't a smart one.

    Thankfully this not a problem I have to deal with as like with many of us millennials, I've realized that a TV is just another redundant device I can do without and have done so since I moved out of my parents' house. Only reason I have any clue about TVs is because I've had to recommend one for my technically inept parents.

  17. Re:Who gives a shit? on Twitter Employee Blamed For Deleting President Donald Trump's Account (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    It's a business - not the government. They have no obligation to freedom of speech or any other freedoms.

    They're a business alright, but the CEO has gone on record more than once claiming that they don't apply the rules differently based on political leanings. They're completely free to be as biased as they want to, but they should at least be up front about how they apply different rules to people with different ideologies. If they don't want traditional liberals like myself who criticize conservatives and liberals when they do/say stupid things (i.e all the time), at least don't pretend like we're welcome when we're not.

    You're not going to be hard pressed to find examples of rules being applies differently based on one's political leanings. One pretty good example of this is how they banned Milo Yianopolis for the exact same kind of mass-harassment feminists like Randi Harper (you know, that crazy meth head who was kicked out of the FreeBSD because what a toxic person she is) have been allowed to get away with for years.

  18. Lets not get too melodramatic with the headlines.

    That's unfortunately a tall order in this day and age when barely anybody wants to pay for subscriptions (so you pretty much have to do clickbait) and per-click revenue is just getting lower and lower (so you have to out-clickbait your competition if you want to stay afloat).

    It's a pretty sad state of affairs when you think about it... To be able to sell subscriptions, the closest thing to an antidote to clickbait, they need people to trust them, but to stay afloat they have to do clickbait, which makes people less likely to trust them. I get the distinct feeling that we're soon going to see online media outlets start going trough the exact same thing that traditional newspaper media has been going trough since the early 2000s.

  19. Re: Two ways to make money in a new market on Tesla Posts Biggest Quarterly Loss, Slashes Production of Model X and Model S (yahoo.com) · · Score: 2

    He says that Volvo is "reputed" for reliability and when it comes to sales it's your reputation that actually matters, not how well you're actually doing. Just look at Masterlock. They're a joke among locksmiths and people who just pick locks for fun, but still somehow a market leader.

    As for reliability, can't say I've got much experience with their post-90s cars, but I know plenty of people who have owned original V40s and V70s and they've all been solid cars. This may be an anecdote, but my parents bought a V40 the year I started in 1st grade and by the time they gave it away the year after I got my Bachelor's Degree it had only broken down once (which was covered by warranty).

    Maybe I'm wrong and haven't fully witnessed the Ford rot set in (the V40 was after all based on a platform co-developed with Mitsubishi), but I still think of Volvo as a solid brand.

  20. Re:We needed a study for this? on Scientists Prove Emoticons Are Not Universally Understood (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    The summary states that they showed them both Japanese and western emoticons, both of which confused the African participants. The Japanese on the other hand were able to read both Japanese and western style emoticons just fine.

  21. Re: Trend of monthly averages in a pic on Every Other Summer Will Shatter Heat Records Within a Decade (vice.com) · · Score: 2

    Seeing how this is news to you, mercury thermometers became very accurate in the first half of the 1800s. When properly calibrated, which the ones used for measuring weather data were, they were accurate to a single 10th of a degree F and that's about the same as the digital ones used today.

    Oh and before you ask, we use digital ones today because you had to go and read the mercury ones in-person while digital ones can be read remotely and you can automate taking readings.

  22. Re:Testable predictions on Every Other Summer Will Shatter Heat Records Within a Decade (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    If we do *not* get the results predicted by the study above, would that invalidate the theory of global warming?

    No, all it would invalidate would be the particular pattern of warming suggested by the theory. To debunk global warming in general would require not only a stop to the warming, but also a sustained period of cooling, which we haven't seen that since accurate record keeping began in the 1850s.

    Seriously, arguing against global warning or trying to debunk it really is in the same league as flat earth theory or the idea that the earth is at the center of the solar system.

  23. Re:Is that surprising? on Perl is the Most Hated Programming Language, Developers Say (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 0

    We're not talking about something obscure here!

    Yes, and seeing how you missed it, I was joking about who designed it.

    The funny thing about language fanboys is that they always act like every single post about their beloved (usually terrible) language is 100% serious.

  24. I'm pretty sure if you look at university balance sheets you can see that furniture, office supplies, student activities and landscaping aren't that big of a portion of universities' budgets. Payroll and facilities are always way more expensive than those combined. Let's not forget that we not talking about one of american universities that can charge their students obscene amounts of money, we're talking about a UK one where student loans are reasonable and written off after a number of years if you can't afford to pay them (which is probably a great help for a lot of liberal arts people).

    We're not talking about paying researchers practically unlivable wages, we're talking good salaries vs starting salaries of over 100k for people who haven't even graduated yet.

  25. Re:Is that surprising? on Perl is the Most Hated Programming Language, Developers Say (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    I worked quite a lot with C (both ANSI and C99) before I ever touched Perl, but this didn't stop my first experience dealing with it feeling like watching the lawnmower scene from Steve Jackson's Braindead* (or Dead Alive as it was called in some markets).

    I don't know about you, but whoever designed the language has either got a very deranged sense of humor or is just a flat out sadist.

    *For those not familiar with the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...