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User: ShakaUVM

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  1. Re:Frog is boiling.... on Supreme Court Ruling Relaxes Warrant Requirements For Home Searches · · Score: 1

    >If that were so, why would it take the Supreme Court to rule on this?

    This was a weird case where a guy denied them the search, but they came back later and a different person consented to the search.

    As long as the police had a reasonable belief that the person could grant a search (a roommate, family member, etc. all count for this), then the consent is valid.

    To put it another way, if the search hadn't originally been denied, then there would have been nothing novel about this case.

  2. Re:Frog is boiling.... on Supreme Court Ruling Relaxes Warrant Requirements For Home Searches · · Score: 1

    >It does matter, because it used to be that if police asked, and got denied, they had to go get a warrant. Now, they can play the mommy/daddy game.

    Actually, it has always been the case that any person in a house could consent to a search.

  3. C-SPAN on Crowded US Airwaves Desperately In Search of Spectrum Breathing Room · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yeah, I was listening to C-SPAN a couple days ago, and the military was talking about the possibility of freeing up a lot of its reserved spectrum for emergency use that rarely gets used as long as the commercial applications using it could be shunted aside in the case of an actual emergency.

    It was a pretty interesting talk, which dealt with the interaction of land, air, and space networks, and their different needs and adaptive capabilities.

  4. Re:Go Amish? on Stack Overflow Could Explain Toyota Vehicles' Unintended Acceleration · · Score: 1

    Yeah, the brakes were rock hard. After I turned off the car to get it under control, it took quite a while to drift to a stop, even with both feet on the brake pedal.

  5. Re:Go Amish? on Stack Overflow Could Explain Toyota Vehicles' Unintended Acceleration · · Score: 1

    I didn't get a ticket for it, and luckily I didn't hit anyone.

    It was still a terrifying experience, though, as there were pedestrians everywhere.

    It felt like the floor mat had ridden up on the accelerator, so I was trying to reach down to pull it off while it was accelerating out of control.

    When that didn't work, I turned it off.

  6. Re:Go Amish? on Stack Overflow Could Explain Toyota Vehicles' Unintended Acceleration · · Score: 1

    I used to drive an '84 Caprice Classic. When the accelerator cable got stuck, there was enough vacuum for exactly zero brakes.

    Even riding the brake with both feet pushed firmly down, it still accelerated out of control around the campus loop.

  7. >All they have to do is follow the law, file a counter-notification and this all goes away. The summary makes it look like YouTube is the bad guy when all they are doing is following the law and acting on the DMCA claims. It is up to the alleged infringer to counter-claim not the service provider.

    YouTube *is* the bad guy. They don't even look at counter-claims most of the time, they just automatically side with the person filing the takedown notice. It's happened to me (when I had permission to use a song, and wrote that in the counter-claim) and there's a classical musician on Reddit who has had hostile DMCA claims filed against his own performances of Bach pieces that have been taken down.

    It's only if you make a really big stink, or sue I suppose, that you'll get a human to actually look at it and correct the problem.

    Google/YouTube is actually proud of the fact that 99% of the DMCA system is automated. This degenerate behavior is "Working As Intended".

  8. Re:Still abusive on Gabe Newell Responds: Yes, We're Looking For Cheaters Via DNS · · Score: 4, Interesting

    >Explaining something does not justify it. They should not go rummaging through my computer. Period.

    Do you understand how VAC and similar anti-cheat software looks? It will scan through your memory looking for certain DLLs loaded, look through your computer files for cheats, and so forth.

    Other than you being ignorant of what is actually happening before, I don't see anything that has changed with this announcement.

    It's not like they're recording all of your metadata, uploading all your facebook posts to a data center in Utah, and targeting people for drone strikes using cell phone records.

  9. Re:Yet they've had airline phones for years on House Committee Approves Bill Banning In-Flight Phone Calls · · Score: 1

    >"`(B) LIMITATION- The term `mobile communications device' does not include a phone installed on an aircraft.'." -- Bill Text

    This rule is ridiculous then, and will just be feeding more money to the airlines.

  10. Re:Wrong question. on Can Commercial Storage Services Handle the NSA's Metadata? · · Score: 1

    >Do people want the NSA collecting a giant database about them?

    No.

    > Does it make the slightest difference if the giant database is nominally Verizon's giant database, that just so happens to respond to all queries from the NSA?

    Yes. Because this, if nothing else, creates a paper trail and at least a properly worded query to the database, whereas currently (as Snowden demonstrated) anyone with a modicum of coding experience can download the whole thing and make off with it and no one's the wiser.

    >Aside from the greater likelihood that the database will be used for marketing and surveillance, not a bit

    You realize there is nothing stopping companies from using this for marketing right now, anyway, right?

  11. Re:This was a good thing for gamers. on John Carmack Left id Software Because He Couldn't Do VR Work There · · Score: 1

    I got a copy for the Xbox360, and it was basically unplayable.

    I didn't buy it for the PC due to the bad experience I had on the console.

    (And don't call people pirates unless you know for sure. Check my Steam profile, same username as here, to see how many id games I own.)

  12. Re:This was a good thing for gamers. on John Carmack Left id Software Because He Couldn't Do VR Work There · · Score: 1

    Yeah, good point. That was another reason why Quake 2 was a step back.

    Still, I wish Carmack had build a few more sanity checks into his code. Overflowing silently was just a pain in the ass to deal with on CustomTF.

  13. Re:This was a good thing for gamers. on John Carmack Left id Software Because He Couldn't Do VR Work There · · Score: 2

    >Two things had become constants at id: the lack of interesting games, and the boundary-pushing tech. Lets be honest, the only thing at id that kept it notable was Carmack. And I say that with a crushed, broken heart, as one who's run a TF server, mastered the trick jumps, and played thousands of rounds well after Quake was out of its prime.

    Indeed. What was remarkable about Quake and Quakeworld was not the single player game (though lord knows I've played it through enough times by myself and in co-op) or the story, but the graphics technology, the client-server architecture (which *still* hasn't been beaten today, IMO, - no other modern game lets you move as fast as QW), and the ease of modability. QuakeC is a terrible hack, which is why they dropped it in Quake 2, but it had several important advantages: almost anyone could pick up the source code and mod it (leading to Team Fortress and then CustomTF), and since it was all run within a sandbox, you could download executable code from the internet and run it on your server without risking compromising your server. Quake 2, with its DLLs, didn't have that protection, which is one of the reasons why I stayed with Quakeworld.

    Because QW was sandboxed, it was theoretically easier to debug, but the aforementioned hackishness of it meant that in reality debugging the thing was a nightmare for several important classes of bugs. I remember spending hours looking at where my code would crash, putting in sanity checks everywhere, and then having the problem turn out to be we were exceeding some internal limit in QuakeC. That the compiler would just silently ignore. Or entity overruns. Or the netcode limit on sending updates. Or the hardcoded limit on entity speed that had a soft limit that it would silently ignore. That sort of thing.

    It was very impressive technology for something Carmack just hacked together in (IIRC) a couple days. I spent two quarters in my compilers class building my own language, and we didn't even have to write a VM to interpret the emitted code. It was brilliant, but hackish.

    I'm sad as well, Phrosty... Carmack leaving id is the end of an era for me. I still have my emails I traded with him back in the day on implicit parallelization of Q2 code on the Tera Supercomputer...

  14. Re:This was a good thing for gamers. on John Carmack Left id Software Because He Couldn't Do VR Work There · · Score: 2

    >>Look at the poor state Fallout 3/New Vegas were released in, as well as Skyrim.

    Which were better than Morrowind, which was better than Daggerfall. But that's specifically Bethesda Softworks (except FNV, which was made by Obsidian), a company with only a passing interest in QAing their code.

    Obsidian actually did spend a lot of effort testing FNV (a friend of mine is near the top on the credits list), but it still had a ton of game breaking bugs at first. In part, it's because the Gamebryo engine is a buggy piece of shit, in part because it's a massive game, and in part because they missed a lot of the bugs.

    Id's engines were and are much less buggy, but even still Rage was unplayable at release and I haven't tried it since.

  15. Re: Get Ready on Congressmen Say Clapper Lied To Congress, Ask Obama To Remove Him · · Score: 1

    Republicans threatened it, but Reid actually did it. He's also blocked all Republican debate and amendments to bills, which is a pretty unprecedented power grab in an institution that has always tried to pay lip service to minority rights.

  16. Re:I'm calling the future of gaming on Blizzard Releases In-House Design Tools To Starcraft Modders · · Score: 1

    > Don't call it a come back, Valve/Steam has been doing it for years.

    And ID before that. They made a lot of their money by releasing highly modifiable games. Team Fortress was originally a Quake 1 mod, which became a Quakeworld mod, which became a Half-Life Mod, which became a standalone product in the Orange Box.

    Valve reaps the rewards of the mod teams they buy, but ID profited by having everyone and their mother buy the game so they could play TF.

  17. Re: Get Ready on Congressmen Say Clapper Lied To Congress, Ask Obama To Remove Him · · Score: 1

    >Meanwhile, some appointees can never get approved under any circumstances.

    Google Harry Reid's "nuclear option" he took a short while ago.

  18. Re:Biased Idea From Onset on California Students, Parents Sue Over Teacher Firing, Tenure Rules · · Score: 1

    >In your opinion.

    In my professional opinion. I've worked for over a decade as a professional evaluator of teachers.

  19. Re:Biased Idea From Onset on California Students, Parents Sue Over Teacher Firing, Tenure Rules · · Score: 1

    >Nice straw man.

    Do you even know what a straw man means?

    >ohh, making up number to fit your narrative, well done. Right their with the finest anti-vaccines, young earth creationist.

    I work as a professional evaluator of teachers. Do you?

    No?

    Oh.

    >Pff, you can't even learn how to do an insert after 6 years of using ribbon, and we are suppose to believe you went to community college at 11?

    I prefer using this method of text input. Fortunately Slashdot doesn't force us to use the same text input methods they wrote for children.

  20. Re:Biased Idea From Onset on California Students, Parents Sue Over Teacher Firing, Tenure Rules · · Score: 1

    >But the truth is that "bad teachers" are the minority.

    Doesn't matter. They're a sizeable minority.

    All you need is one bad math teacher, and your math career is over. If you have a terrible trig or precalc teacher, you're going fail AP Calculus. If you have a terrible AP Caluclus teacher, you'll fail differential equations in college, and so forth.

    So if even 10% of teachers are bad, that's a line of Russian Roulette that will hit most kids by the time they finish school.

    When I happened to me, I had to enroll in a local community college class to get the education I didn't get from my middle school.

    While I did it, I don't expect many 11 year olds would do the same.

  21. > A 1000 square foot flat-roof house could support up to 111 solar panels for 22kWh per day

    111 solar panels? Are you crazy?

    I have a regular sized house in the suburbs, and my roof supports no more than 20 panels.

    I've never seen a normal house with 100+ panels on it.

  22. Re:WTF? on New Home Automation? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    >And yes, everything that consumes finite resources is everybody's business, that's why water and energy policies are so often in the news -- you can't separate water and energy from consumption, since whether it's food, lumber, or home automation equipment, everything needs water and energy to create.

    I propose we create a system that will regulate how society allocates limited resources to people. We could even set it up so that people who contribute more to society are given more allocations, in order to incentivize them to contribute to society instead of just consuming resources. We could even create a secondary market for allocations, so people could choose what interests them more - energy, housing space, water, location, etc. We could even set up the government to operate by just taking percentages of these allocations, and trading those allocations to accomplish things like building roads and parks.

    We could call this system "money".

  23. Re: There must be a very good reason... on Utilities Fight Back Against Solar Energy · · Score: 1

    Solar produces at 5PM anyway, but also: http://papundits.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/load-curve.jpg

  24. Re: There must be a very good reason... on Utilities Fight Back Against Solar Energy · · Score: 2

    >>Thats the other thing, we don't need all this extra power in the middle of the day, we need it at 6 oclock at night when everyone turns on the big screens and ovens.

    That's the winter power curve. During summer, consumption peaks around noon to the early afternoon, as people run their ACs full blast. This peak is also much higher (~33% or so) than the winter peak draw.

    Summer at noon to early afternoon also happens to be the time when solar is at peak production, so it's very useful at helping to deal with the highest levels of draws which lead to rolling blackouts.

  25. Re:There must be a very good reason... on Utilities Fight Back Against Solar Energy · · Score: 2

    >Basically they become a free power storage and backup facility only paid for any extra usage) for the customers, which is great for adoption, but means that non solar customers are adding further subsidy to the solar customers (over and above the common subside via taxation/government grants).

    Not here in California. We get to pay a monthly fee to be hooked up to the grid that is independent of our net power generated or consumed.

    Even still, PG&E has lobbied (and is still lobbying) to not have to pay customers for net power generated. Why? Because, hey, free money, I guess. I don't imagine any other reason they could justify that.

    I got into an argument with a guy on Reddit who claimed solar only saved utilities on fuel costs for generation, but fuel is the lion's share of power costs involved in natural gas plants. So rooftop solar really does save them money on generation.

    There's no excuse for them to be able to charge for net watts I generate and not even reimburse me the pittance they do now.