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User: sg_oneill

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  1. It isn't that articles need to be dumbed down.

    It is that articles need to be structured to be usable by a wide range of users. The hard technical details need to come after a high level summary and a layman's explanation.

    YES., this is the correct solution. 4 sections;-
    Basic abstract;-
    High-school level discussion.
    Boffin-level discussion.
    All-level summary/links/etc

    The reader can just start from the top, and proceed down until it gets too deep/mathy, and then skip down to the bottom for more links/resources.

  2. Re:What makes this a "parody" religion? on Parody 'Subgenius' Religion Wants to Crowdfund An Alien-Contacting Beacon (gofundme.com) · · Score: 1

    Because its a parody religion whos members straight up say "If you believe this shit your a loony", and pretty much everything about it is designed to mock and confuse those of "Serious" religions.

    It IS kind of a cult, but in the same way trotskyites or Ayn rand followers are a cult. Nutty as shit, but not ACTUALLY religious, and unlike the trots and randoids, pretty openly have fun with it all.

  3. Re:here's the correct link for Space Data V. Loon on Google Accused of Racketeering. Lawsuit Claims 'Pattern' Of Trade Secret Thefts (mercurynews.com) · · Score: 1

    ?? Isn't that something hot air balloons have done for a century?

    Yeah. I'm gonna have to assume theres more to the patent than just that. Because a patent on that would be absurd.

  4. Re:Less streaming content and higher price? on Netflix is Raising Its Prices, Again (mashable.com) · · Score: 2

    So let me get this straight, they've already lost a lot of non-Netflix created content, will lose Disney in 2019, and now they're raising the price?

    The problem is they need more money to keep stuff on their channel. This current craze of every cable vendor and their dog starting their own streaming service means content is getting more expensive to lock down.

    Nobody is winning out of this whole balkanization of the streaming scene.

  5. Re:Good. Stop flying drones. on Bold Eagles: Angry Birds Are Ripping $80,000 Drones Out of the Sky (cetusnews.com) · · Score: 2

    These are mining companies with billions in the bank. These drones are almost nothing in their budget.

    Yep. I remember once installing a video conferencing system worth all up close to a quarter of a million dollars in the early 2000s. I asked the CEO "How do you guys financially justify spending all this money?" to which he replied "kid we got more money than we know what to do with, this is nothing", and he was right, the mining company in particular had ridiculous amounts of capital just lying around in bank accounts or investments a few million to stick crazy expensive video conferencing machines into all their regional HQs was barely pocket change for these people

  6. Re:Good. Stop flying drones. on Bold Eagles: Angry Birds Are Ripping $80,000 Drones Out of the Sky (cetusnews.com) · · Score: 1

    The drones won't stop so you better get used to them.

    Wedge tails beg to differ.

  7. Re:Good. Stop flying drones. on Bold Eagles: Angry Birds Are Ripping $80,000 Drones Out of the Sky (cetusnews.com) · · Score: 2

    I believe only the Tasmanian wedge tailed eagle is listed as endangered.

    The key word is "protected". Injuring or killing protected specieis is what gets you in for a bad time with an angry judge, regardless of whether its endangered, or not. Although its largely an academic distinction. Most non endangered protected species are only a bad summer away from endangered anyway.

  8. Re:Good. Stop flying drones. on Bold Eagles: Angry Birds Are Ripping $80,000 Drones Out of the Sky (cetusnews.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nothing a 10 gauge goose gun can't fix.

    Go shooting protected birds in Australia, and you'll be lucky if the cops get you before the locals do. Most australians consider poaching somewhere between pedophilia and keeping dead hookers in the basement. When I worked at the department of parks, we'd have to think very hard over what info we'd release on animal abuse prosecutions, becuase people would react so angily that vigilantism was a real possibility.

  9. Re:Bug Conservation on Do Strongly Typed Languages Reduce Bugs? (acolyer.org) · · Score: 1

    We're not discussing frameworrks, we're discussing modern Type safe languages, and your confusing type explicit with type safe. One current language I'm kind of fond of is Crystal. Its a ruby variant that compiiles to hard machine code via llvm. All variables absolutely resolve to a type (Int, Float, etc),, but largely this is infered by the compiler, so you dont HAVE too speciify it much of the time, but only if the compiler can say "Ok, this must be an integer, and no other type is possible, so I got this homey". But if for instance type inference say an integer OR a null is possible (Ie its not initialized),, it'll hit the breaks and tell you too fix it. Now you COULD say "Ok, this is a union type of Integer and Null, so calm down" or you could fix it by initializing the variable properly. Unless you really mean for a null to be iin there foor some reason, theres no needd to specify the type, you just need to fix the bug, Unless you really do want nulls to be possible for some reason, in which case you can declare the type as something like Int32|Nil , but you know your code your garbagefire

  10. Re:Great. Just great. on Australia Finally Creates Its Own National Space Agency (yahoo.com) · · Score: 1

    AIS is fine. You or I might not enjoy kick-ball, or batorb but millions of folks do.

    The problem is we have a retarded govt that managed to turn a world leading fibre to the home project into an even more expensive, later and vastly shittier copper to the home project because their policy is "Do the oposite of what the other party does and try and blame communists for some reason, even if they havent existed since the 70s in australia". And now we're spending a hundred mil on a flawed goddamn non binding survey with none of the legal protections of a vote, and not even anonymous to appease the god botherers about gay marriage despite far more accurate and vastly cheaper private sector studies showing 75%+ support for not being backward ass idiots regarding letting the gays get married.

    We spend money like its going out of fashion on retarded bullshit because the govt values internal faction power struggles over the best interests of citizens.

    Sportsball funding is tiny by comparison

  11. Re:Bug Conservation on Do Strongly Typed Languages Reduce Bugs? (acolyer.org) · · Score: 1

    There's also turn-around time. If you can get more done in a dynamic language, then you have more time for testing and code review.

    Look I love Python as much as the next guy (Javascript can go and die in a fire), but not specifying types is a false economy. Hurrah you saved seven or eight key strokes, now watch in horror as the edge case that jams an int into a float triggers during commissioning.

    Good type checking (And I dont mean C or Java, I consider those at best Typo checking, useful, but 80s safe, not modern safe), the sort that pops up and says "Hey, theres a code path here that could put a null into your code, you'll either need to fix that or specify in the type that a null is valid" can be perfectly fast to work with , assuming you have a modern IDE (or even a decent emacs plugin I guess) as static analysis is fast enough these days to work with your editor and autocomplete the boilerplate out for you.

    And heres the thing, you might have less time for bug fixing. Fortunately your IDE caught most of the forehead slappers before you mashed build, because thats a thing you can do with modern type safety.

  12. Re:Windows Hello on 'Dear Apple, The iPhone X and Face ID Are Orwellian and Creepy' (hackernoon.com) · · Score: 1

    Its taking a 3D (As in I believe theres a couple of cameras) IR picture, so it would be pretty hard to forge.

    But as you say theres nothing to stop them from forcing you to unlock it. Unfortunately its going to be hard to convince a judge that "look at this phone" is a violation of miranda

  13. Theres also a MASSIVE lock-in factor with Oracle, and often not where you think it'd come from.

    Last Govt job I had, us folks in IT really really wanted to get Oracle out of our datacenter, because just dealing with the company itself was so damn expensive. On a team of 6 of us, one of the guys pretty much spent half his time dealing with oracle lawyers and all their bullshit auditing and compliance. But we just couldn't break the chain. Turns out the department was dependent on Oracle accounting software that had existed in the organization through 2-3 government restructures. Getting a massive history of accounting off that software into something else would have cost tens of millions of dollars in labor alone, not including actual software costs, lawyering up when the "auditors" kick the door in demanding full access to sensitive government data and on and on and on. Outside of that single piece of software, we systematically rewrote ANYTHING that touched the database to use Postgres/PostGIS (We worked in sciences doing a lot of work with climate and soil data) but there was just stuff we couldnt port.

    Worst part is, a lot of the stuff we couldnt port forced users to rely on IE6 despite its heinious security profile because there was just no goddamn way we could convince the bureacrats upstairs to pay oracle to upgrade, when frankly all our advice regarding oracle was usually "BURN IT WITH THE FIRE".

    Oracle sucks so badly, and those who havent dealt with it really dont know just how bad it can get.

    Worst part is , if you took the stupid company out of the picture, the database itself is actually a pretty neat piece of software. Then again, so was SCO Unix, once upon a time, before satan unleashed his lawyers all over the place.

  14. Re:No on Can Blockchain Save The Music Industry? (wired.com) · · Score: 1

    As a musician, I care.

    The music industry as we know it can't die soon enough, including the streaming services and online stores. The whole lot, burn it down. Because only after we've completely dismantled the parasitic machine that exploits musician labor to get executives rich while musicians barely afford food on their table and consumers not get value or access for their money, only after the whole damn lot has burnt to the ground can we replace it with a new industry thats good for musicians and good for consumers with anyone elses interest tangiental at best.

    And I have no idea what that replacement is, but anythings better than the current mess.

  15. Re: Just because you can doesn't mean you should.. on AI Can Detect Sexual Orientation Based On Person's Photo (cnbc.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ive always said the danger with AI isn't killer robots but killer humans. Machine learning is being used to perpetrate a huge invasion of privacy in the form of "big data" data matching. It's like countless companies , and governments, have deployed armies of robot detectives to sift out or repeat secrets , and not to solve crimes or whatever but to manipulate us into compliant consumers. This particularly feat is even more worrying however because I'm certain theres any number of theocratic fascists regimes , Christian , Muslim and beyond who would be very interested in this. Gay pre-crime , so to speak. Welcome to the future

  16. Re: I didn't think they were US based... on Sci-Hub Faces $4.8 Million Piracy Damages and ISP Blocking (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 1

    Extradition only works in criminal cases. This is civil. It'd require the justice dept to go after her

  17. Re:Because they're getting their asses handed to t on Why Oracle Should Cede Control of Java SE (infoworld.com) · · Score: 1

    by Node.js and Angular for anything besides the odd query to a database here and there?

    Awwwwwww, the graphic designer has a technical opinion. Keep up the good work! Have an encouragement ribbon.

  18. Re: Why bother? on Reddit's Main Code Is No Longer Open Source (reddit.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Psssst there are more countries than America

  19. Yes all that real news. How else would the good folk of Appalachia have discovered that Obama was putting chemicals into the water that made the frogs gay

  20. Re: They're neither "outside" nor "fact-checkers" on Facebook Pages Spreading Fake News Won't Be Able To Buy Ads (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    ASsociated press and Snopes leftists?

    Boy what a bubble you must live in

  21. Is Lexus discriminating against me because I can't afford their cars?

    No. But lets fix this analogy.

    If the only car you where allowed to buy was a Lexus, and because you lived in a garbage part of town Lexus decided you can only buy a Lexus bicycle, then yes there would be a problem.

    This is a case about abusing service monopolies and is another datapoint in the increasingly obvious case that the internet market is broken and needs some serious intervention to restore fair competition.

  22. Re: No safe spaces for Nazis on Discord Bans Servers That Promote Nazi Ideology (theverge.com) · · Score: 0

    Wow, if you're going to go off against "racist assholes" you might really want to attack countries like Japan, China, Indonesia, India - wait... - most countries of the world in fact which are ethnically homogeneous (and want to remain that way).

    Nice theory. But completely wrong.

    Neither China, Indonesia, nor India are ethnically homogenous at all. Both China and Indonesia have very large numbers of sub ethnicities within them (Compare for instance Mongols and Han chinese, straight up different races of people. Or to be even more extreme, compare the Javanese to the Papuans or Timorese.), India is exceptionally diverse, possibly even more so than Indonesia which is really a whole lot of different countries mashed together.

    Japan is somewhat Homogenous, more comparable to european countries, than the ethnically diverse Indonesians or Indianss, but its a multicultural country like most other stable first world countries and has been so since the war.

    But anyway, what the hell has any of this got to do with the the topic, or are you just squirting out ink to flee the argument?

  23. Re:Huh? on Judge Says LinkedIn Cannot Block Startup From Public Profile Data (reuters.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If users added their info, and made it public, it's not up to LinkedIn to decide what users want to protect.

    Wrongo! Its their server. This ruling is *very* erroneous, and since I'm not in the job market, I'm going to be deleting my account now. Which is actually a shame, because I was using it to keep up with former workmates from previous jobs, but I'll be damned if I'm going to be handing my work history over to asshole companies that specializing in mining through other peoples bins looking for evidence to hang me with

  24. Re:Speaking just for me on Hollywood's Bad Summer Movies Are Driving a Decline in Movie Ticket Sales (fastcompany.com) · · Score: 1

    When you politicize your content, you alienate half the population no matter which direction you lean. Nothing new there. Hollywood seems to have forgotten this because they think California is the world.

    The only people politicizing content are the insufferable dummy spitters who flip out everytime they put a woman or a black guy in a film

  25. While I realise your just joking. Its probably worth noting Foxconns interest in setting up in the US probably has more to do with increasing quality of life in China. Theres an entirely plausible future out there where americans struggle on terrible wages to make cheap junk for wealthy chinese.