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User: Doc+Ruby

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Comments · 21,318

  1. Re: Got news for you on Does Even Amazing Partisan Tech Deserve Applause? · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    No, they said nothing about everyone who disagrees with their politics. Nor did they say that single-party rule is best. Yours is the savory troll food known as a strawman argument.

    What they said was that of the two parties we actually have, the Democratic Party does things to improve democracy. The Republican Party is blatantly anti-democratic, whether in funding by (and for) a few of the richest people, or in stopping people from voting if they're probably not voting Republican.

    In reality, what they said is true. In Republican fallacyland, you're still just a savory troll.

  2. Re:Got news for you on Does Even Amazing Partisan Tech Deserve Applause? · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    OK: You're a communist.

    And an idiot.

  3. Re:Metamarketing is the new form of marketing on Does Even Amazing Partisan Tech Deserve Applause? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So you blindly voted for whatever crook was opposed by the people who actually work in your local government. You've proved Republicans don't need their disintegrating party: you only care about what you imagine are liberals.

  4. Re:Still can't believe Obama won on Does Even Amazing Partisan Tech Deserve Applause? · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Offer every rich one all the entitlements you can possibly give them, when they cannot be afforded. Talk about RMoney fiddling while the US burns.

    Of course you can't find a more "Conservative" country to move to. Except maybe Somalia - oh, wait, too Black for Republicans.

    Thanks for playing through your entire post, demonstrating how Republican parrots like you live entirely in a fantasy world. Where each of you is a dictator.

  5. Re:WTF is this? on Does Even Amazing Partisan Tech Deserve Applause? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's a horribly corporatist troll. Commercial tech is nothing but good, because it makes people's lives better "without opposition". Political tech is bad because there's opposition, or because it doesn't fix everything. What a load of CXO worshipping propaganda.

  6. No Death Penalty on Search For "Foolproof Suffocation" Missed In Casey Anthony Case · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In this case the prosecutors and justice system were incompetent to prove this person was the killer.

    In other cases they're incompetent to tell that the prosecutors and justice system have failed to prove the person was the killer.

    When we execute convicted people there is no chance to catch the errors that are executing people who are not guilty. Not guilty people are killed because the system isn't adequate to execute only the guilty.

    We shouldn't execute people, because we're not really sure that we're killing someone who's guilty.

  7. Who Has the TSA Caught? on Man Arrested At Oakland Airport For Ornate Watch · · Score: 1

    How many actual criminals has the TSA actually caught? People who would actually have done any harm if the TSA hadn't caught them?

    How many of them would have been caught with methods that don't violate everyone going through an airport?

    The answer is probably that the benefit is very small. Other than the benefit of $BILLIONS to security corps and a authority/fear culture that makes it easier to waste more $BILLIONS on abusing us.

  8. Android Tablet for Google TV? on Microsoft's SmartGlass For Android Reviewed · · Score: 1

    Is there some way we can get the Google TV UI on an Android tablet? The entire GUI, not just the Google TV Remote Android app. How about more than just the UI, and actually stream TV from the Google TV box to the Android tablet.

  9. X Sux on A Proposal To Fix the Full-Screen X11 Window Mess · · Score: 1

    X needs to be replaced with something the way Linux replaced Unix. X is full of old solutions to old problems, loads of features and methods that nobody (or hardly anybody) uses, is far too complex. It's stuck with an architecture and components slavishly oriented to the client/server pattern rather than distributed peers and meshes of servers for shared AV on multiple devices of very different power that people actually use.Android ditched X. We should replace it even on Linux with Skia, adding a multi-window extension and a widget that allows both X and Skia to display simultaneously. Until nobody uses X anymore.

    Make these windows into objects that can be easily collected into groups, pipe data among them, flick them among networked machines (including public screens). A new infrastructure for the new, ubiquitous AV presentation we're running on mobile parallel supercomputers.

  10. SDR in Linux/FPGA? on DARPA Funds a $300 Software-Defined Radio For Hackers · · Score: 1

    Is there a SDR project for Linux that implements some of the circuits in FPGA?

    How about SDR where some of the RF analog is implemented in FPAA (analog array)?

  11. Different HW Needed? on DARPA Funds a $300 Software-Defined Radio For Hackers · · Score: 1

    Is this really "software-only defined radio"? Doesn't the radio need different hardware for different types of radios? Different antennas for different frequencies (and signal amplitude ranges in those frequencies)? Different analog for RF conditioning and glue from (different) antenna to logic?

    Or maybe a single "multi-antenna" with generic RF analog circuits can serve any radio. Isn't that a lot more expensive?

    If I want my receiver to do say WiFi right now, but switch to Zigbee later, and to Enocean after, and to Z-Wave later than that, and to 6Lowpan after that, can I start with just HW that does WiFi, and upgrade only SW over the next several years as the protocols are finalized? How about if later I want to switch among those radio types on demand, every few minutes (or milliseconds)?

  12. Re:Did the signal degrade, or the noise increase? on Ask Slashdot: Why Does Wireless Gear Degrade Over Time? · · Score: 1

    So because one time you reported something you didn't notice any change, therefore nothing ever happens. Logic!

  13. Re:Did the signal degrade, or the noise increase? on Ask Slashdot: Why Does Wireless Gear Degrade Over Time? · · Score: 1

    Women are no longer the "bad driver" stereotype. You have to upgrade your bigotry to a different arbitrary victim.

  14. Re:Did the signal degrade, or the noise increase? on Ask Slashdot: Why Does Wireless Gear Degrade Over Time? · · Score: 1

    That's not what "nil to zero" means. "Nil to zero" means a range from nothing (not necessarily even a value) to value is nothing.

  15. Re:Signal isn't chaning, the noise floor is on Ask Slashdot: Why Does Wireless Gear Degrade Over Time? · · Score: 2

    We might not, but Google does. Six ways from Sunday.

  16. Mobile Phone Bars Up and Down on Ask Slashdot: Why Does Wireless Gear Degrade Over Time? · · Score: 1

    I know mobile phones and towers (probably) aren't like the low power 2.GHz networking gear this article's asking about, and the degradation I'm talking about is on the scale of seconds, not years.

    But why does the signal strength indicated by the bars on my mobile phone often rise and fall across the entire range a lot of the time? What is "wavering"? Come to think of it, this does also seem to sometimes happen with the WiFi signal strength I see on my mobile devices, even within a few dozen feet line of sight of the AP with few or no other APs or 2.4GHz signals.

  17. Re:What if they are right? on Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation · · Score: 1

    Yes, simulations designed to simulate the real world's most difficult properties can translate their subjects back into the real world, replacing real world properties for the simulated ones. In fact I develop building HVACR control systems that we test exhaustively in simulations before installing in real buildings.

    But those artificial intelligences are designed to be ported between simulation and reality. The simulations are designed to mirror reality. They are only a subset of simulations. All kinds of games, the most familiar simulations, are not designed to mirror reality, and porting the simulated intelligences is a matter of either extreme changes to the subject, or extreme luck (or a combination of the two), or just the more common impossibility.

    So "A sufficiently advanced AI character that originated in a game could be given access to a robotic body" requires sufficient advancement in the relationship of the simulation to reality, more than of the AI character. Though the AI character's advancement, if a reflection of the advancement of the simulation, could be sufficient to be ported to a physical implementation rather than to a simulation.

    If the universe is a simulation, then if it's a close approximation of the simulator's reality maybe we the "AIs" in it can be let out of our high-tech ant-farm into the higher reality. Success of that transubstantiation really depends on the intelligence of the intelligent designer. If in fact the universe simulation is just another natural thermoinfodynamic like genetic evolution, then it's going to depend on either luck or some extension of the anthropomorphic principle even beyond our universe.

  18. Re:I hate those types of physicists on Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation · · Score: 1

    I have been experienced the way a glass of water is drunk.

  19. Re:What if they are right? on Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation · · Score: 1

    Humor is the appreciation of learning quicker than was expected from what had been learned before. Seems a very valuable feature in an info collecting and integrating being.

  20. Re:What if they are right? on Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation · · Score: 1

    Have you ever done that with something conscious? By which I mean self-conscious, which means several levels above sensor data in the data model. It means the app maintains a model of the sensor data (perception), and a model of that model (awareness), and a metamodel of that (consciousness) and a metamodel of that (self-consciousness). So running on the chip with memory is something that looks itself in the mirror and says "I know that I know what I know about what I know". You've got one of those?

  21. Re:What if they are right? on Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation · · Score: 1

    We're doing that now. We are just starting to use memory repair in eg. Alzheimers patients, and memory augmentation by eg. nutritional supplements. However, those are "in-game upgrades", executed in the "simulation" - simulated upgrades, if the universe is a simulation. The equivalent would be when we upgrade the game engine to a new version, or get a faster video card. The equivalent in a simulated universe would be hard to describe, since we don't really know what the simulator is like, and maybe aren't capable of knowing (any more than our game characters have the capacity to know about the CPU on which they run). However, religions talk about various "revelations" that might be an upgrade. The classical Greek overthrow of the Titans by the gods, which was a "new OS", might be an example.

  22. Re:What if they are right? on Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation · · Score: 1

    "Sufficiently" is a self-selecting weasel word that makes the logic circular. As if "any sufficiently reasonable argument will prove my point" is a proof.

    When have we ever taken a game character out of a game simulation and put it into a sensor/actuator machine with feedback from the real world? The game simulations are always very different from the real world. Usually including magic and different physics (especially the force mechanics of strength). Though your point is not circular logic, I don't know that there is an example of it.

  23. Re:What if they are right? on Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation · · Score: 1

    The characters in our MMOs don't know they're being played by us.

    We are just walk-on extras in somebody else's nightmare.

  24. Re:What if they are right? on Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation · · Score: 1

    Beginning? I haven't been "neo" for decades.

  25. Re:What if they are right? on Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation · · Score: 1

    The simulation is a system described within a system. Our universe is the simulation. Our universe is described by the terms in Principia. Goedel said that a no system description can be complete, that its completeness requires a larger system containing it to describe it.