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User: Kjella

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  1. Re:"DDOS" the justice system? on Supreme Court Upholds Arbitration In DirectTV Case · · Score: 4, Insightful

    it costs so much because lawyers are greedy assholes. not working for free is one thing, working for obscene amounts of money is another.

    While that is a valid topic for another day, the cost of prosecuting the shoplifting of a pack of gum is always going to cost far more than the gum no matter how reasonable the wages are. But if you didn't prosecute it, petty shoplifting would be rampant. Class actions are supposed to serve the same function for civil law, if you violate a lot of contracts for a few dollars each no individual is harmed enough to make a law suit meaningful but the class as a whole does. They know individual arbitration is a waste of our time because of the amounts involved. And they'll use the illegitimate gains from the 99% who won't complain to cover the arbitration cost.

    The alternative that we have here in Norway is usually more in the direction of strong consumer protection laws, competition authorities and such but that would imply a far more regulated market that you probably don't want. And you're usually equally opposed to voluntary organizations standing up to big business like unions. Americans like to be free individuals. That tend to get stomped on by forces much bigger than themselves, then whine about it. Then demand less regulation so they can get even more screwed by even more lopsided agreements, then whine some more. Anything that even resembles collective action is stamped as socialist and evil.

    There will always be power structures, if it's not big government and big business then it'll be gangs of thugs, oligarchs controlling key resources and such. And every power structure will be a mix of good and evil. Democratic institutions are not just about the public good. Capitalist institutions aren't just about fair and honest competition. Media isn't just about fair and unbiased journalism. Special interest groups don't just want their voice heard. Every power structure works for itself, the individuals in it and in collusion with other power structures. It's about keeping the giants caught in a system of checks and balances so the ants aren't stomped on. Getting "your day in court" is part of that.

  2. Re:They got used to it on Why Governments Lie About Encryption Backdoors (vortex.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well I think it's just as much the general public not being used to early, brutal death anymore. I just checked the mortality statistics here in Norway:

    0-1 years old: <0.25%
    0-45 years old: <2%
    0-66 years old: <10%

    That is rather amazing when you consider there's still fatal accidents, diseases, murder and suicide. But we're chipping away at it bit by bit, adding safety measures, advancing medicine, reducing crime, improving mental care. Then a guy with a Kalashnikov fucks it up good, killing lots of people who with 98-99% probability should have lived decades, minimum. I'm not sure how they really coped with that during WWI and WWII when young men (and quite a few others) were dying left, right and center but I know today it's such an abomination we don't deal with it at all. We want it solved and eradicated, not just make the reasonable precautions and live with the residual risk.

  3. Perhaps we should work on artificial stupidity instead :)

  4. Re:Failed Actors on Create Your Favorite Actor From Nothing But Photos (i-programmer.info) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    An actor who I 'recognize' is an actor who has failed at their job. The job of an actor is to take on a role, and part of that process is immersing themselves in the role. If I see a 'star' actor and not the character being portrayed, the aesthetic distance has been broken and the actor has failed.

    No offense, but your views on the matter don't seem to be very representative as there's a ton of decent actors who'd do just as good an acting job as the stars and cheaper too, but we seem to prefer the same known faces we've seen in other movies. Because no matter how well they act the role it's pretty glaringly obvious that an "identical twin" just appeared in a different story universe, regardless of make-up and such.

  5. Re:They haven't accepted that they're in 2 busines on Cable Providers Still Have No Answer For Netflix As Cord-cutting Accelerates (bgr.com) · · Score: 1

    The cable companies won't find a solution until they accept that they're in 2 businesses: The network provider business, where they supply the basic pipes that connect their customers to the world at large. (...) The content provider business, where they supply content that users view.

    They're in the business of "What value are we delivering and how can we convert that to profit?". I do have an economics degree, not an MBA though but I'd rephrase as follows:

    1) How can we leverage connecting consumers to services?
    2) How can we leverage connecting services to consumers?
    3) How can we leverage our unique content?

    Without network neutrality there's a ton of dirty tricks you can play using routing, QoS and quotas to sell "preferential access" which is a lot more profitable than being a basic utility. As a general rule, if you get to gouge on a case-by-case basis it is always more profitable than a general price. Whether all packets cost you the same is of course totally irrelevant.

    As for unique content, you can of course sell it stand-alone but often the profit-maximizing way is to leverage it to sell far a more generic functionality or service through bundling. HBO clearly used to use their exclusive content to sell HBO the cable channel, of course Netflix do the same with their exclusive content and their service. Again your model is a bit too simple, they don't make content to sell the content but to drive the overall business.

  6. Re:Mostly a photo-op on Paris Climate Deal Adopted · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When you look at things like this in isolation you might think it does nothing, but this is the long fight. Similar to the anti-smoking movement, it took decades of incremental steps to finally get to a tipping point where not smoking became the default accepted point of view.

    Because you managed to convince the smokers it was in their own interest to quit. And if not themselves then to save their family and friends the effect of second hand smoke. Your 1/7 billionth contribution to AGW? Ten bucks for your kid's college fund is probably going to change their life more. Sure those fractions add up but there's a million things you could do on the individual level that would matter more. And that I think will take priority.

  7. Jupiter has an orbital period of 12 years. From what I've understood it takes 3 passes to confirm an exoplanet, meaning 0-12 years to initial discovery + 2*12 = 24 years for a Jupiter-class planet. It's only been 23 years since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1992 and detection capability has improved much since then, so it's way too early to tell. Maybe you can start making semi-educated guesses from lack of candidates, but that too seems premature. In another 15-20 years, we'll have much better answers.

  8. Re:Global Warming is Awesome! on Paris Climate Deal Adopted · · Score: 2

    Gernany is roughly 15 degrees centigrate warmer than it used to be 35 years ago. However that period around 1974 was extraordinary cold, in comparrison to that time it is now nearly 45 degrees warmer .... so I really wonder where this "2 degrees average increase" is aiming for

    Bahahahahahaha, 45C warmer.... On an extremely warm summer day in the south maaaaaaybe you can reach 40C, you're saying in the 70s it was -5C and below all year long? And they still easily have freezing temps, so where it's -5C today they had -50C? You don't even pass the giggle test.

  9. Re:Conspicuously missing from TFA... on Paris Climate Deal Adopted · · Score: 4, Informative

    Conspicuously missing from TFA... a list of the countries that have signed it.

    Oh, it'll probably be most but it is roughly as harmless as signing the UN declaration on human rights. There's no mandatory national goals, no incentives or penalties. It "notes" on point 17 that they're not going to actually reach the global goal of the agreement. It's a pot luck lunch agreement, each country sets their own goals and how they want to reach them and the only harm if they don't set very ambitious goals or fail to reach them is a bit of political egg on their face. The environmentalists of course tout this as a massive victory, but it's really just taking existing national initiatives and calling it a global effort.

    This was not very surprising, after Kyoto I and II it was clear they wouldn't get anything with binding targets from the US, China, India or any of the other big polluting nations - only Europe and Australia have binding goals now. So instead of aiming for an agreement that would fail, create a toothless agreement and call it a victory. It's certainly working in the local press here in Norway, now they're talking like we've committed to saving the world. Truth is, nobody got committed to anything and that's why it's going to pass.

  10. Re:I'll tell you why on Why Is Gravity the Weakest Force? · · Score: 1

    Not true. Science is all about the "why" of an observation. An apple falls from a tree. Why? Gravitation and force are discovered to be something measurable and can be demonstrated to have universal application. What it won't tell you is whose orchard it is.

    It's an ambiguity of the English language, if there was a clean separation "how?" should describe mechanism and "why?" purpose. Like in criminal law, means and motive. Gravity really explains how the apple falls from the tree, not why. Outside of religion and philosophy class we don't consider inanimate objects and forces of nature to have a will or purpose though, so we just assume the question to mean how. The real why is more like is there a god who wants the apple to fall to earth? Like, why is the universe the way it is and science won't answer that.

  11. Re:So once again (and again and again)... on Study: Happiness Won't Extend Your Life After All (latimes.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Don't worry in a few years they'll find out that happiness lead to good life choices that lead to good health that lead to you living longer.

    At least I know I'm prone to destructive behavior like binge eating or getting hammered when I'm sad. That's got to have an effect.

  12. Re:Intel has reasons to let them live on The Ups and Downs of AMD (hackaday.com) · · Score: 1

    While all of those might be good reasons to keep AMD alive, I don't think any of them are strong enough to ease off in the competition with ARM. Intel needs to push mobile chips that very directly compete with AMD and at this point the collateral damage might be better than the alternative. With lawyers you can stay #1 for years, #2 is marginal, #3 takes forever and #4 they probably hire any smart people AMD has to let go. Intel could join the ARM pack using their production process and low-level design know-how if they wanted, if and when that time comes. Right now shoring up against cheap ARM devices eating away at tablets/convertibles/laptops seems more vital to protect the high end markets.

  13. While Intel played dirty, Core was a killer on The Ups and Downs of AMD (hackaday.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    July 24, 2006: AMD buys ATI, stretching their credit to the limit
    July 27, 2006: Intel launches Core 2 Duo (Conroe)

    To get an idea of how quickly AMD was in trouble, here's Anandtech in November 2007 at the launch of Phenom:
    If you were looking for a changing of the guard today it's just not going to happen. Phenom is, clock for clock, slower than Core 2 and the chips aren't yet yielding well enough to boost clock speeds above what Intel is capable of. While AMD just introduced its first 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz quad-core CPUs today, Intel previewed its first 3.2GHz quad-core chips. (...) Inevitably some of these Phenoms will sell, even though Intel is currently faster and offers better overall price-performance (does anyone else feel weird reading that?). Honestly the only reason we can see to purchase a Phenom is if you currently own a Socket-AM2 motherboard; you may not get the same performance as a Core 2 Quad, but it won't cost as much since you should be able to just drop in a Phenom if you have BIOS support.

    Up to July 2006: K8 > Netburst
    July 2006 - November 2007: K8 < Core (AMD sales tank)
    November 2007 - October 2011 K10 < Core (successor lagging behind)
    October 2011-2016? Bulldozer < Sandy Bridge (late and underperforming)

    Why didn't AMD have the cash to burn in 2006-2009 to come up with something better? Oh, a $5.4 billion purchase of ATI. It sucked all the R&D out of CPUs and into APUs and "synergies", but even today you see no major differences between an APU and pairing a CPU + dGPU unless you've written very special code for just that situation.

  14. Re:Reminds me of the early 80s on Samsung Launches Business Unit To Focus On Driverless Cars (koreatimes.co.kr) · · Score: 1

    Are you serious? Tesla Autopilot is already available to consumers, and does 80% of what you expect a SDC to do. Bumping that up to 90%, 95% ... is a software upgrade. By 2017 you may still need to manually drive on dirt roads, but cars that are 99% autonomous will be available. By 2035, manually driven cars will be banned from public roads.

    No. Not even close. There's so many roads with crappy or no road markings or hidden by mud or snow, it doesn't obey even a tiny fraction of the road signs or rules of the road, at best it might manage an emergency stop through collision detection if you let it run through a pedestrian crossing by itself. It's entirely in the blue if it has sensor capability or processing capability to do more, Musk at least publicly admitted that it clearly doesn't have the redundancy. Basically if one sensor goes bad or broken or is blocked by rain or snow or mud the autopilot will turn off, hardly acceptable behavior. And he's years behind Google in figuring out how exactly a car can drive by itself. Even if they exist in 5 years and get semi-popular in 10 years, that manual cars will be banned in 20.... care to make a wager? I'd call you an optimist if you said 50 years.

  15. Re:for same watts, Pi wins X 220, but pointless on $5 Raspberry Pi Zero Compared To Intel's NetBurst CPUs & Newer (phoronix.com) · · Score: 1

    Of course that fact is probably not of any practical use. There are use cases for which a Pi is the right tool for the job, there are uses for which a typical desktop is the right tool for the job, and there are use cases for which the Arduino is the right tool for the job - and there isn't that much overlap. If you need a lot of computing power, you use a powerful processor, not a bunch of Raspberry Pi boards.

    Well, a desktop from 2004 was far from useless. I'm thinking more in the direction of the Microsoft Lumia 950 + Display Dock, what's lacking is "universal apps" but you got a big screen (1920x1200 @ 60Hz) + mouse + keyboard, a dual core 1.8GHz ARM w/H.264+HEVC hardware decoding + 3GB RAM + GPU that beats Intel Bay Trail and AMD Mullins. Sure you can't compare it to a high end desktop but it might be more than good enough for many. The same kind of people who didn't need a desktop might in the future not need a laptop either, just a breakout box.

  16. When source material is properly mapped to an HDR panel, colors are more accurately displayed

    HDR = high dynamic range = difference of intensity between brightest and dimmest details, nothing to do with color. Well you could fuck with the colors to increase intensity because obviously you can only use 1/4 pixels in an RGBG pattern for red while you can use 4/4 for white, but I don't think anybody would make that trade-off. Rec. 2020 on the other hand will give you a wider color space and 10 bit color better accuracy, they're baked together in UHD broadcast/disc but HDR is just one part and not this part.

  17. Re:Illegal downloads on Streaming Video Is 70 Percent of Broadband Use (recode.net) · · Score: 2

    You're making the false assumption that all content is worth the same. I could put up an hour of me being a goofball on YouTube and be happy to be legally streamed for fifty bucks of ad revenue, while HBO might be slightly annoyed if that's all an episode of Game of Thrones grossed. It's a bit like measuring shoplifting by weight when people steal diamonds and pay for groceries.

  18. Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets? on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Moving To Per-Core Licensing (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Larry Potter and the Pulsing Puking Audio, I swear if I didn't know better I'd think Linux was run by a bunch of devs from Bizzaro who sit around saying things like "Oh No, things am stable and everything is working, this will make things too easy! We must break critical drivers and subsystems with am patch and replace well written system with alpha code, then users will feel they am leet for getting it running half as good as it did and we get fat support contracts...aren't me am smart?"

    I don't think you have to go there, this is basically one of the downsides of a "do-ocracy". In some form it's almost inevitable because the participants are the de facto agents of change and there's a lot of armchair quarterbacks that want to direct the project to serve their needs and like 4chan would say it's not "your personal army". But it means that the system is heavily tilted towards those who want to write code, even if it's for a very marginal use case and mucking with stable and working code. Essentially all you have to do to break the system is get the buy-in from other developers who also often want to break the system in their own way, the inmates deciding how to run the asylum if you will. Those who "just" use and depend on the functionality of the project doesn't have a direct say in the matter.

    The primary resistance to this is some form of meritocracy or quality standards, so that bad ideas and bad code are weeded out. Unfortunately that means that somebody or someone has to decide what has "merit" and what is "good" code or not, with all the problems that entails. The most extreme form is probably having a BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) and rules that are almost carved in stone like "Thou shalt not break userspace", you might argue it has its downsides but it has certainly led to some very successful projects too. Unfortunately it works equally well - or poorly if you will - in reverse, if the wrong person gets in power supported by his cronies the opposition can be slowly weeded out of the project until they control a critical piece of infrastructure and everyone else comes along for the ride.

    Open source fan(atic)s that don't want to admit this is a problem often say you can just fork it, but that ignores the momentum and interdependencies of a large project. There's a reason that some form of "divide and conquer" is a centerpiece in every psychopath and tyrant's playbook, as long as there is no clear alternative to rally around that can convert the silent majority of developers and upstream/downstream projects then both developers and users will adapt, from begrudgingly accepting it to finding an alternative and leaving. Which is not entirely unlike what happens with proprietary software, if things get bad enough you dump it for a competitor but there's obvious costs in lock-in, familiarity, re-training and so on. It's not free, not even if the alternative is free as in beer and in speech.

  19. Re:Logic versus programming on Programming Education: Selling People a Lie? (blogspot.com) · · Score: 2

    Honestly, I think you learn how to program better simply by explaining what you are trying to do in plain English. The actual programming task has almost little educational value.

    Technically, yes. Practically, no. What you want them to do is come up with an actual method/formula/implementation for doing it, not just the hand-waving. Like the task is to sort a stack of books. The person giving the task might not even understand that there is such a thing as sort algorithms and that the computer needs a very precise set of steps on what to do. He's just got the start and end points, now the stack is unsorted and when it's done it's sorted.

    And that's maybe fine in a business setting, it might not matter or it's an implementation detail left to the developer because in this case it's fairly obvious it can be done. But in many other cases I'm like okay you've defined some inputs and output, but there's no obvious relation between them and you're trying very hard to make that my job to make it work, even if it's way into the business domain where you should explain to me how this should work. I don't think you understand it until you have a computer that refuses to think for you.

  20. You have to line up 4 plastic pegs, and then push and twist (to lock) each of them. While the pegs have a convenient arrow on them to tell you which direction you need to twist to lock them, they DON'T have an indicator for what the starting position should be.

    In an astonishing leap of logic, if turning the peg in the direction of the arrow leads to the final position then turning it the other way leads to the starting position. The peg only moves about 90 degrees and is flat on two sides so with the fan below you start like |_ and twist it counter-clockwise until it's like _| with the round side out. I guess it's time for the corollary to Murphy's law, even if there's no real way to do it wrong someone will find one.

  21. Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary on Providing Addresses for 4 Billion People Using Three Words (mondaynote.com) · · Score: 2

    What the fsck is their technology anyway?

    Encode like this except with 0.0002 degree precision = 50,000 offsets instead of 10,000,000 so it fits in a short. You now have a 2+2+2 = 6 byte = 48 bit coarse representation of a coordinate. Take a dictionary, number words 1-2^n in binary. I'd say n=16 for 65536 of the 171,476 in the Oxford English Dictionary. You now have 3*n = 48 bits of data. Map. Done. Seriously, that's all.

  22. Re:Uhm, greed? on Why Electronic Health Records Aren't More Usable (cio.com) · · Score: 1

    Really, if we look at it from a use-case patient perspective.
    What would work is simply this:
    1. A container to hold doctors notes in image/pdf/something format
    2. A medical history of things you'd need to know if you end up in the ER. Current medications/allergies...

    To expand on 1. they really should understand you can do more than one format, like PDF/A for display, text/plain for full text search and whatever structured format you want. The one format to rule them all will never fit.

  23. Depends on what you want on Is AI Development Moving In the Wrong Direction? (hackaday.com) · · Score: 1

    His conclusion is that we haven't actually been trying to solve "intelligence" (or at least our concept of intelligence has been wrong). And that with faster computing and larger pools of data the goal has moved toward faster searches rather than true intelligence.

    In the Turing test, one of the easiest ways I've found to disrobe computers is failing to grasp semantic interrelations that is not a is-a or has-a relationship like for example music and dancing by making contradictory statements or not reacting to absurd combinations like going to a rave party to listen to jazz music dancing a waltz. That's knowledge though, it wouldn't help me determine the intelligence of an isolated Amazon tribe that doesn't know what rave parties or jazz or a waltz is. But it we want computer assistants that ordinary people can relate to, it has to understand vast amounts of context in order to make sense of us and responds back in a way that's natural to us. It might not create Skynet but it's infinitely more useful if we want computers to be effective extensions of ourselves.

  24. Re:Why emojis/emoticons are in Unicode? on Companies Want To Insert Ads Into Unicode (thenextweb.com) · · Score: 1

    Can you realize how bad will if we got the 90's emoticons on it, then after they got no more used, inflate Unicode with all the internet 2000's expressions too, and then very new decade, the new trend inflating Unicode after the old one got no more used?

    So we have like ~120000 characters defined with about a million to spare in UTF-8 and we could increase that to a billion by going back to the original specification. We could give every CJK glyph and every word in the oxford dictionary an emoji with plenty room to spare. What exactly would be "so bad"?

  25. Re: At what point do we reevaluate the position on How Technology Is Increasing the Number of Jobs We Have (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Which land is it that's completely inhabited by whites only? It's not the one that Stockholm's in. Fun facts about Sweden: Nationally, about 10% of the population are immigrants or at least one of their parents was. In the greater Stockholm metro, it's more like 25%. Here in my suburb, it's about 60%. And to the best of my knowledge, Sweden's never had anything like the White Australia programme.

    Yes, but the "old" kind of immigration was mostly people crossing the border, I'm from Norway and I got relatives that both have lived and do live in Sweden. In US terms it's pretty much like moving from one state to the other. The EU gave us "exotic" immigration from Poland, the Baltics, the Balkans and a few more from Western Europe, but globe-spanning immigration with a radically different culture in any significant numbers is really just the last decade or so. Sweden is going to change a lot over the next years, far more than the numbers might suggest.