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User: CmdrEdem

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Comments · 77

  1. Trump will bring Nixon's kind of surveillance back, therefore "Making America great again"!

    Anyway, you know you are screwed when you hope the most an US President does is in line with the Nixon's administration.

    At least then you can hope for a resignation eventually, right? *sobs*

  2. Re:The pain is good on Fixing the Pain of Programming · · Score: 1

    Please don't arrest me, Punctuation Police! I promise that I'll try harder!

  3. Re:The pain is good on Fixing the Pain of Programming · · Score: 1

    I understand and agree with all objective stuff you say. I never meant that everyone should enjoy the kind of troubleshooting I enjoy. There are some cases where I really get pissed off. But when I set myself to, for instance, compile source code from a third party developer I'm accepting and expecting trouble, with little to no support from the original party, and I get proud of myself when I figure it out. That is true for me at least.

  4. Re:The pain is good on Fixing the Pain of Programming · · Score: 1

    You sound like you need a safe word when engaged in sex

    No. But that was the intended joke.

    your support team must just love getting code from you

    Just because I enjoy troubleshooting some stuff myself does not mean that people has the time or the inclination to do the same. Since I like to troubleshoot I try to do it so other people does not have to.

  5. The pain is good on Fixing the Pain of Programming · · Score: 1, Insightful

    When you spend 8 hours troubleshooting an open-source project to compile with a third party proprietary library it feels damn good to make it work. Coding is good because it's hard. The higher the stakes the more the accomplishment of that task will make me proud/happy.

    Sure... there are some places where things should be simple. When I install an IDE I expect it to compile a hello world just after typing the proper code.

  6. Re:I need to know something on Pentagon Document Lays Out Battle Plan Against Zombies · · Score: 1

    In the mid 1800's artificial satellites were only science fiction too. As was robotics in the mid 1900's. Now all the global telecommunication depends on satellites and robots are faster and stronger than humans, even if they do not have cognitive capabilities comparable to ours yet.To have a plan is the simplest form of preparation. It's not like they have extra infrastructure or personal around the clock to stop something like a zombie infestation from happening, but they have a plan. And they will spend their time and resources with exercises anyway. Might as well go bat shit crazy.

    But anyway, it's not like my country's army has money to buy ammo for live ammo exercises.

    I think I speak for all non-Americans when I say: Let the US Army burn money with harmless thoughts instead of black R&D, torture camps, wars on other countries and so on.

  7. The first law of automated weapons is on The Struggle To Ban Killer Robots · · Score: 1

    Don't have them.

    First: If the concern is really about automated killing then we have to establish the following:
    No object capable of generating enough kinetic energy to kill a human can be directly interfaced with an electronic circuitry.

    But that would include cars and all kind of machinery. So the rule above would be a 95% insurance that AIs would not be able to kill humans. The other 5% is accounting that an AI would self-destruct to short-circuit and generate enough electromagnetic current to electrocute a human from a few centimeters away. And with my CS knowledge I would say that the electrocution scenario nowadays is impossible due to the physical properties and disposition of the materials involved in computer construction. But I don't know if an AI is only possible with materials and devices capable of such currents.

    This rule also prevent external hacking from turning one's arsenal against himself. If I had an army I rather take my chance with good old meat bags for the trigger pulling.

  8. Re:As a Brazilian on Brazil Approves Internet Bill of Rights · · Score: 1

    What I could confirm otherwise is somewhat old news. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/f...

  9. As a Brazilian on Brazil Approves Internet Bill of Rights · · Score: 2

    Keeping net neutrality is a huge win. Other articles in the bill are very positive too.

    The shitty part is the record keeping. As far as my legalspeak goes, and that is almost nothing, what I understood is that if I have a website I have to maintain a 6 month record of all my visitors. I'm guessing that they refer to general access logs, just like Apache access log files or some equivalent. What I did understand is that ISPs cannot keep those records. But I might be very wrong. Either interpretation is bad anyway, so it does not matter much how bad it is.

    What bothers me more is that our equivalent to the FCC (Anatel) is building a database and backdoor access to all ISPs client data. If what I heard is right (two sources working in a third party developer for a local ISP) they will have access to every byte sent through every Internet connection in the country. The buffer size I do not know. THAT bothers me a lot.

  10. Re:80% of people working in a field on DC Revolving Door: Ex-FCC Commissioner Is Now Head CTIA Lobbyist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That is not the issue. The issue is if the regulator, instead of stopping abuse, let it slide for the promise of a future high paying job. In my book that is bribery, and I'm sure many people agrees with me.

  11. Re:Education is designed to do that on Our Education System Is Failing IT · · Score: 1

    You are joking, right? Do you really think lateral thinking can be achieved doing basic algorithms and complexity theory proofs? Algorithms are just a mechanic way of expressing yourself. Needed, but not the skill that is really important. Because sooner or latter all the software engineers that search for the holy grail in graphical languages will find the answer, and then a monkey will be able to express himself and "teach" the computer how to do what he just thought.

    Complexity study. Again, useful. Specially to search for better algorithms or justify such search. But you can only proof complexity and compare algorithms with each other if you can think in many ways to tackle the same problem.

  12. Education is designed to do that on Our Education System Is Failing IT · · Score: 2

    IMHO education does not teach how to explore new possibilities. It teaches rules and discipline. Some times, if you are lucky, you find someone that can jump start your brain to think critically and try to find new answers to old questions, that people already answered for you. That is the beginning of the process to find new questions and the respective answers.

    In Computer Science the education issue is specially bad because we are taught how to think like the machine. How to constraint our thoughts to fit that little box that is good with math and nothing else. And then teach the machine how to do that. Ow... the irony.

  13. Re:Anyone else notice on PC Gaming Alive and Dominant · · Score: 2

    It is a platform by itself, sure. There are games only available on Steam. But there is no marketing effort there. I cannot say for ads on the Internet overall because I use AdBlock, but I don't see Steam trying to grab attention of gaming media. I don't live in the US but I'm could guess that Steam does not use TV ads just as MS and Sony does. Their public is on another place already. Sure they get a lot of attention on the Internet because they matter a LOT, but nowadays they don't need to try to get attention. A simple Gabe's sneeze sends ripples through the entire PC gaming community right away. I think the difference between Steam and hardware platforms is that a console adds an entirely new capability to a television. Steam depends on an already present computer, and for some reason people likes to play in front of a television, that is usually far away from computers. To make Steam more like a console they made the Steam Machines. That is the entire point of the Machine, even if they seem quite lost about it.

  14. Consoles get the spotlight due to... on PC Gaming Alive and Dominant · · Score: 2

    big, coordinated marketing efforts. PC has no such coordination. Steam could try to do that, and I think that will still be the biggest contribution of the Steam Machines. Quite ironic if you think, as I do, that the Steam Machine effort seems quite uncoordinated nowadays.

  15. Re:There is no time for gaming on PC Gaming Alive and Dominant · · Score: 1

    Dear Anon, by your logic, since I play RTSs and TBSs, will you be a grunt in my army?

    No? Oh sh*t. I knew I should have trained a little diplomacy playing some Neverwinter Nights 2.

  16. I can see many other ways on Nat Geo Writer: Science Is Running Out of "Great" Things To Discover · · Score: 1

    Instead of saying that science is running out of interesting stuff to find out I could say that scientists are simply too concerned in publishing meaningless articles to stride forward and find the "great" stuff.

    Or that we hit a point in our natural science studies that does not offer that many opportunities for major applications.

    Other way to look at this is that with so much information available scientists can exchange more information and many people works in smaller fractions of the same problem and help each other in a more predictable way. There is no huge, instantaneous development, or said development takes time to become really meaningful on that area.

    But in the end here is my opinion: Here in /. I find, every week, things that are truly amazing scientific developments. Maybe the writer is just numb due to so many incredible discoveries.

  17. In my experience on Men And Women Think Women Are Bad At Basic Math · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Women and men are equally bad at math. Specially at teaching math. It's not an easy subject and it's not a natural way to think about anything.

  18. That is hard to predict on Why Robots Will Not Be Smarter Than Humans By 2029 · · Score: 1

    If smart is the capability of intellectually adapting to accomplish tasks then computers are in trouble for now. If academia overall stops chasing it's own tail worried about publishing papers in great volume of questionable relevance and resumes the publishing of meaningful developments then maybe we can get a good breakthrough in ten years. And that is a big maybe.

    I am not particularly thrilled to create an AI good enough to be like us. /. is nice enough but humans overall are dicks. Anything we create will follow this tendency. We are not good enough to avoid that.

  19. This is so wrong. on Killing Net Neutrality Could Be Good For You · · Score: 1

    Sure, the Internet was not designed to stream HD videos, but neither it was designed to play games, or make telephone calls. The only thing they designed it for in the beginning was simple http. But all those things work now. The Internet is flexible. The companies want to kill net neutrality because the Internet is a strong competitor in many services they have a stake in too. Examples: Skype can replace telephones. Netflix can replace cable. And the Internet allows for people to create new, better solutions at any time and over the already established infrastructure. Having a tenth of my download rate as my upload is already a spit on my face, and now they want to control what services I can properly use or not? That's not acceptable.

    Besides, if they charge more to not limit Netflix bandwidth, most people will likely pay for it and keep using the same amount of bandwidth, only now the ISPs are getting some money for that. This is only about profit, that they have more than enough.

  20. There is another possible black hole's firewall on How the Black Hole Firewall Paradox Was Resolved · · Score: 1

    Im not a physicist, but hear this. Imagine for a second that most of the photons that gets trapped on a black hole will certainly head towards the singularity. Now, there is a certain distance where the orbital speed is the same as the light's speed, and that is not at the core, presuming that at the core the gravity must be strong enough to stop light from going out even at the perfect escape vector. Therefore it is possible, but very unlikely, that this orbiting light around the black hole is enough to melt or crisp any objects that care about being burned.

    Please correct me if I'm in any way wrong.

  21. No need for all that data collection for my mood on Pending Apple Patent For 'Inferring User Mood' · · Score: 0

    Just remember: When you try to patent such idiocy I will be pretty pissed off. Nice rule of thumb.

  22. I wonder... on First Cases of Flesh-Eating Drug Emerge In the United States · · Score: 1

    ... if /. will be the first site to have flesh-eating posts.

  23. What management says is: on Survey: Most IT Staff Don't Communicate Security Risks · · Score: 1

    "Don't worry about it, it's not that serious."

    Well, you are wrong, your head is up your ass, and this kind of stuff is why guys like you hire guys like me, even if you don't know that. So, let the IT dept. do it's job, dammit!

  24. Re:"abnormalities in human behavior"? on Will Robots Replace Rent-a-Cops? · · Score: 1

    Let's just say I'm not including only direct physical harm in my definition of violence. We may not hit ourselves in each other faces all day long, but:

    1- Our culture, more and more, represents violence. All kinds of media. Every time. All around.

    2- Look at the Internet. Look at comment sections (/. excluded, and that's why I still read comments here). That should be the new definition of verbal violence.

    3- Any way we deprive someone from their basic means of survival can be considered violence IMHO. All societies I can think of had, to their core, a way from taking something from most people to concentrate in the hands of fewer. The difference now is that with better transportation, entire countries can be screwed in favor of other countries. That is true for socialism and communism too. That is human nature, and that's my point.

  25. "abnormalities in human behavior"? on Will Robots Replace Rent-a-Cops? · · Score: 1

    Since the human nature is a violent one, I don't think violent behavior is abnormal, only not accepted in most circumstances by our social standards. The robot will detect behavior disapproved by the government that bought it.