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User: Waffle+Iron

Waffle+Iron's activity in the archive.

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Comments · 6,037

  1. The company has also announced that in the coming weeks they will be changing their name to "unnecessary".

  2. Re:Voice recognition is improving rapidly? on Will Compression Be Machine Learning's Killer App? (petewarden.com) · · Score: 2

    To rival humans at voice recognition, these assistants would need to do at least two things that actual humans already do:

    1: Constantly listen in on your life (and possibly watch it with a camera), so that it can maintain a real-time context to interpret any ambiguous verbal information. Waking up the assistant only after it hears its name is not sufficient because without context you need to be extremely clear to establish what you're talking about. I've noticed that even talking to people, when you switch the topic to a totally new subject, it often requires a "handshake" where you tell them what you're going to talk about and then they acknowledge that they're on the same page with you.

    2: Have the assistant interrupt the human immediately in mid-sentence when it doesn't understand something, with something like "Huh?" or "What?". Real people do this so often that we don't even notice it, but right now it would seem incredibly rude if a bot did that.

  3. Re:Sexist BS. on 'Do Not Track,' the Privacy Tool Used By Millions of People, Doesn't Do Anything (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm sure that it was placed there purposefully to trigger uptight twits such as yourself.

  4. the belief that internet access would be cheaper if ISP's didn't have the regulation to "bog them down". Not all of them were ignorant of technology either.

    However, they were all hopelessly naive.

  5. We would have to design programming languages with a syntax that was optimised for some new HID

    I'm not sure what that would look like, but I think that it's safe to say that it wouldn't be anything like your sig.

  6. Re:US$320 billion. How much to get to Mars ? on The US Grounds All F-35 Jets (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    You must be off your meds.

  7. Re:US$320 billion. How much to get to Mars ? on The US Grounds All F-35 Jets (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Today we refer to his people as "deplorable".

    No, back at that time most of the deplorables were still Southern Democrats.

  8. Re:Don't think terrorists would want to use this on Scientists Are Getting Seriously Worried About Synthetic Smallpox (sciencealert.com) · · Score: 1

    The only people I could see trying to do this are anarchists, and reckless researchers or home biologists.

    I think that far more likely than those is some cult with a doomsday obsession.

  9. Re:Moon or satellite? on Moons Can Have Their Own Moons and They Could Be Called Moonmoons (atlasobscura.com) · · Score: 1

    I can play your OCD game too:

    If someone pull their pants down and shows you their bare ass, that's not a satellite. So you're wrong: a moon is not necessarily a satellite.

  10. Re:Moon or satellite? on Moons Can Have Their Own Moons and They Could Be Called Moonmoons (atlasobscura.com) · · Score: 1

    But this entire topic isn't talking about artificial satellites at all. You're the one who brought that up.

    In astronomy, satellite and moon are the same. This article is about astronomy.

  11. Re:Moon or satellite? on Moons Can Have Their Own Moons and They Could Be Called Moonmoons (atlasobscura.com) · · Score: 1

    But a natural satellite is also often called simply a "satellite", making it interchangeable with "moon" in this context, as I originally said.

  12. Re:Moon or satellite? on Moons Can Have Their Own Moons and They Could Be Called Moonmoons (atlasobscura.com) · · Score: 1

    "uninitialized": score another win for auto-correct

  13. Re:Moon or satellite? on Moons Can Have Their Own Moons and They Could Be Called Moonmoons (atlasobscura.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Don't astronomers usually refer to them as satellites? I always though "moon" was the name of the Earth's satellite, specifically.

    If uninitialized, "moon" is an interchangeable synonym for satellite. When capitalized, It refers specifically to the Earth's moon. Likewise, when "Satellite" is capitalized, it refers to a particular model of automobile produced by Plymouth in the 1960s.

  14. Re:App... on Plex for Linux Now Available as a Snap (betanews.com) · · Score: 1

    In my day, we called them "programs".

    "Software Application" sounds like marketing fluff.

  15. Re: That might be counterproductive on State Attorneys Urge FCC To Combat Neighborhood Spoofing (biglawbusiness.com) · · Score: 2

    In your case, yes, you can assume any inbound caller is either a bill collector or a robocall so you can afford it. The rest of us have friends, business associates, etc.

    If it's anyone I care about, it's already in my contacts list and gets displayed using their real names. Any other number purporting to be from my exchange is always spam.

  16. That might be counterproductive on State Attorneys Urge FCC To Combat Neighborhood Spoofing (biglawbusiness.com) · · Score: 1

    These days, one of the most effective ways to avoid spam calls is to ignore numbers that look like they're from my own exchange.

  17. Re:Ouch on Hubble Telescope Hit By Mechanical Failure (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    It's from the sure-to-be upcoming movie "Thai Football Team Cave Field Trip".

  18. Re:psot foest on Economics Nobel Laureate Paul Romer Is a Python Programming Convert (qz.com) · · Score: 4, Funny

    print("first post!")

    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "psot foest", line 1, in slashdot.org
    IndexError: "first post" must not be preceded by other comments

  19. Re:Ouch on Hubble Telescope Hit By Mechanical Failure (bbc.com) · · Score: 3, Funny

    But Elon might actually offer a solution, or at least offer to offer one.

    I've heard that he has a spare one-man capsule that was designed specifically for rescue missions.

  20. That'll show 'em on The UK is Practicing Cyberattacks That Could Black Out Moscow (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    If a 900 day siege that largely destroyed one of their largest cities and killed over a million people wasn't able to bring Russia to its knees, surely an electrical blackout in Moscow will!

  21. Re:This shouldn't be partisan on Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For? (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    Even though it was something started under the Obama administration, people were suing simply because it was Trump doing it. Would they be sharing their concerns if Hillary Clinton was president right now?

    LOL. You don't think that there would be a huge swath of Americans who would absolutely freak out if Hillary sent out a Presidential Alert? There's no doubt that Trump himself would be at the head of that mob with torch and pitchfork in hand.

  22. Re:Energy versus Power on This Solar-Powered, 'Low Tech' Website Goes Offline When It's Cloudy (vice.com) · · Score: 2

    You can complain all you want, but that won't change rule zero of journalism school:

    Rule 0: When you discuss energy, power or electric potential, you WILL NOT use the correct physical dimensions.

    Ever.

    Violation of this rule will result in automatic expulsion.

  23. Re:This needs to stop on For Now, at Least, the World Isn't Making Enough Batteries (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 0, Troll

    This extreme bias is persistent and spreading.

    Not all bias is incorrect. There is also an extreme bias in the media for support of the "spherical earth" theory.

    The fact that the current chief of the US Federal Government is a fossil fuel-loving ignoramus is indisputable.

  24. Re:I'm sure they needed it too on Apple Watch Apps Instantly Went 64-Bit Thanks To Obscure Bitcode Option (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 4, Funny

    Did Apple Watches suddenly gain some dire need for 64-bit address space?

    If you don't switch to a 64-bit watch now, it will stop working in the year 2038!

  25. Re:why not later versions? on Microsoft 'Re-Open Sources' MS-DOS on GitHub (microsoft.com) · · Score: 1

    if (exe_name == "lotus") {
                                crash_randomly();
    } else {
                                run_normally();
    }

    MS wasn't quite as malicious as you make them out to be. You forgot to look in the header file, which contains this line:

    #define run_normally crash_randomly