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User: martin-boundary

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  1. Re:And now, things get Ugly. on Uber To Turn Into a Big Data Company By Selling Location Data · · Score: 1

    The fact that someone argues that someone else benefits from their data being used improperly does not in any way change the fact that their data is being used improperly.

  2. Re:And now, things get Ugly. on Uber To Turn Into a Big Data Company By Selling Location Data · · Score: 1

    Easy, because Uber didn't invent these concepts. They are a me too company in the datamining space trying to follow the herd. So we *know* how this is going to end by looking at how other companies behave. Grow up.

  3. Re:And now, things get Ugly. on Uber To Turn Into a Big Data Company By Selling Location Data · · Score: 2
    No, he's not. He's a bystander in the deal between Uber and the advertisers. As a bystander, he can do whatever he wants. If he decides to shit all over the data Uber intend to sell the advertisers, that's fine. If he decides to sue the advertisers for wrongful access to his data, that's fine. If he decides to sue Uber for privacy violations, that's fine too. Basically, the sky's the limit, since Uber are illegally misusing his data (at least in the EU - where companies are only allowed to use personal data for the immediate business at hand - meaning getting you from A to B in the case of Uber).

    So go ahead, make Uber's day.

  4. Re:Drives IT people nuts on MRIs Show Our Brains Shutting Down When We See Security Prompts · · Score: 1

    [Ok]

  5. Re:Marriage on Why It's Almost Impossible To Teach a Robot To Do Your Laundry · · Score: 1

    Suit yourself. I just want a robot that learns how to be Sheldon Cooper. At least then I know the clothes will be folded right.

  6. Re:Cue the intelligent design argument. on NASA Ames Reproduces the Building Blocks of Life In Laboratory · · Score: 2

    Nonsense. Everyone on the planet is able to create artificial life. It's called having sex, and they can do it anytime they like. Doesn't mean the invisible sky giant is having sex.

  7. Re:Just Maybe on Demand For Linux Skills Rising This Year · · Score: 1

    Nah... They'll probably want 10 years of Linux On The Desktop....

  8. Re:Funniest headline I've seen all day on Star Trek Fans Told To Stop "Spocking" Canadian $5 Bill · · Score: 1

    I'm sorry (eh) but the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one...

  9. Re:Just damn on Leonard Nimoy Dies At 83 · · Score: 1
    Don't worry. He doesn't need his Katra. He's part of a bigger community now.

    One that gets to point fingers and scream Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

  10. Re:Kinda stupid since on Machine Intelligence and Religion · · Score: 1

    That's exactly the point. Christianity has a kernel of warlikeness in it, which came to light when some smart Romans realized how to make use of it. A truly inoffensive religion wouldn't be employable in this way. Unfortunately, no such inherently peaceful religions have been discovered yet.

  11. Re:ummm... on The Revolution Wasn't Televised: the Early Days of YouTube · · Score: 1

    Uh, no, that's the hint that you need. It's irrelevant what happens in the CDN.

    It's actually far from irrelevant. The CDN is the major reason "streaming" services are viable in the first place. Without the CDNs we'd be back in the real streaming era of RealPlayer et al, right before that small company Akamai saw a business opportunity...

    You're still going to stream it to your player.

    Nope. Your player reads it from a growing file on disk. If you only want to concentrate on that part and call it streaming, then you've already lost the whole transporting across the network part, including controlling what gets streamed while it happens.

    If it starts playing before you finish downloading, you're streaming.

    Still incorrect. That's just playing a partially completed file on disk. It's "streaming" in the most primitive way possible. For example, you can't seek forward and play another part of the media until you've waited for the full file up to that point to be downloaded. True media streaming technologies allow the player to seek forward, *and not get the bits in between*. Basically, the server doesn't send any unnecessary bits, modulo the encoding method.

    In your "disk as the media server" analogy, you would want to have some way to access the file randomly - that's only possible when the intermediate data has already been stored.

    If you have to wait for the whole file to download before you can watch, then it's not streaming.

    There you go. We seem to be in agreement after all. If you have to wait for 90% of the whole file to be downloaded before you can seek to the 90% position, then it's not streaming.

    There probably are still video services like that, but I don't know of any.

    There's an easy test you can perform to find out: stream a large file (large enough to take some time to download) and right at the start, have your player seek to somewhere near the end. If it starts playing the end straight away, it's probably a streming player, but if you have to wait a while, then it's probably a downloading player.

    Whether the video gets downloaded into a buffer in memory or a buffer in a disk file is completely irrelevant to the question of whether you are streaming. It only speaks to the issue of how it is done.

    Not so. I argue that the difference in technology is sufficiently important to the end user experience that without downloading tech, streaming media business models wouldn't have taken off - as they didn't in the early days when this was tried.

    Ultimately, my point is that "streaming" as some of you use the word is a marketing term, useful to give the impression that data arrives on demand into the player and disappears as soon as it has been used, whereas this isn't the reality. True streaming like that is certainly possible and there are servers that do it, but mostly it's downloading files and hiding them. And I happen to like finding them and maybe processing them in ways that work for me.

  12. Re:ummm... on The Revolution Wasn't Televised: the Early Days of YouTube · · Score: 1

    Sure thing, genius. Come back and play when you've actually learned what store-and-forward means. Hint: it's nothing to do with buffering...

  13. Re:ummm... on The Revolution Wasn't Televised: the Early Days of YouTube · · Score: 1
    No, streaming refers to data being sent on demand without store-and-forward. For video, it means your server broadcasts UDP packets which your player reads. If the player elects to save the packets in a buffer and delay playing them, that's still streaming. If the player accesses a file on disk, which was independently downloaded using a standard file transfer protocol, that's downloading - even if the player starts showing the data after a short time before the file is fully downloaed.

    The distinction is important - streaming is an end-to-end communication directly over the network, whereas downloading can and often does involve middlemen - eg CDNs, proxies, etc. The technology stack for downloading is way more elaborate, advanced and versatile than the technology stack for streaming. The advantage of the latter is that the data is realtime, not delayed.

  14. Re:The Revolution (DIVX) was ~1998/1999 on The Revolution Wasn't Televised: the Early Days of YouTube · · Score: 1

    Oh yeah! And when she was buffering it was totally in tune with the rythm of her music, too!

  15. Re:ummm... on The Revolution Wasn't Televised: the Early Days of YouTube · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Bwahaha! Most videos *today* aren't "streaming". I don't watch any videos on youtube or otherwise "live", I always download them, and start watching them with mplayer. Let me tell you a dirty little secret: the videos are files you can download with any browser or command line tool, if you know the correct url. Most services try to hide those urls just to mess with the riffraff.

    You can find out the urls by either installing a download extension for your browser, or using an extension that shows the HTTP headers for all the requests your browser does, or in many other ways that get progressively more tedious.

    Interestingly enough, real streaming content existed and was unsuccessful before youtube. It existed in the form of an rtsp protocol implemented by a small company called RealMedia. It was unsuccessful because the player was constantly buffering and the picture quality was too low to improve throughput. This was years _before_ youtube.

    Video quality on the net improved only when streaming was abandoned in favour of file downloads, because this insulates you from network issues better than on the fly buffering, and it also allows higher resolution and quality tradeoffs in a more continuous way.

    Of course the biggest improvement was simply that in the last 15 years most people have had acess to broadband, to the extent that people like you are duped into thinking your downloaded content is "streaming".

  16. Re:The Apple business model. on Vint Cerf Warns Against 'Digital Dark Age' · · Score: 1
    That's why I use Emacs. It's been around for 30 years, and based on that track record, I expect it will be around when I die. Seriously.

    It's worth it.

  17. I want to live in two out of three worlds on Notorious 8chan Board Has History Wiped After Federal Judge's Doxing · · Score: 1
    There are two worlds out of three that I want to live in:

    1) a world where everyone knows how to dox, teaches how to dox, and uses it all the time as appropriate.

    2) a world where nobody uses doxing and doxing is frowned upon everywhere and under all circumstances

    3) a world where people don't do doxing, and it is frowned upon for people, but the NSA, CIA and law enforcement uses doxing internally, and it is accepted that they should do this.

    I want to live in 1) or 2), but I do not want to live in 3).

    I prefer 2).

  18. Re:Forced benevolence is not freedom on RMS Objects To Support For LLVM's Debugger In GNU Emacs's Gud.el · · Score: 1

    One does not have an inherent right to the work of someone else. Such a right only exists when it is contractually forced by an agreement such as the GPL.

    You're building strawmen. All exploitation is based on taking the work or property of someone else without an equitable exchange. And so it is with those who use BSD software to construct their own, proprietary software. The point of the GPL licence is to prevent such exploitation. The point of the BSD is to encourage such exploitation as a way to flood the software landscape with particular implementations. The point of RMS is that the second idea is shortsighted and corrosive to the software community. The point of Apple and other companies who use the BSD as a foundation is to make money and screw the community.

  19. Re:Forced benevolence is not freedom on RMS Objects To Support For LLVM's Debugger In GNU Emacs's Gud.el · · Score: 1
    Are you serious? What rights to BSD contributors lose? You list the losses yourself in in your second sentence!

    What rights do BSD contributors lose? All the community code exists, the community can continue without the commercial changes,

    I realize you have no clue given the remainder of your argument, so let me spell out your own logical implications for you: BSD contributors do not get to take commercial code and modify it any way they like. The commercial code is locked up and not fully available, nor redistributable. That's what the BSD contributors lose. All they get is to play with their own code, and sit on the sidelines while others modify their code and add bits that can't be taken freely and changed in return.

    That's not freedom, that's exploitation. Mind you I have no issue if you like to be exploited, just don't tell others it's freedom when it's really exploitation.

  20. Re:Monomania on One Man's Quest To Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake · · Score: 1

    I just hope that while he was subjecting himself, he was at least sitting on a comfy chair. For the tools of the inquisition are comprised of, uh, ahm,....

  21. Re:And the game continues on The Pirate Bay Is Back Online, Properly · · Score: 5, Insightful
    That argument makes little sense. Of course people get paid for their work. The TBP operates in the pipeline _after_ people already got paid. Movies or whatnot don't get made without people getting paid. The carpenters who build sets and models get paid. The costume designers get paid. The extras get paid, the camera people, etc.

    It's best to think of piracy as a form of spoilage. The example is harvesting apples. That's a lot of work, and the pickers must get paid, but once the apples are put in storage, some percentage of the apples will spoil. You don't see farmers being ideologically opposed to spoilage, do you? It's not an ideology or an ethical problem. It's a natural part of the lifecycle of apples. There are ways to minimize it, but it gets expensive and often is not worth it.

    Media have a lifecycle too. Once enough people got to see them, some people will make copies, using cams or otherwise. With news it's even worse. Once enough people hear about the latest terrorist bombing, they'll paraphrase using their mouths. That's piracy: It's only a matter of numbers, and of probabilities.

    Economically in fact, piracy is a good thing just like any form of spoilage. Imagine if you bought 10,000 apples and they never, ever, spoiled? You'd still be eating those apples when you were 80 years old. You'd never have bought another apple in your life. You'd have expensive storage costs over 80 years. The farmer would be out of business already, since after everyone bought a lifetime's worth they wouldn't buy any more. And apple prices would be much higher in a futile bid to compensate.

    Same with movies and media. The myth of a piracy free hollywood is a nightmare in disguise. Don't waste your time believing their lies.

  22. Re:Finally! on Dell Continues Shipping Fresh Linux Laptops · · Score: 1

    I never wanted the linux laptop. The linux desktop was fine the way it was, until Lennart and the merry band of free desktop people turned it into an unusable piece of shit for idiots who don't know the dirrerence between an icon that says "Internet" and the internet itself. Pardon my french.

  23. Re:In other news... on The NSA Is Viewed Favorably By Most Young People · · Score: 2
    Because. If you want 10 geniuses in the world, you neet 10,000 also rans. These are people who work hard, and think they could be geniuses but fail. If you want 10 also rans, then you'll get NO geniuses.

    It sucks to not make the cut for people, but that's no reason to stop encouraging them to be better than they are. I say, let's push everyone to their limits and let's collect a harvest of talented, hard working individuals in all types of endeavours, who can compete with the geniuses of the past on absolute terms, none of that nurturing feel good bullshit where everyone gets a prize just for trying.

  24. Re: Poor Alan Kay on Bjarne Stroustrup Awarded 2015 Dahl-Nygaard Prize · · Score: 1
    Essentially, they should never be used at all. If you're going to have an unrecoverable error, it's trivial to design the system to exit without using exceptions anyway.

    Probably the most useful side effect of exceptions is printing the stack trace, and that's not something where the overhead (both performance wise, and logical complexity wise) of exceptions is needed. And you should really be doing logging rather than relying on cryptic exception traces.

    The one theoretical case where exceptions are sometimes argued to be superior is if you don't know what to do locally about an error, and you're hoping that a higher level part of the program might know how to recover. Classic example is a read error, and then asking the user to put a usb stick in.

    But guess what? That's not how nontrivial programs work. The higher level simply can't know fully the effect of handling an exception that bubbled up, because the low level details that matter can and often do have unpredictable consequences in terms of program correctness, especially when you're reasoning at a higher level. When an exception is thrown, your program state is wonky. Only trivial programs are like the usb stick example. Real programs become subtly wrong if you try to recover a partially completed, partially incomplete, multi statge operation, especially if you're not the guy who wrote the code, but feel you're doing the right thing at a higher level.

    Your greatest chance of correctly handling errors is a few lines above or below where the error actually occurs. Anything else sounds good but is worse.

  25. Re:Discussion is outdated on Ask Slashdot: Is Pascal Underrated? · · Score: 1

    But then again, as long as customers still buy without complaining, why bother with quality?

    Because then the terrorists win.

    Seriously, bugs imply exploits imply security breaches imply more terrorists thinking they have a shot at blowing stuff up.