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  1. We already have plenty of killer robots on What Will Happen When Killer Robots Get Hijacked? (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1

    People keep talking about this like this is some futuristic threat. Yet we are living with this threat(and managing it) for a while.
    We have weaponize drones and other remotely controlled platforms for many years. I am aware of one incident where the Iranians managed to hijack a US drone, and force it land. But this was presumably done with GPS spoofing and did not give them sufficient control to attack anything.

    Air to air missile systems have fully autonomous modes of operation, and we trust them not to shoot airliners out of the sky.

    The future is here, has been here, and the the risks are manageable. Of course we need to make sure we have adequate safeguard against hackers or simple malfunction, but we are far away from a Terminator scenario.

  2. Scala is definitely worth it on Ask Slashdot: Should I Move From Java To Scala? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Scala has achieved critical mass, it has shown steady growth over the years and will likely continue. It is entirely possible it will never become as big as Java but that should not be the requirement, it is plenty big enough you can count on it.
    I have been developing large scale projects in Scala for the last 6 years and I can't imagine going back to Java now. Scala makes it easy and fun to write good correct code.
    Scala is boilerplate free, it feels a bit like your favorite scripting languages yet with compile safety a powerful type system and lot's of help from IDE.
    Obviously Scala supports Functional Programming which is essential as everything becomes multi threaded and/or distributed. Scala makes it easy to write functional code and is immutable by default, yet it isn't opinionated and you can use other paradigms when they make things easier/faster.
    It's fun to write, you don't have to be a genius to use it, though with weak members on your team you will want a strict style guide. I found using Scala is a selling point when recruiting top talent, even those who never used it. Those who have used it, especially coming from a Java background are instantly hooked.
    This was verified again in recent Stack Overflow developer surveys where Scala came out to be a very loved language, nearly everyone who tries it falls in love.
    I highly recommend

  3. And the supporting evidence is where? on 'Longest Living Human' Says He Is Ready For Death At 145 (telegraph.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    The article doesn't mention any supporting evidence. I'm not even talking about documents from before age 22 like the guiness records people usually ask for. If he is indeed 145 years old there should be an abundance of evidence prooving at least he is more than 113 years old making him the oldest man alive. Where is this evidence, the article mentions nothing, and neither does a five minute google search. I call bull.

  4. I avoid reliance on operator precedence on Ask Slashdot: When Do You Include 'Unnecessary' Code? (sas.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    I add "unnecessary" parentheses to complex expressions in order to avoid the mental burden of thinking of operator precedence. I instruct my team to do the same.
    Obviously if I can name a sub expression reasonably I just extract it, this is often enough not a reasonable solution.
    Usually I prefer terse code, but the above is a fairly common exception.

  5. Even frivolous suits can have a grain of truth on Facebook Sued for $1 Billion for Alleged Use of Medium for Terror (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 2

    Regardless of this specific lawsuite, we should ask ourselves, are Facebook and others doing enough to stop terrorists for leveraging their platform?
    Consider the great effort by Youtube and others to stop copyright infringements. Both internally and by use of DMCA notice and take-down.

    The effort in stopping not only incitement to racial violence but also operational planning of such acts seems meager.

    I think lawmakers are almost inherently behind the times on this, and we seem to not have an anti-terror lobby anywhere as strong as the stronger-IP lobby. It would be nice to see Facebook get their act together and do more, setting standards for others to follow and if necessary become law.

  6. You should ask how should we learn? on Slashdot Asks: How Did You Learn How To Code? · · Score: 1

    Since almost no school teaches 4th graders programming obviously this isn't going to be a common answer.
    We should ask hows do we increase programming literacy.
    In the age of IoT and everything having a computer in it, basic programming literacy for the masses is important.
    I have taught first graders to program so 4th graders which don't have a typing obstacle are almost all capeable of learning. It seems a good place to start.
    Starting early has obvious pedagogic advantages. Doing so for everyone can both increase literacy and increase social mobility. I'm all for it.
    P.s My mother taught me Basic when I was six(in 1989).

  7. Re: Antivaxing in particular on Ontario Parents Refusing To Vaccinate Their Children Could Be Forced to Take Science Class (qz.com) · · Score: 2

    Google does not control world knowledge. Vaccinces have been established as far more good than bad well before google came around. And even now we not only have other search engines we also have other means of spreading information including for example traditional peer reviewed journals.
    And just to ice it off even if google tried doing such a thing, whixh is futile in the first place, it probably would be discovered. Just like much more benign manipulations were made public.

  8. Re: Antivaxing in particular on Ontario Parents Refusing To Vaccinate Their Children Could Be Forced to Take Science Class (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    There is no massive conspiracy as those don't work. And though we really lack understanding of many things we can still do great things using the scintific method.
    We can send rockets into space not only without quantom mechanics but also without the theory of relativity. We don't need perfect understanding. Creating predictions and testing them is enough.
    I am all for better fundamental understanding and we are making progress there to. But you can not ignore the fact that vaccines work. And the scintific method shows they do. All the fast talk about side effects and scary "chemicals" won't change that.
    I don't need to know and understand each and every ingridient in a vaccine to trust it just like I don't verify the airplanr I fly in by myself. I know the numbers show both are very safe. And both are heavily regulated to keep them that way.

  9. Israel has this country wide for decades on San Francisco Adopts Law Requiring Solar Panels On All New Buildings (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    It is nice to see at least some small parts of the US are finally catching up.
    In Israel buildings up to 8 stories are required to use solar water heating and it has been this way for decades.

  10. Re:VideoCrypt on U.S. Forces Viewed Encrypted Israeli Drone Feeds (theintercept.com) · · Score: 1

    As I read the information, It was encrypted in a similar fashion but not necessarily identical. Specifically I suspect a different crypto system was used but it still only rotated lines in the video. They used image processing techniques to restore the only partially garbled image, the did not break the underlying crypto nor did they recover the key. The may not even understand which underlying Crypto algorithm is used to decide how much to rotate each row. They break the system without breaking the crypto, which is common.

  11. Re:As always? on U.S. Forces Viewed Encrypted Israeli Drone Feeds (theintercept.com) · · Score: 1

    Poorly applied crypto is far more common than weak crypto.
    We see many mistakes: No IV, ECB mode, keeping weak version along with strong, weak keys, error correction underneath encryption and many more.
    In this case they didn't actually apply encryption to the entire feed only rotated the lines pseduo randomly, and the decryption did not require breaking the key nor even figure out which encryption algorithm was used.

    As for how good the military is in using it? well The Israelis got caught with their pants down, the US had their totally unencrypted feeds captured by Taliban in Afghanistan, and had a drone hijacked in Iran.
    So If two of the most technologically advanced militaries are obviously making embarrassing mistakes, do you think any military is safe?

  12. She should have her license revoked on DUI Charges Dismissed Against Woman Whose Body Brews Alcohol (cnn.com) · · Score: 0

    Until such a time the condition can be dealt with.
    If she was unaware and could not reasonably be expected to be aware of her condition she should not face criminal charges (even a DUI charge). But only this time.
    As it seems she is not yet over her condition, she should not be allowed to drive at all until such a time it is demonstrated she is medically fit to drive. The article makes no mention of such a limitation, so it seems the judge thinks she can continue driving drunk on self brewed alcohol.

  13. Breaking news: Hackers hack human sensors on Researcher Hacks Self-Driving Car Sensors · · Score: 1

    They forced a self driving car to stop, wow. Is it any harder to blind a human driver causing him to hit the breaks?
    Use a search light or lasers, or a pretty woman flashing her breasts.
    This is hardly a "hack" and definitely not a weakness of self driving cars compared to the human variant.

  14. Re: How long will it last though? on Google's Waze Jumps Into the Ride-Sharing Business · · Score: 1

    This has a solid business model. It can not be a popular success without being a business success.

  15. Use popular mature open source on Ask Slashdot: A Development Environment Still Usable In 25 Years Time? · · Score: 1

    I have maintained various legacy systems dating as far back as the late 1970s some have faired better than others. By far the biggest difference between those that faired well and those that didn't was continuous supoort. A system from 1990 that wasn't maintained for only a few years due to the false assumption it was being phased was much harder to maintain and than older system which never went out of maintainance.
    The popular technilogies faired better than the trendy ones. PL1 Cobol and later C all faired well. Ada not so much. IBM mainframe faired very well. Nonstop servers (HP) not so much. Binary only libraries prevented hardware upgrades even when almost everything compiled properly. If you stick to the popular now yet mature technologies you won't be alone with your troubles down the road.

  16. Swap days with future employer on Ask Slashdot: How To Turn an Email Stash Into Knowledge For My Successor? · · Score: 1

    I have arranged this with a few employees from both directions when a replacement was not found in time.
    Start doing a few days at your new job early (before the agreed upon date) they don't have to be in a row.
    And return these days after a replacement has been found (but no more then two months after you start the new job or such like).
    The new employer is likely to agree, it allows you to get into things sooner, and can prevent first week stagnation since you will be on boarding gradually.
    It is common after the first day on the job the new boss realizes he isn't quite ready(accounts, training materials, computer, first assignment, ...) on-boarding gradually is easier. You probably can't do more then a handful of days this way but but a few days is much better than none.

  17. It should have been wolfenstein not Doom on First Games Inducted Into the World Video Game Hall of Fame · · Score: 1

    Doom may have been more popular but it didn't really develop the genre. It was an incremental improvement hardly revolutionary.

  18. The largest gatherings of such aircrafts was WW2 on FAA: Big Tech Challenges For Massive Washington, DC Warbirds Flyover · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Depending on how you define an event, the most WW2 planes flying at once could have been one of several raids.
    Good candidates include the bombing of Dreseden, Berlin, Hamburg or London.

  19. a phiser won't wait for me to hit enter on Google Announces "Password Alert" To Protect Against Phishing Attacks · · Score: 1

    If I start typing my password the site can collect it as I type. By the time I'm done it is too late.

  20. Why is Israel not part of the NNPT? on Interactive Edition of the Nuclear Notebook · · Score: 1

    6 countries are believed to have held nuclear weapons as of the treay's creation.
    Only 5 are recognized as "legitimate" nuclear powers.
    Saying if you have them you may keep them but no one else can makes a minimal about of sense. Saying: "everyone who has them except Israel is allowed to keep them" is just plain wrong.

  21. It will be trivial to overcome on AVG Announces Invisibility Glasses · · Score: 1

    These glasses may foil current face detection techniques (I'm not even sure about that),
    but based on the pictures provided they do not actually conceal from the camera a significant part of your face,
    and do not introduce significant variable noise. It should be trivial to adjust face detection and recognition to overcome this
    should these ever become popular enough.

  22. lifesize video conference on Ask Slashdot: Whiteboard Substitutes For Distributed Teams? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have used pretty much every tool out there skype, goto meeting hangouts to name the more popular ones. But when I did some work with E-bay a while back I got a chance to work with their lifesize system. The camera the screen the high definition and the lack of lag come together to make something far better then anything else I used. I suspect they charge an arm and a leg for such a setup but it works. (I have no financial intrest in lifesize )

  23. we already have killer robots on Only Twice Have Nations Banned a Weapon Before It Was Used; They May Do It Again · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Missile defence systems normally have a fully autunomous setting.
    The machine is trusted not to shoot down airlines.

  24. Bad science strikes again on Test Shows Big Data Text Analysis Inconsistent, Inaccurate · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The first hint you get is when you notice this paper was published in a physics journal, not a great sign. Then you actually start reading, and you see they declare LDA as "state of the art". And when you actually read what they propose it is a bunch of standard text techniques which actually work quite well with LDA.
    So what they actually showed is that taking vanilla algorithms out of the box without even the most basic data processing under-performs compared to superior data processing attached to a simpler algorithm. Which anyone which did any sort of text processing or any other kind of data managling already new.

  25. It's all about balance on Ask Slashdot: What Makes a Great Software Developer? · · Score: 1

    Software development like almost everything else is about balance.
    Do I refactor/rewrite or not? Add the extra layer of abstraction? write defensively?
    Do I commit a partial solution to keep integrated with mainline?
    Should I deploy a partial solution to get real feedback?
    Do I make it more complicated to handle some future requirement?

    The best software developers have a good sense of balance. You can always learn a new language/technology
    you can also learn to do things by-the-book learning balance is tricky.

    Joel Spolsky says a developer needs two attributes: "Smart" and "Gets things done"
    I am beginning to believe the latter is the more important part.

    I always recommend new graduates to take their first position in a big corporate environment and their second (and all future) in fast moving start-ups.
    After you have learned the "anal" way of doing things you make much better decisions when cutting corners.