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User: bluefoxlucid

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  1. Re:Not a duty of the Executive Branch on White House Punts On Petition To Allow Tesla Direct Sales · · Score: 5, Informative

    Exactly. Congress has to write a law saying, "By Constitutional law, we are tasked to facilitate interstate commerce. This is impeding interstate commerce; therefor, the new law says: stop doing that." Then the President can point and say, "Go Go Federal Agents!" and any lawsuits raised by Tesla can get to the Federal Courts where the Judge is obligated to say, "Your state laws are in conflict with Federal regulations which are supported by powers Constitutionally granted to the Federal government, therefor the Federal regulations trump your State laws."

  2. Re:the executive can't just wave state law aside?? on White House Punts On Petition To Allow Tesla Direct Sales · · Score: 1

    The executive branch didn't do any of that. Congress is the legislative branch.

  3. Re:Actually, WH can waive state laws on White House Punts On Petition To Allow Tesla Direct Sales · · Score: 1

    Actually, that's Congress. The Legislative branch would have to produce appropriate legislation. Once legislation exists, the Executive Branch may issue an Executive Order to execute the legislation.

  4. Re:The study focuses soley on Japan on The Last Three Months Were the Hottest Quarter On Record · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Well it wasn't my part of the world. Hey, how about this: if we're doing a global study, let's study the whole fucking planet, eh?

  5. Re:OK on Led By Nest, 'Thread' Might Be Most Promising IoT Initiative Yet · · Score: 1

    IPv6 privacy extensions are elective, and operate inside a /48 or /56 as assigned.

  6. Re:OK on Led By Nest, 'Thread' Might Be Most Promising IoT Initiative Yet · · Score: 2

    Same. I'm wondering when all this external provider bullshit ("Cloud") is going away and we can just have the smartphone connect to the Wifi, pulling out Avahi and mDNS to find devices, then ask the devices about their Internet connectivity. The device can say, "I have this public [IPv6] address", or it can say, "Connect to me through this service". You could configure the device for either. Key exchange with it through the local Wifi so you have PKI both ways.

  7. Re:I'm not an anti sharing nazi... on Economist: File Sharing's Impact On Movies Is Modest At Most · · Score: 1

    Every movie you watch now is some set of actors tacked onto Save the Cat.

  8. Re:Not to detract from our roots... on How To Fix The Shortage of K-5 Scholastic Chess Facilitators · · Score: 1

    There are two main types of chess games. In one, someone manages to checkmate while there are still a lot of pieces on the board. You seem to only be familiar with this type of game. It's possible to prioritize for that over holding onto pieces, with strategies like "gambits" taking that idea back to the opening move.

    Yes, this is how minor skirmishes in Go work. The difference is in the way your play comes out.

    In Chess, the capture of a piece or the loss of a piece means something. Being in a specific square at a specific time means something. You are trying to establish a tactical advantage for the moment, so that you can move further toward your tactical goal of capturing the king.

    In Go, fights work the same way. The sacrifice of a piece, or the capture of a piece, or of a group, or the solidification of a group, the push into a certain area, a cut to separate two groups, these mean something. They may make the difference between life and death of your stones.

    When all that is done, in Go, you have a position which may make an outward-facing wall, or may have blocked off some territory. You might let yourself get closed in, giving your opponent enclosure of an area worth a point or two, but immediately facing his already-strong group, and thus unable to influence the game. Or, if that area is open, you might run out some, sacrificing points and potential strength for the chance to destroy your opponent's influence or prospects for more points. You may let a small group die simply because this will give you an extra move, allowing you to take control of the game and begin wearing down your opponent before he can shore up some obvious weaknesses. You may play outward to create a wall, giving your opponent points but gaining influence so that you can later capitalize on this strength.

    Imagine if you could lose one chess game by winning another, or by capturing the king with rook coming up the middle rather than the knight coming up the left side. Imagine, still, if the individual games didn't matter; you win or lose by the whole of your effort, combined, and in full arrangement. And imagine you do all these things in parallel, and have to consider how they affect each other.

    Welcome to Go.

  9. Re:As an actual, full-time chess coach... on How To Fix The Shortage of K-5 Scholastic Chess Facilitators · · Score: 1

    You should look into Go. Chess is a small, very limited game that teaches poor thinking.

  10. Re:Not to detract from our roots... on How To Fix The Shortage of K-5 Scholastic Chess Facilitators · · Score: 1

    Chess encourages short-sighted tactical thinking with no concern for the consequences. You aim to take a single position (capture the king), even if it destroys *everything* in the process. Every move is about maintaining the tactical position, which is a short-term goal.

    Go can be taught to four-year-old kids. It encourages abstract strategy across the larger plane: tactical battles are carried out based on their worth in the overall strategy. Do you enclose or run? Capture or let live? These make the difference between territory and influence, between scoring points and gaining control of the board. Which is worth more now? Which will provide you better control later? What is urgent, what do you need to win in the long run?

    Chess is a game for small minds.

  11. Re:Why is this news? on The First Person Ever To Die In a Tesla Is a Guy Who Stole One · · Score: 1

    The best part about cyclists running red lights is they still get there faster than they would, but you still beat them there. This is great because a lot of people are still thinking about queued cars and, once in a while, someone will complain loudly about how the cyclist isn't getting there any faster because they passed him.

    Then you have two idiots to gossip about.

  12. Re:Why is this news? on The First Person Ever To Die In a Tesla Is a Guy Who Stole One · · Score: 1

    Did he have a nice bike? If you hit him, can you try not to mangle the frame? I'm always looking for new bikes when their former owners learn about traffic safety.

  13. Re:Thrown from the vehicle on The First Person Ever To Die In a Tesla Is a Guy Who Stole One · · Score: 1

    A testament to Tesla's safety measures? He died of impact sustained while not in the car... what brain damaged retard wrote this?

  14. Re:Go Aereo! on Aereo Embraces Ruling, Tries To Re-Classify Itself As Cable Company · · Score: 2

    If you sue someone for putting a fence on their lawn and screwing up your nice, pretty neighborhood with a fence--because fences are universally visually disruptive--and then sue them for not having a fence, something else is going on.

    In this case, there are obvious business dynamics in play here. What those dynamics imply may not be obvious, but that the dynamics exist is blatant. A business raising conflicting lawsuits is obviously trying to play some kind of legal three card monty, and forcing the courts to rule another business as X and then coming to court to complain that the business cannot be X is exceedingly easy to hit with SLAPP rules: suddenly you have to show, before discovery, that you can reasonably win this case, all while you just won a case where a judge ruled that the thing you were previously demanding and that you are now against is in fact the thing that must be done. You've already won the case against this, and you are now bringing bullshit to court.

    As for backtracking, it's extremely unlikely. I said it would be monumental; but it's possible. If the courts hit the plaintiffs with SLAPP, there opens an argument that the lower courts often sided against the final ruling or made opinions to the effect that their judgment was extremely borderline and the issue is unclear from both a legal and logical perspective. If that's the actual case, then the supreme court has a lot of opinion to take into account to re-evaluate its position: the supreme court could decide that the situation is not clear-cut and, although their opinion does lean in the direction of the prior ruling, it was never strong and there is no strong legal opinion in the courts in general.

    In such a situation, the court can stretch this analysis to infer that the plaintiffs, having forced the defendant into a court-ordered position and then attacked the defendant in court from exactly the opposite position, were never interested in he legal position the courts were actually examining. Given that the courts aren't *exactly* sure how to approach that issue, the plaintiff's motives become much more important: to engage in long, drawn-out legal battles they don't have strong likelihood of winning.

    Having one legal battle on a nebulous issue that's not well understood by legal precedent or statue is fair. This happens, it's a normal part of civil disputes. Going through all that and then immediately reversing your position and starting over signals to us that you're just trying to drag the defendant through as much legal bullshit as possible, which suddenly makes every suit you've filed the whole way up look like SLAPP. Ironically, there is neither precedent nor statute to guide the courts in matters where it becomes clear you've been abusing the court system for a very long time; if any such legal case does come up, it would end in a landmark decision telling us whether the statute of limitations is measured in years or in how far out the door you can get before the judge smells bullshit.

  15. Re:Go Aereo! on Aereo Embraces Ruling, Tries To Re-Classify Itself As Cable Company · · Score: 1

    If the companies raise a suit in the opposite direction, Aereo can point back at prior suits, enter in prior arguments against them as evidence, and try to classify the whole tirade as a SLAPP.

    That is to say: Aereo can reference back that the same people suing them "because they're not a cable company" made arguments and successfully sued them "because they are a cable company." It can show the same entities suing them, successfully, with arguments diametrically opposed to the premise of the current case. It can then have the courts declare the lawsuits as strategic and not legal, and force them to repay legal fees.

    Backtracking is harder. The Supreme Court sided against Aereo. I've read that the lower courts didn't have a firm decision, or that only one lower court found Aereo substantially similar to a rebroadcaster because Aereo is unicasting to individuals on a case-by-case basis. The debate is largely over whether Aereo's time and space shifting counts as copying content, or if they're logically and legally similar to a person renting a small space on your roof and putting an antenna and a small computer there.

    Even given all that, it's hard to go back after you hit the Supreme Court. Aereo would have to appeal to the Supreme Court again, have them reverse their decision, then point back at the long history of suit and point forward at the sudden opposing suit and say, "Look, they sue us in any case, they're just being dicks," and get the courts to retroactively apply SLAPP and make the plaintiffs pay full legal fees all the way back. I don't think there's actually statute or precedent for any such thing; it would be monumental.

  16. Re:It's only fair on Aereo Embraces Ruling, Tries To Re-Classify Itself As Cable Company · · Score: 1

    Wait until they start talking to Verizon, and learn how to swap their definition to get multi-billion-dollar government grants, then reclassify to avoid all regulatory statutes tied to the grants.

  17. Re:Hmmm ... on Google's Experimental Newsroom Avoids Negative Headlines · · Score: 2

    Okay, hold on, I'll get you a link to Pornhub where you can see Brazil getting fucked by Germany.

  18. Re:Sad... on UK Gov't Plans To Push "Emergency" Surveillance Laws · · Score: 1

    Because great men like Winston S. Churchill are now long dead.

  19. Re:another bs summary on slashdot on Judge Shoots Down "Bitcoin Isn't Money" Argument In Silk Road Trial · · Score: 1

    It's more that he created an enterprise to facilitate criminal activities, particularly contraband smuggling and sales. Operating a business for the purpose of facilitating crime in general is different than "being a criminal".

  20. Re:Maybe because normal humans can't code on Normal Humans Effectively Excluded From Developing Software · · Score: 1

    What? This is bullshit, dude. Programming isn't a layer on top the physical world of spatial relationships; it's a layer on top the physical world of discrete, numeric algorithms.

    In the real world, you have analogue power levels--voltage, current. Then, we build digital circuitry, such that being about 2.8-3.8V from ground state is "3.3V" or "ON", and being below that is "OFF"; being above that is "HALT, CATCH FIRE". This is a purely numerical behavior: the variations in the real world do not apply to digital circuitry.

    On top of that, you build a set of operational codes to manipulate states, i.e. assembly. You also build programming languages such as C, Python, and so on, which turn complex algorithms into a static analysis tree, optimize the tree, and then convert that into optimal procedural operational codes.

    The best we have for programming is object orientation, which takes a lot of procedural stuff for repeated modules away; but then you need to build the procedural framework to use those objects, as well as the discrete procedural behavior of the object. You're reducing complex procedural code down to a limited interface so that you can write other complex procedural code to handle that, thus reducing the amount of complex procedural shit you have to think about interacting with other complex procedural shit.

    You can't program a computer by putting a ball on top a stick. Computers need programming in terms of what is absolutely understood and non-ambiguous.

  21. Re:another bs summary on slashdot on Judge Shoots Down "Bitcoin Isn't Money" Argument In Silk Road Trial · · Score: 1

    I would have ruled that money laundering laws are stupid and should be thrown out! There are a lot of other shits we could charge this guy with. For example: Continuing criminal enterprise.

  22. Re:Maybe because normal humans can't code on Normal Humans Effectively Excluded From Developing Software · · Score: 1

    Okay seriously, some people are retarded. They can't manipulate numbers because their brains are broken. Low-functioning sociopaths can't understand social interactions, and don't connect the pattern behavior together to fake it; high-functioning sociopaths recognize it as an academic subject, and fake it.

    How is it hard to believe that some--perhaps many--tasks require an uncanny ability to do a certain thing, which nobody has? Maybe any idiot can learn to make a shitty program in Visual Basic; but, for the vast majority of people, no investment of time and effort is going to make them John Carmack. Similarly, some investment of time will teach you to sculpt; no investment of time will make you Michelangelo. Your creative writing courses won't make you Brandon Sanderson, Stephen R. Donaldson, or J.K. Rowling; the best you can hope for is being the next no-talent hack like Tolkien.

  23. Re:IETF next on Tor Project Sued Over a Revenge Porn Business That Used Its Service · · Score: 1

    All these people can file SLAPP motion. Even the legitimate ones can claim she's running SLAPP cases around the whole issue, and have her barred from bringing this shit up ever again.

  24. Re:Wrong initiative, enough of space. on Buzz Aldrin Pressures Obama For New Space Exploration Initiative · · Score: 1

    The market is what makes engineers and scientists. NASA created some market niches earlier than they would have existed, and it did create a few on its own. The least likely is satellites. The DOD created the friggin' Internet.

    Also who ever decided to become an engineer because of the moon launches? This is pop culture: every kid wanted to be an ASTRONAUT, and their idea of an astronaut was a fat man in a white suit with a hose and a fish bowl on his head, playing in outer space! Nobody looked at that and went, "Wow, I want to design a new super armatron to manipulate heavy materials via shuttle so I can repair a space research lab's solar panels!" They might have seen something like that on TV and decided they wanted to blast the thrusters and throw shit around with the giant machine arm, but that's about it.

    People have this uncanny ability to rewrite history. Look at the Lebanon war, where people said the fighting "came out of nowhere", and "would be over in a few days." It kept being "almost over" for almost 20 years, with some people in hotels in the next country over, waiting because they were sure that THIS week would be the week the war ends. What does history say? It says everyone could see the rising tensions (no they couldn't) and the breakdown of the economy (that had been happening for decades), and people started to flee the country because they knew the fighting would start (they fled the country immediately *after* it started), and holed up for a long and protracted war (which nobody actually believed--they thought this was just a big, three-to-five-day skirmish). People who lived through this shit and wrote it in their diaries immediately, a week or two after the war, talked like all these deformations of history were what actually happened--even though their own diary said absolutely the opposite.

    Put away the romantics and come back to earth. Reality's down here.

  25. Maybe because normal humans can't code on Normal Humans Effectively Excluded From Developing Software · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously, does everyone think programming is a spatial relationships problem or something?

    Let's put this on the table right now: Normal humans can build houses. Oh, you might not have any construction knowledge, and you'll build a horrendous little shitheap that falls over when the wind blows, but that's not the point. I can put construction knowledge in your head and, in a few months, you'll be able to properly select foundation for a site, properly frame a house, and properly build out the sheathing and siding and insulation and walls. You won't be a master craftsman, but you'll be able to do it right.

    Humans are good with spatial things. Humans can look at a two-by-four and understand what a two-by-four is. The engineering concepts behind building a workable shed are a little different, but easily transferred. Given a little time and guidance, a human can learn to relate building materials spatially, measuring and cutting and nailing or screwing or gluing as needed, planning and building a proper structure.

    Humans are terrible at numbers and algorithms.

    Humans are so terrible at numbers and algorithms that they become *extremely* proficient at math if you teach them with a soroban--a machine that converts numerical problems into spatial procedures--and can't be taught algorithms without visual diagrams of trees and boxes and other shit to show sorting and transformation algorithms. Have you ever looked at textbooks or Wikipedia pages for stuff like PKI, red-black trees, or AES encryption? There's pictures of the simplest shit! Why? Because HUMANS CAN'T PROCESS ALGORITHMS!

    The easiest process for a human programmer implementing an algorithm like a quick sort is to associate variables with objects in the visual diagram, associate their state changes with the movements in the visual diagram, and write code that carries out the analogous behavior. By comparison, BUBBLE SORT IS FUCKING HARD TO IMPLEMENT when your only guidance is: "iterate through each list element. Compare each element to the previous. If the previous element is larger, swap them." You actually have to think about how to do the comparison (greater than, less than? Wait, which am I comparing to which?), and how to swap them--usually with a temporary variable, although "A ^= B; B ^= A; A ^= B;" works. Most people visualize some kind of diagram while trying to understand the algorithm.

    The real world requires interaction with space, mainly to avoid hungry tigers, kill tasty deer, and avoid driving your car into trees like you're fucking drunk. It doesn't involve shift accumulator left and XOR with memory at address $FC. It doesn't involve explicit semaphore locking and deadlocks if you fail to unlock the semaphore in a loop with multiple function calls and thread branching during the loop. It requires things you can put your fist through if they don't work right, and then continue with successfully.

    We can't all be rocket surgeons.