"People have been trading sex for advancement for all of human history."
While that is true for plenty of women who start doing it on their own...
"Whores are _not_ victims, they are co conspirators."
Try telling that to the kids and teens who get kidnapped, sold, beaten, drugged, and forced into it. Or, more to the point, try telling that to the parents of some of those kids.
1) "teenage fans" - I didn't see a specific age range, but since they didn't specify "young adults", it sounds likely that some of these teens were underage, in which case inappropriate touching would definitely be criminal (unless you're an elected official or running for office in the US).
2) "touched them inappropriately" - Likely if someone reported that, it means he didn't ask first. You could argue that touching equates to "making a pass", but I don't think that argument would hold up in court these days.
Actually, the addictive games ARE mining the shit out of their players. They gave psychologists prominent positions in game design with the specific goal of keeping players addicted for as long as possible, and the psychologists requested very detailed tracking to help figure out what was working and what wasn't. It was akin to performing psyc experiments on the players. Sure when it comes to mining, they only had access to in-game contacts (where the contacts in FaceBook are RL contacts), but I believe far more people had lives ruined due to addiction to games like WoW than to FaceBook. Most of that would be due to flunking out of school/college, but in some cases jobs and spouses were lost, and in some really extreme cases theft/suicide/murders. That puts it close to the level as actual alcohol/drug addictions. Yes I know it's really not the same, but that seemed to be their goal, and they came pretty close.
When it comes to privacy, IMO visiting FaceBook is no different from visiting a physical store. When you go to WalMart, they have hundreds of security cameras filming your every move. They try to track how often you shop there and what you buy. They collect as much as they can about anyone who walks into their store or shops at walmart.com, and they use it to figure out what works and what doesn't just like the WoW designers did. Why should FaceBook not be allowed to do what the other big companies are doing? (Actually, even the small companies are doing it, they're just more inept at it and less likely to adequately protect really sensitive information like your credit card number.)
"There needs to be a US law that a person can request all the data a company has collected about you."
No, there really doesn't. That law wouldn't stop companies from collecting it. All it would accomplish is making it easier for other people to access that information. The worst thing I've heard about FaceBook is that some potential employers use it to dig up reasons not to hire you (or existing employers dig up reasons to fire you). Although in some cases instead of firing, it results in discrimination, blackmail, or sexual harassment. That's not a problem with FaceBook though, it's a problem with the employers. Imagine your employer being able to access all of WalMart's video footage of you. It really is the same thing. It is completely immoral when employers do that, and where it is not illegal with extremely harsh penalties, then lawmakers should correct that ASAP. Employees are expected to keep their personal lives out of the workplace because it is extremely inappropriate. It is even worse for employers to force their way across that boundary, and it wouldn't be hard for them to impersonate you to exploit that law you suggested. They gather all the info they would need to do that when you apply.
Seriously though, what about WoW? What about EverCrack (as its own players referred to it half-jokingly)? What about the new e-Sports games like LoL, Dota2, or any multiplayer game that does its best to avoid falling into obscurity? What about TV shows that do their best to try to keep viewers hooked? What about Hollywood trying to keep people coming back in to see movies?
What company goes out of their way to make a product that no one likes very much (and that will fail as a result of it)? He'd be better off blaming people for being sheep than for blaming a company trying to provide the best possible service/product. It's what companies do. No one is forcing them to sign up, to spend all their time on it, to get hooked on "likes" (or people clicking their cows).
I agree except for the "became stupid" part. I think "became greedy" is more accurate. Like another poster who replied to this, I filter out 3rd-party vendors, but where NewEgg used to be the best deal around for parts, they haven't been for a long time.
How often do you order things and then decide you don't need/want them? I don't think I've ever returned anything to NewEgg except for one DOA part and one motherboard where they accidentally shipped me the wrong model. Neither cost me anything to return for the correct/working part (except a small amount of time).
I agree. Although the one "unique" feature I would like to see the most in an Android phone is a USB port that will last as long as the rest of the phone does. My latest Android is a Nexus 5x. It's barely 1 year old, the phone still works great, but the USB cable won't stay plugged in if someone breathes on it. Every Android phone I've ever had has eventually had the same problem, so I try to be really careful when plugging/unplugging it, but it didn't help. I had also hoped that either the Google-branded phone or the change to USB-C would help with that problem, but no such luck.
I may try a magnetic cable, but I'm worried it will end up falling into one of these categories: https://xkcd.com/1892/
This brings us one step closer to the world of "Ready Player One". On the plus side, if we end up in that big of an energy crisis, we'll already have this technology available before it gets to the point where no one but the top 1% can afford to travel anywhere. Maybe we could look at figuring out the best way to stack trailers on top of each other next.
"Besides, did you know %60 of Apple's income actually goes to the software engineers in Germany?"
Apple has pretty high profit margins. Profit (by its very nature) doesn't go to ANY employees. There's no way 60% of all Apple's income goes to pay employee salaries, much less any one sub-group of its employees.
"It's because some idiot politician, a victim of the Peter Principle, thinks M$ is giving them a deal"
That's a pretty ignorant statement considering they were "often confronted with major difficulties and additional costs when it comes to acquiring and operating professional application software" (major being the key word there). It seems pretty cut-and-dry to me. They used M$ before Linux. They knew exactly what the TCO of Windows was (including all the viruses and other problems they had) because they had used it for many years and could go back and study the IT budgets for those years. They thought Linux would have a significantly lower TCO, and they liked the improved security and privacy it would give them, so they made the switch.
After they switched, they got severely burned by budget over-runs. It was so severe that, even though they dislike M$ and they will lose face admitting they were wrong and switching back, they still consider it the lesser of evils. The bean-counters made this decision (or provided the numbers for the higher-ups to make it), and in this case it sounds like the bean-counters are right. I'm not a fan of M$, but throwing good money after bad is just stupid.
I have a smartphone right now, but I'm fine with using wifi and hardly ever use it as a phone, so I have a "dumb" phone plan. I pay around $3-$5/month on T-Mobile for emergency/family calls only, and its primary uses are:
Calendar and Alarm Clock (best smart-phone features ever) Camera (keeps me from having to carry an extra device when I need one) Flashlight (ditto, plus never have a hard time finding a working flashlight anymore) E-reader (my entire book library fits in my pocket) Music player (ditto for my music library) Weather radar, traffic, and route checker (from wifi before I drive somewhere) GPS (without wifi while I'm driving somewhere) IM/email (rarely, but it'll do in a pinch) YouTube/Fark/etc. (rarely, when I have wifi and am in the mood) Grocery list tracker (damn handy for checking stuff off while shopping) Graphing calculator (for helping the kids with high school math homework;-) One more way for my wife to bug me (she gets upset if I answer while driving, but she only calls me on it while I'm driving, and she gets even more upset if I don't answer)
I probably missed a few uses. Technically that last one counts as a "phone" use, but I don't want to count it because when that happens, I find myself really wishing it wasn't a phone.
As a side note, technically I don't have a "hands-free" system for the car, but I can still make calls with no hands. It's pretty slick to be able to say "OK, Google. Call my daughter on speakerphone." No Internet access is needed for that, which is nice (last I'd heard, Siri required a data plan to do that).
Anyway, to me all of that is worth buying a low-to-mid-range Android unlocked with no contract, and then getting the $3/month plan from T-Mobile. I really wish they had a mid-range Android with a really sharp camera in it instead of doing everything they can to push the prices even higher, but you can't have everything.;-)
I know, and you're nit-picking. I actually attend a Quaker church as an atheist attender (some Quaker churches are ok with that, some are not), so I may know quite a bit more about them than you do. But then again, for all I know you may be a birth-right Quaker. Regardless, exceptions like that do not prove the rule. You could've made a better point with the fact that the Quaker church is split into 3 different branches that can't seem to agree with each other. One of the branches is even evangelical, and seems to have little in common with the other 2 except for the name. Either way, their primary tenet is peace, and the Quakers I know (first-hand, not read about) express plenty of regret and embarrassment over Nixon and his role in Vietnam.
As far as Christians go, IMO Quakers are by far the nicest, the most welcoming, and have the most religious integrity. They're actually quite content to discuss different views and beliefs with members of other religions (including atheism), and even respect those other views and beliefs as long as you're not attending to disrespect theirs. Naturally that's not true for every member of every Quaker church (definitely not the evangelical branch), and everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I'm sure I would find similar issues and differences if I took a closer look at Buddhism. As with anything else in life that's not black-and-white (and very little seems to be), YMMV.
Correction: You really only need to type the letter "i" to have Internet Explorer show up at the top of the list (unless you've installed a bunch of other stuff that starts with an "i").
That's not true at all. Granted, the only reason it's not true is that there are more than 6 people in the world with Windows 10 who can't figure out how to either:
1) Click the start button and type the letters "i" and then "e".
2) Type "Chrome" or "Firefox" into Edge's search bar.
Valid point. I was actually half-joking when I mentioned pacifist religions. Atheism seems to be the best option as far as religion goes. I'm not saying all atheists would be peaceful, but it would remove one very common excuse people use for violence.
But if you feel it's important to be Christian with a capital C, you could still be a Quaker. Yes, another half-joke.
That's bullshit for the most part. This article isn't about detailed info like our social security and credit card numbers. It's about big data, aggregated summaries of large amounts of data, not financial details for individuals stolen from Equifax, Target, Home Depot, etc.
Let's say Google sells a summary of all our surfing habits to another company. They're not selling "us". We're still here. We're not impacted in any way, and that data is completely useless to us. So that other company uses that data to improve a web site that few of us will ever visit. The ones of us who do might be happy that the web site doesn't suck. Pardon me if I don't feel like I've been "raped" when Google does that. Pardon me if I don't even want a check for $0.02 in recompense for my unknowing "contribution".
It's actually more insidious when companies gather data for themselves, like the way Amazon uses the data from us visiting their own site to try to maximize sales and profit, but that's no different from my grocery store keeping track of how well certain ads and displays work and tweaking them to try to boost sales. It's not a "new" sales tactic, and they're not unfairly using our data.
"They operate on the belief that women are eternal children."
Hmm, maybe they're onto something. Maybe it's more accurate to say that liberals are eternal children, and women tend to be strongly liberal, ergo...
Before the flame war starts and the conservatives try to mod me up while the liberals try to mod me down, it's a joke. I vote liberal, my wife is liberal, and I have no problem with making a joke at my own expense (or my wife's;-). If you have a problem with it, maybe the joke hit too close to home, in which case you may have bigger problems than my poor jokes.
Anyway, I often feel the biggest problem with conservatives is that they never lighten up about anything. Too often they act like the stereotypical "angry old white men". So if you're liberal (or a woman) and feel insulted by this, don't act like an angry old white conservative man. Lighten up and take the joke the way it was intended.
Well, you can still be attacked and killed for taking that position publicly in certain areas here in the US, in the same way you can still be attacked and killed for being black. It may not be as common as it used to be, but it still happens, and it probably will as long as religious dogma is still around (unless everyone switches to a pacifist religion like Buddhist, Quaker, etc., but IMO it's more likely for people to give up religion completely than to do that).
Anyway, my point is that it's still risky, even if it's not considered radical anymore.
While I agree it's not as good as a "real" BMI, it's better than the laser keyboard in a few ways:
1) It would work with a prosthetic limb if your hand had to be amputated. Allow these signals to control it, and even if your brain doesn't send it the right signals initially, the human brain is actually really good at adapting to changes like that.
2) TFA: "You could be blasting a hundred words a minute on your smart phone with your hands in your pockets." I'm not sure how accurate that is, but it still sounds like quite a step up from the laser keyboard. Apparently your fingers still need to twitch, but don't need to complete the full range of movement needed for a keypress. So it might be useful for people who still have hands but have problems (e.g. carpal tunnel, arthritis), or perhaps who just can't stand to type on those damn cell phone keypads.;-)
And now we get "modern" C++ developers replacing messes like that with a ludicrous number of levels of abstraction with template arguments, conditional template code paths, variadic templates, etc. Although I suppose when something goes wrong with one of those you can step through it with a debugger. That's much more of a hassle with C macros.
Anyway, every time you give programmers a shiny new hammer, a certain percentage of them will always think it's the shiniest and best hammer ever, and therefore should be used for everything. Need to fix a leaky faucet? Hammer time! It doesn't matter that a hammer is the worst possible tool for the job, we can just tear the whole thing down and replace it with something that needs to be built with the shiny new hammer!
I wonder if the guy you're talking about used to work with a much older language (or perhaps assembler). He was probably ecstatic when he moved up to C, and thrilled that it had a rich macro environment.;-)
I think by now most slashdotters realize that Elon is a bit of an asshat. In theory, military leaders could decide to put too much faith in AI-driven tanks, bombers, etc. too soon, but while it may make an interesting plot device in a book or a movie, IRL military leaders are much more risk-averse (which is definitely a good thing).
When it comes to AI, I would be more worried about terrorists trying to build a deadly version of this: https://boingboing.net/2012/03...
It's not like a suicide bomber would consider any target something like this might shoot to be the "wrong" target, so the AI could be complete crap and still have the desired effect. As long as they could make it rack up a high body count and generate a lot of fear, it would be considered a great success.
My favorite was a newspaper article I read sometime in the late 80's announcing: "Scientists discover that all food causes cancer!"
It was amusing, but it was also a pretty good article explaining that if you took a bunch of lab rats and raised them on a diet of a concentrated form of one specific type of food (and allowed them to eat nothing else), they pretty much always developed cancer and died at a significantly higher rate. It then pointed out that a number of recent articles claiming various foods caused cancer had cited studies that did exactly that.
Anyone have a JavaScript OpenCL/CUDA/Vulkan plugin handy to use for this?;-)
TBH, I imagine they would want to use the asm.js subset for this. I'm not sure what the status is for browsers compiling it, but basic math operations would definitely be covered in the asm.js subset. Sure it wouldn't be GPU-powered, but these days most visitors would be using cell phones, tablets, or cheap netbooks/laptops with cheap integrated graphics.
IMO, the worst thing about this wouldn't be when it happened on a laptop or desktop. It would be when it drained the battery on my cell phone (especially if it could keep chugging along when I put my phone to sleep while a web page was up).
How could we possibly be certain that we could control a Yellowstone eruption? The first attempt to "prick" Yellowstone could trigger a much larger eruption and wipe out human civilization. Even if you could test various methods on smaller volcanoes with (relative) safety, there's no guarantee that the same methods would work the same on Yellowstone's scale.
I think it would be better to set up several large geo-thermal power stations surrounding it and export cheap electricity to other states. It would be like adding several large heat sinks to drain away heat 24/7. I have no idea whether it would help enough, but I doubt it would hurt as much as a "prick". If we have an economic incentive to keep doing it (and even to increase capacity over time), the project will never run out of funding (or be de-funded by the next administration that gets voted in). That could make it a viable long-term solution to help prevent (or at least delay) an eruption for a really long time.
Slashdot Mirror
"People have been trading sex for advancement for all of human history."
While that is true for plenty of women who start doing it on their own...
"Whores are _not_ victims, they are co conspirators."
Try telling that to the kids and teens who get kidnapped, sold, beaten, drugged, and forced into it. Or, more to the point, try telling that to the parents of some of those kids.
Let's see:
1) "teenage fans" - I didn't see a specific age range, but since they didn't specify "young adults", it sounds likely that some of these teens were underage, in which case inappropriate touching would definitely be criminal (unless you're an elected official or running for office in the US).
2) "touched them inappropriately" - Likely if someone reported that, it means he didn't ask first. You could argue that touching equates to "making a pass", but I don't think that argument would hold up in court these days.
Actually, the addictive games ARE mining the shit out of their players. They gave psychologists prominent positions in game design with the specific goal of keeping players addicted for as long as possible, and the psychologists requested very detailed tracking to help figure out what was working and what wasn't. It was akin to performing psyc experiments on the players. Sure when it comes to mining, they only had access to in-game contacts (where the contacts in FaceBook are RL contacts), but I believe far more people had lives ruined due to addiction to games like WoW than to FaceBook. Most of that would be due to flunking out of school/college, but in some cases jobs and spouses were lost, and in some really extreme cases theft/suicide/murders. That puts it close to the level as actual alcohol/drug addictions. Yes I know it's really not the same, but that seemed to be their goal, and they came pretty close.
When it comes to privacy, IMO visiting FaceBook is no different from visiting a physical store. When you go to WalMart, they have hundreds of security cameras filming your every move. They try to track how often you shop there and what you buy. They collect as much as they can about anyone who walks into their store or shops at walmart.com, and they use it to figure out what works and what doesn't just like the WoW designers did. Why should FaceBook not be allowed to do what the other big companies are doing? (Actually, even the small companies are doing it, they're just more inept at it and less likely to adequately protect really sensitive information like your credit card number.)
"There needs to be a US law that a person can request all the data a company has collected about you."
No, there really doesn't. That law wouldn't stop companies from collecting it. All it would accomplish is making it easier for other people to access that information. The worst thing I've heard about FaceBook is that some potential employers use it to dig up reasons not to hire you (or existing employers dig up reasons to fire you). Although in some cases instead of firing, it results in discrimination, blackmail, or sexual harassment. That's not a problem with FaceBook though, it's a problem with the employers. Imagine your employer being able to access all of WalMart's video footage of you. It really is the same thing. It is completely immoral when employers do that, and where it is not illegal with extremely harsh penalties, then lawmakers should correct that ASAP. Employees are expected to keep their personal lives out of the workplace because it is extremely inappropriate. It is even worse for employers to force their way across that boundary, and it wouldn't be hard for them to impersonate you to exploit that law you suggested. They gather all the info they would need to do that when you apply.
Cow Clicker! IMO this was a much better commentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Seriously though, what about WoW? What about EverCrack (as its own players referred to it half-jokingly)? What about the new e-Sports games like LoL, Dota2, or any multiplayer game that does its best to avoid falling into obscurity? What about TV shows that do their best to try to keep viewers hooked? What about Hollywood trying to keep people coming back in to see movies?
What company goes out of their way to make a product that no one likes very much (and that will fail as a result of it)? He'd be better off blaming people for being sheep than for blaming a company trying to provide the best possible service/product. It's what companies do. No one is forcing them to sign up, to spend all their time on it, to get hooked on "likes" (or people clicking their cows).
Not today he won't:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
I agree except for the "became stupid" part. I think "became greedy" is more accurate. Like another poster who replied to this, I filter out 3rd-party vendors, but where NewEgg used to be the best deal around for parts, they haven't been for a long time.
How often do you order things and then decide you don't need/want them? I don't think I've ever returned anything to NewEgg except for one DOA part and one motherboard where they accidentally shipped me the wrong model. Neither cost me anything to return for the correct/working part (except a small amount of time).
I agree. Although the one "unique" feature I would like to see the most in an Android phone is a USB port that will last as long as the rest of the phone does. My latest Android is a Nexus 5x. It's barely 1 year old, the phone still works great, but the USB cable won't stay plugged in if someone breathes on it. Every Android phone I've ever had has eventually had the same problem, so I try to be really careful when plugging/unplugging it, but it didn't help. I had also hoped that either the Google-branded phone or the change to USB-C would help with that problem, but no such luck.
I may try a magnetic cable, but I'm worried it will end up falling into one of these categories: https://xkcd.com/1892/
This brings us one step closer to the world of "Ready Player One". On the plus side, if we end up in that big of an energy crisis, we'll already have this technology available before it gets to the point where no one but the top 1% can afford to travel anywhere. Maybe we could look at figuring out the best way to stack trailers on top of each other next.
"Besides, did you know %60 of Apple's income actually goes to the software engineers in Germany?"
Apple has pretty high profit margins. Profit (by its very nature) doesn't go to ANY employees. There's no way 60% of all Apple's income goes to pay employee salaries, much less any one sub-group of its employees.
"It's because some idiot politician, a victim of the Peter Principle, thinks M$ is giving them a deal"
That's a pretty ignorant statement considering they were "often confronted with major difficulties and additional costs when it comes to acquiring and operating professional application software" (major being the key word there). It seems pretty cut-and-dry to me. They used M$ before Linux. They knew exactly what the TCO of Windows was (including all the viruses and other problems they had) because they had used it for many years and could go back and study the IT budgets for those years. They thought Linux would have a significantly lower TCO, and they liked the improved security and privacy it would give them, so they made the switch.
After they switched, they got severely burned by budget over-runs. It was so severe that, even though they dislike M$ and they will lose face admitting they were wrong and switching back, they still consider it the lesser of evils. The bean-counters made this decision (or provided the numbers for the higher-ups to make it), and in this case it sounds like the bean-counters are right. I'm not a fan of M$, but throwing good money after bad is just stupid.
I have a smartphone right now, but I'm fine with using wifi and hardly ever use it as a phone, so I have a "dumb" phone plan. I pay around $3-$5/month on T-Mobile for emergency/family calls only, and its primary uses are:
Calendar and Alarm Clock (best smart-phone features ever) ;-)
Camera (keeps me from having to carry an extra device when I need one)
Flashlight (ditto, plus never have a hard time finding a working flashlight anymore)
E-reader (my entire book library fits in my pocket)
Music player (ditto for my music library)
Weather radar, traffic, and route checker (from wifi before I drive somewhere)
GPS (without wifi while I'm driving somewhere)
IM/email (rarely, but it'll do in a pinch)
YouTube/Fark/etc. (rarely, when I have wifi and am in the mood)
Grocery list tracker (damn handy for checking stuff off while shopping)
Graphing calculator (for helping the kids with high school math homework
One more way for my wife to bug me (she gets upset if I answer while driving, but she only calls me on it while I'm driving, and she gets even more upset if I don't answer)
I probably missed a few uses. Technically that last one counts as a "phone" use, but I don't want to count it because when that happens, I find myself really wishing it wasn't a phone.
As a side note, technically I don't have a "hands-free" system for the car, but I can still make calls with no hands. It's pretty slick to be able to say "OK, Google. Call my daughter on speakerphone." No Internet access is needed for that, which is nice (last I'd heard, Siri required a data plan to do that).
Anyway, to me all of that is worth buying a low-to-mid-range Android unlocked with no contract, and then getting the $3/month plan from T-Mobile. I really wish they had a mid-range Android with a really sharp camera in it instead of doing everything they can to push the prices even higher, but you can't have everything. ;-)
My next phone will be two cans connected by a string.
I know, and you're nit-picking. I actually attend a Quaker church as an atheist attender (some Quaker churches are ok with that, some are not), so I may know quite a bit more about them than you do. But then again, for all I know you may be a birth-right Quaker. Regardless, exceptions like that do not prove the rule. You could've made a better point with the fact that the Quaker church is split into 3 different branches that can't seem to agree with each other. One of the branches is even evangelical, and seems to have little in common with the other 2 except for the name. Either way, their primary tenet is peace, and the Quakers I know (first-hand, not read about) express plenty of regret and embarrassment over Nixon and his role in Vietnam.
As far as Christians go, IMO Quakers are by far the nicest, the most welcoming, and have the most religious integrity. They're actually quite content to discuss different views and beliefs with members of other religions (including atheism), and even respect those other views and beliefs as long as you're not attending to disrespect theirs. Naturally that's not true for every member of every Quaker church (definitely not the evangelical branch), and everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I'm sure I would find similar issues and differences if I took a closer look at Buddhism. As with anything else in life that's not black-and-white (and very little seems to be), YMMV.
Correction: You really only need to type the letter "i" to have Internet Explorer show up at the top of the list (unless you've installed a bunch of other stuff that starts with an "i").
That's not true at all. Granted, the only reason it's not true is that there are more than 6 people in the world with Windows 10 who can't figure out how to either:
1) Click the start button and type the letters "i" and then "e".
2) Type "Chrome" or "Firefox" into Edge's search bar.
Valid point. I was actually half-joking when I mentioned pacifist religions. Atheism seems to be the best option as far as religion goes. I'm not saying all atheists would be peaceful, but it would remove one very common excuse people use for violence.
But if you feel it's important to be Christian with a capital C, you could still be a Quaker. Yes, another half-joke.
That's bullshit for the most part. This article isn't about detailed info like our social security and credit card numbers. It's about big data, aggregated summaries of large amounts of data, not financial details for individuals stolen from Equifax, Target, Home Depot, etc.
Let's say Google sells a summary of all our surfing habits to another company. They're not selling "us". We're still here. We're not impacted in any way, and that data is completely useless to us. So that other company uses that data to improve a web site that few of us will ever visit. The ones of us who do might be happy that the web site doesn't suck. Pardon me if I don't feel like I've been "raped" when Google does that. Pardon me if I don't even want a check for $0.02 in recompense for my unknowing "contribution".
It's actually more insidious when companies gather data for themselves, like the way Amazon uses the data from us visiting their own site to try to maximize sales and profit, but that's no different from my grocery store keeping track of how well certain ads and displays work and tweaking them to try to boost sales. It's not a "new" sales tactic, and they're not unfairly using our data.
"They operate on the belief that women are eternal children."
Hmm, maybe they're onto something. Maybe it's more accurate to say that liberals are eternal children, and women tend to be strongly liberal, ergo...
Before the flame war starts and the conservatives try to mod me up while the liberals try to mod me down, it's a joke. I vote liberal, my wife is liberal, and I have no problem with making a joke at my own expense (or my wife's ;-). If you have a problem with it, maybe the joke hit too close to home, in which case you may have bigger problems than my poor jokes.
Anyway, I often feel the biggest problem with conservatives is that they never lighten up about anything. Too often they act like the stereotypical "angry old white men". So if you're liberal (or a woman) and feel insulted by this, don't act like an angry old white conservative man. Lighten up and take the joke the way it was intended.
Well, you can still be attacked and killed for taking that position publicly in certain areas here in the US, in the same way you can still be attacked and killed for being black. It may not be as common as it used to be, but it still happens, and it probably will as long as religious dogma is still around (unless everyone switches to a pacifist religion like Buddhist, Quaker, etc., but IMO it's more likely for people to give up religion completely than to do that).
Anyway, my point is that it's still risky, even if it's not considered radical anymore.
While I agree it's not as good as a "real" BMI, it's better than the laser keyboard in a few ways:
1) It would work with a prosthetic limb if your hand had to be amputated. Allow these signals to control it, and even if your brain doesn't send it the right signals initially, the human brain is actually really good at adapting to changes like that.
2) TFA: "You could be blasting a hundred words a minute on your smart phone with your hands in your pockets." I'm not sure how accurate that is, but it still sounds like quite a step up from the laser keyboard. Apparently your fingers still need to twitch, but don't need to complete the full range of movement needed for a keypress. So it might be useful for people who still have hands but have problems (e.g. carpal tunnel, arthritis), or perhaps who just can't stand to type on those damn cell phone keypads. ;-)
And now we get "modern" C++ developers replacing messes like that with a ludicrous number of levels of abstraction with template arguments, conditional template code paths, variadic templates, etc. Although I suppose when something goes wrong with one of those you can step through it with a debugger. That's much more of a hassle with C macros.
Anyway, every time you give programmers a shiny new hammer, a certain percentage of them will always think it's the shiniest and best hammer ever, and therefore should be used for everything. Need to fix a leaky faucet? Hammer time! It doesn't matter that a hammer is the worst possible tool for the job, we can just tear the whole thing down and replace it with something that needs to be built with the shiny new hammer!
I wonder if the guy you're talking about used to work with a much older language (or perhaps assembler). He was probably ecstatic when he moved up to C, and thrilled that it had a rich macro environment. ;-)
I think by now most slashdotters realize that Elon is a bit of an asshat. In theory, military leaders could decide to put too much faith in AI-driven tanks, bombers, etc. too soon, but while it may make an interesting plot device in a book or a movie, IRL military leaders are much more risk-averse (which is definitely a good thing).
When it comes to AI, I would be more worried about terrorists trying to build a deadly version of this:
https://boingboing.net/2012/03...
It's not like a suicide bomber would consider any target something like this might shoot to be the "wrong" target, so the AI could be complete crap and still have the desired effect. As long as they could make it rack up a high body count and generate a lot of fear, it would be considered a great success.
My favorite was a newspaper article I read sometime in the late 80's announcing: "Scientists discover that all food causes cancer!"
It was amusing, but it was also a pretty good article explaining that if you took a bunch of lab rats and raised them on a diet of a concentrated form of one specific type of food (and allowed them to eat nothing else), they pretty much always developed cancer and died at a significantly higher rate. It then pointed out that a number of recent articles claiming various foods caused cancer had cited studies that did exactly that.
Anyone have a JavaScript OpenCL/CUDA/Vulkan plugin handy to use for this? ;-)
TBH, I imagine they would want to use the asm.js subset for this. I'm not sure what the status is for browsers compiling it, but basic math operations would definitely be covered in the asm.js subset. Sure it wouldn't be GPU-powered, but these days most visitors would be using cell phones, tablets, or cheap netbooks/laptops with cheap integrated graphics.
IMO, the worst thing about this wouldn't be when it happened on a laptop or desktop. It would be when it drained the battery on my cell phone (especially if it could keep chugging along when I put my phone to sleep while a web page was up).
How could we possibly be certain that we could control a Yellowstone eruption? The first attempt to "prick" Yellowstone could trigger a much larger eruption and wipe out human civilization. Even if you could test various methods on smaller volcanoes with (relative) safety, there's no guarantee that the same methods would work the same on Yellowstone's scale.
I think it would be better to set up several large geo-thermal power stations surrounding it and export cheap electricity to other states. It would be like adding several large heat sinks to drain away heat 24/7. I have no idea whether it would help enough, but I doubt it would hurt as much as a "prick". If we have an economic incentive to keep doing it (and even to increase capacity over time), the project will never run out of funding (or be de-funded by the next administration that gets voted in). That could make it a viable long-term solution to help prevent (or at least delay) an eruption for a really long time.