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User: ebonum

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Comments · 348

  1. Someone doesn't want to lose fee money on Tenants Outraged Over New York Landlord's Plan To Install Facial Recognition Technology (gothamist.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When I lived in NYC, I knew lots of people renting "rent-regulated apartments". One worked at Goldman for 200K+ a year. It was a good deal. The person with the apartment pocked the rent spread each month. The Goldman guy paid about 75% or 80% of full market value and was able to save each month to buy an apartment.

    If you have a NYC rent stabilized apartment, market forces push you very hard to live outside the city and sublet. I'm going to guess the people who were subletting, the leasors, were not paying taxes. They were well motivated to not get caught.

    If the goal is to give poor people something for free, letting them sublet accomplishes that goal. Doubly so if they skip taxes.

  2. Nothing to see here on Airline Passenger Walked Past Security With a Loaded Gun Magazine (apnews.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Reality: He would have gotten on the plane had a crappy meal, a fraction of a can of Coke(tm) and arrived at his destination. A disaster was not averted. 100's of lives were not saved. A government rule was enforced. Nothing more.

    TSA headline: Our agent heroes saved you AGAIN! Countless lives saved and counting. btw. We demanddeserve another 10 billion in funding.

  3. Artificial horizon? on The Other Recent Deadly Boeing Crash No One Is Talking About (nymag.com) · · Score: 2

    If you look at it and you are headed down (and you have good airspeed), you don't need to keep trying to nose down - regardless of what your senses are telling you.

    What about looking at how the altimeter is changing?

    The artificial horizon gives you a lot of information when your sense of direction is playing tricks on you (in the clouds and feeling like you are going up,down, rolling, etc.)

  4. Complexity is awesome! on USB 4 Will Support Thunderbolt and Double the Speed of USB 3.2 (engadget.com) · · Score: 2

    One cord to rule them all!

    What I really need to know is if it will support 3 phase 480V to run my HAAS CNC?

  5. Computerized Medical Records on Singapore HIV Registry Data Leaked Online in Health Breach (bbc.com) · · Score: 0, Troll

    Data wants to be free. Everyone should assume that digital medical records have a non-zero chance of getting out. If you don't want your medical records online, don't agree to digital medical records.

  6. Year of Experience on Nearly Half of Game Developers Want To Unionize (engadget.com) · · Score: -1

    You have two years experience. You get paid $72,000/year.

    But I do twice the work of the old fart over there making 155k.

    Sorry. Union rules. When you have 20 years experience, you too can make 155k/yr.

  7. Re:Will the electronic receipts fade like the pape on California Lawmaker Wants to Ban Paper Receipts, Require Digital Ones (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Photocopy the receipt a day or two after purchase and staple the receipt to the copy before the paper receipt fades.

    From someone who gets audited and passes. Auguring with the IRS never goes well, and they don't give a damn if you are right. If you are right, you get the privilege of paying an attorney to prove you are right.

  8. No way. Now how. on California Lawmaker Wants to Ban Paper Receipts, Require Digital Ones (cnbc.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    I need a receipt and there is no way in H*** you are getting my email.

  9. I saw an Arquillian Battle Cruiser near JFK!

    Shut it down!

  10. Yawn. Alibaba did $30.8 billion in one day. on Cyber Monday Is Set To Be a $7.8 Billion Day, Breaking Online Records (usatoday.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    On November 11th, 2018.
    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/1...

  11. One Purpose on 'Windows Isn't a Service, It's an Operating System' (howtogeek.com) · · Score: 2

    Cigarette is to "nicotine delivery device" as Windows OS is to cash delivery machine!

  12. Bring an Android phone into Apple HQ, and see how well that works out for you!

  13. Of Printers and Cars on Tech To Blame For Ever-Growing Car Repair Costs, AAA Says (cnet.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I would be interested in knowing the breakdown of an automaker's sources of profit.
    Are we now to a point where they sell a $25k car at a loss. However, they know the odds of a fender-bender are high, and it will cost the automaker $800 for the $8,000 repair.

    Is the model moving to something closer to inkjet printers, banks and airlines? Get you in the door cheap, then nail you on the parts or fees.

    The interactions I've had with people from parts suppliers indicate the mark-ups the automakers put on parts are insane.

  14. Douglas Adams Quote on How the Finnish Survive Without Small Talk (bbc.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    “It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die."

    After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.”

    - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

  15. How is this news? on French Officer Caught Selling Access To State Surveillance System On the Darkweb (zdnet.com) · · Score: 4, Funny

    My complete surprise. NEVER saw this one coming.

    Let's see. About 10 million Slashdot posters have been predicting this.

  16. No I in AI on Machine Learning Confronts the Elephant in the Room (quantamagazine.org) · · Score: -1

    There is no intelligence in AI whatsoever. These are programs that can be broken down into if statements, while's, etc. It might be hard to for a human to read the exe or follow the logic, but it is still a computer program.

    Humans can understand the whole picture. An "AI" algorithm matches something in a picture to something it has been previously trained/programmed to match. Humans learn WHY a class of somethings behaves a certain way. Humans are then able to quickly and accurately apply the WHY to new situations. Algos are not there. Yet.

    Add enough if statements and you might get an algo/program to give the illusion of intelligence. Program an "AI" program with a million pictures of elephants with correct answers. Then give the program a new picture of an elephant, odds are it can classify the picture based on prior programming and appear intelligent. Have a program play a game a billion times a second for a week with lots of random moves, and it will find solutions humans missed. Try this: Don't let the AI programmer/researcher know anything about a game in advance. Then let the "AI" program play the game once. Let a human play the game once. Then see who wins. The human or the program?

  17. Understanding what the abc conjecture states takes effort. Proving it...
    A reminder of just how different a real mathematician's mind is from the rest of us.

  18. I grew up without a computer. In college, computers were mostly for word processing. Spell check ensured that, to this day, I have never learned to spell. After college, I learned to code. I read a lot of books such as Scott Meyers, Aho, Abelson and Sussman, etc. Programmed in NYC at major banks. After a very rough first year, I was good to go. You can learn things such as linear algebra, group theory, context-free grammars, etc. without ever looking at a computer.

    There is ZERO need to have a digital device to learn everything you need.

  19. Growing up, the men who built the bomb had access to zero digital devices. They were SOOO disadvantaged! It is amazing they could even match their socks. As kids, they must have all thought, "I can't learn anything. I don't have the iPad XXX."

  20. So if I manage to hack po-dunk police force's systems, I can data straight from Apple?

  21. Fair Question: Did Clinton meddle in the Russian election?

  22. US Interference on Facebook Has Identified Ongoing Political Influence Campaign (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    So if Facebook finds an American firm working on Brexit or the CIA trying to spread disinformation in Egypt, are we going to get a headline when Facebook uncovers it?

  23. AT&T Partnership/Investment on Magic Leap Finally Demoed Its Headset And It Is 'Disappointing' (digg.com) · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All other VR companies will have to pay oppressive fees for "fast lanes".

    Magic Leap doesn't have to work well. It has work well enough and be the only choice.

  24. From here, does Amazon actively help search for, turn in and prosecute every little online seller? Breaking tax laws usually results in disproportionately harsh penalties. If you are a few months late on a state's sales tax, a nice deputy of the law will lock your doors.

    At the same time, if you sell everything through Amazon, they will ensure compliance with the 1000's to 10,000's of state sales tax rules and quirks. In some cases, even within the same zip code, you have to know what side of a road someone is on to know the correct state sales tax rules to apply.

  25. Regulations on The Rise of the Pointless Job (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    What about all the people devoted to complying with pointless regulations?