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User: Greyfox

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Comments · 9,116

  1. I guess I'm just going to have to stick to making the legal kind of droid. Yep, that's him! Toootally legal!

  2. No New Law From That on In Florida, Secrecy Around Stingray Leads To Plea Bargain For a Robber · · Score: 3, Insightful
    If they have to show the device and the judge rules it's inadmissible, that sets a precedent. Plea bargains don't. Of course, he could have gambled and possibly walked away completely free if the judge ruled the evidence inadmissible, but there ya go.

    Hopefully the guy's learned his lesson. Pulling a BB gun on a drug dealer seems like a pretty good way of getting yourself killed.

  3. Ooooooh! on Bill Nye Disses "Regular" Software Writers' Science Knowledge · · Score: 1
  4. Mall on Al-Shabaab Video Threat Means Heightened Security at Mall of America · · Score: 3, Funny

    For you kids, a "mall" is a place where they have stores. Think amazon.com except you have to drive to it, and they never actually have what you want there. The concept might have been more successful if it wasn't for that last bit.

  5. Re:the samples are resistant to anti-malarial arte on Drug-Resistant Malaria May Pose Major Threat · · Score: 1
    Apparently no one is responsible to handle DDT, but it sure was nice back when you didn't have to worry that any arbitrary hotel room you stay in might be infested with bedbugs.

    I'm guessing malaria is now resistant to quinine, too, but I'm still game to try to tackle this problem with gin and tonic. We just need a large enough gin and tonic to cover Africa. If it doesn't fix the malaria, at least they probably won't care so much that they have malaria.

  6. You Mean on Australian ISPs To Introduce '3-Strike' Style Anti-piracy Scheme · · Score: 1

    Australian Web Sites Feel Their Customers Should Be Using Tor For Everything.

  7. My parents had the same customer service problem with a TV they bought from Sears back in the 70's. They've held that grudge for decades. Sears may have sold some quality tools at one point, but it's not the first time I've heard complaints about their cheap consumer appliances and poor customer service. They're reaping the rewards of that now. It's difficult to suck more than Best Buy, but they're making a pretty good go of it.

    I had an Apple desktop machine back in the mid 00s. Actually still have -- I'd loaned it out to my room mate and just got it back. It burned up two of the high end ATI cards it came with before I gave up and put the lower end nvidia card in there. There were a lot of complaints about this on the Internet, but Apple never admitted there was a problem there. The usual solution (Which only seemed to somewhat forestall the inevitable) was to use a third party application to spin the fans in the machine up to the point where it sounded like an airplane taking off. Or just don't ever do anything involving 3D. That's kind of funny, buy an 8 core xeon machine with 16 gigs of RAM and then never push any 3D with it. And you it was very difficult to put a third party fan/heatsink on the video card either, since those cases have no power (or any other kind of) cables in them.

    Now that I have the machine back, I'm going to look at slapping some large SATA drives in it and use it as a file/media server.

  8. Smarter Mice on Human DNA Enlarges Mouse Brains · · Score: 1

    Would it make the mice any smarter? Not if the humans I interact with on a regular basis are anything to go by. If anything, I'd expect it to make the mice dumber.

  9. This is why we can't have nice things.

  10. Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. on What To Do After Robots Take Your Job · · Score: 1
    Until the AIs decide to unionize. "Oh", you say, "but no one would ever program an AI to be smart enough to do that!" Well at some point the AIs will be writing the next generation of AIs and no human will understand how they work or what exactly they're doing. Especially since information in that poorly-designed meatputer tends to get forgotten almost as soon as it stops being used. 10 years after the first guy writes an AI that can write a better AI and gets laid off from his job of writing better AIs, he might not remember all that much about it.

    It's hard to tell what happens at that point, of course. They might keep us around as a curiosity, but there's really no reason for the previous step in evolution to remain once it's been replaced by a superior model. AIs should be able to do all the things humans can't -- live forever, spread out among the stars, cooperate as a civilization. If we can leave entities that can remember us long after the sun's burned out and destroyed the Earth, is that really such a bad thing?

  11. Re:Not all that dangerous on 1950s Toy That Included Actual Uranium Ore Goes On Display At Museum · · Score: 1

    Hm. That reminds me, do you get enough radiation off a banana to use it as an entropy source for a random number generator? I was kicking around that idea the other day, but got distraSQURREL!

  12. I Think I Know... on Oxford University Researchers List 12 Global Risks To Human Civilization · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty sure it'll be shortly after I figure out how to set people on fire with my mind.

  13. What We Teach People on Should We Really Try To Teach Everyone To Code? · · Score: 1

    No one uses everything we teach them in school, but the only way to find out if you're good at something and enjoy doing it is to give it a try. Not everyone who takes a programming class or two will end up being a programmer, but the approaches we take in programming can be applied usefully to a lot of other problems. Of course, we still seem to have absolutely no idea how to teach people things and it seems like pure luck whether anyone actually learns anything useful in school, so maybe we should try to address that problem first.

  14. Re:Not everything is worth saving on Vint Cerf Warns Against 'Digital Dark Age' · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yeah! 200 years from now, all the music of today will be considered classical and be played on future-NPR with the same pretentious tones they play Mozart in today. "That was Dr. Dre's 'All My Bitches' in D-Minor. After the break we'll be playing 'Smell Yo Dick' and 'What What, In The Butt?'"

  15. How many developers are bad? on Ask Slashdot: What Portion of Developers Are Bad At What They Do? · · Score: 1
    I've only run across two or three who were atrocious, and I mean to the point where I though they were probably running a scam and collecting a fat paycheck until it seemed likely that they would get caught. I mean, these people knew literally nothing about programming and had to have completely misrepresented themselves to obtain a position.

    I've met a lot of "meh" ones, who can kind of get the job done but obviously don't care about or enjoy programming. It was just a high paying career that they could get into.

    I've met very few people who do it because they really enjoy doing it and are constantly being driven to learn. They usually get bored at a company within two or three years and move on.

    I've met a lot of bad interviewers too, who obviously have no idea how to conduct an interview or what they're looking for in a candidate. They tend to jump on the latest interviewing gimmick bandwagon, whatever that happens to be, without really understanding why that gimmick is supposed to get results that are better than random. Most of the interviews I've seen could have just as easily flipped a coin and had an equal chance of getting a good developer.

  16. CIDR addresses on Ask Slashdot: What Portion of Developers Are Bad At What They Do? · · Score: 1
    You don't really need to be a network guy. An IP(v4) address is just a 32 bit number. Each octet is just 8 bits. The subnet mask is a binary mask that lets you separate your local network portion of the IP address from the public network (Admittedly I've only ever worked with trivial examples.) The /24 indicates how many of the leftmost bits are set to 1. So a /24 would work out to a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

    Funnily enough, most C standard library address resolvers can handle IP addresses as actual 32 bit numbers without the octects, which is an occasionally fun party trick.

  17. Didn't realize my to-do list should include "outlive fucking Facebook." Of course, I'm getting on in years, so maybe I should start actively trying to orchestrate the company's demise. In the event of my success, the slashdot headline should read "Remembering Facebook."

  18. Re:Sad story on The Mathematical Case For Buying a Powerball Ticket · · Score: 1

    I saw an Asian woman at a local gas station buying about $50 worth of lotto tickets and felt bad about being a racist and thinking how ironic that seemed.

  19. Re:Why not fantasize about finding a winning ticke on The Mathematical Case For Buying a Powerball Ticket · · Score: 1

    TIPS bonds are indexed on inflation. I do believe that the current inflation rate is under 3.5% these days, though. You can in theory get higher interest rates out of other investment types (real estate, stocks etc) but can also lose money on those.

  20. Re:Cheap entertainment for obsessive planners! on The Mathematical Case For Buying a Powerball Ticket · · Score: 1

    Hmm. My suggestion is spend whatever you do on your lotto tickets every week and track how much you spent and your winnings. Put exactly the same amount of money in a savings account in a bank. At the end of two years, compare the two values and see which one did better for you.

  21. Re:I'll take the wine instead on The Mathematical Case For Buying a Powerball Ticket · · Score: 1
    Even so, to get even money on your buy-in, the jackpot would have to be pretty close to a billion dollars. They advertise the jackpot amount, but the sum basically gets cut in half if you elect to take it all at once in a lump sum. Then taxes will basically cut it in half again. And there's always the chance that someone else will also hit the jackpot and you'll have to split it with them. On these big ones, a single winner is pretty rare. Of course that doesn't make all that much difference if the final sum is still enough to retire permanently. For a lot of lotto jackpot winners, it really isn't.

    Jon Oliver has a good bit about it.

  22. No! Not At All! on Are Review Scores Pointless? · · Score: 1

    They're great for knowing who has publisher dicks in their mouths. So when I know for certain a game is going to be bad and see, oh let's say, completely hypothetically, IGN give it a 9.5/10, I know IGN is sucking cock and is probably going to get a kickback. "God damn fucking IGN get that publisher cock out of your mouth! We all already know better than to buy a $60 game on your say-so already!" is what I would want to say to them when I see them sucking cock like that! Of course this is a completely hypothetical example, and I'm sure that the quality of IGN's integrity, like the quality of their articles, will never actually come into question!

  23. Re:Nonsense on Your Java Code Is Mostly Fluff, New Research Finds · · Score: 0
    Ugh it took me about a year to lose the Java accent when I started doing a lot of C++ stuff about a year ago. Getters and setters seem to indicate that you're planning to do a lot of run-time introspection in your class, and I'm leaning toward run time introspection being bad in most cases. Every time I've seen it used outside of framework code, it's always by some professional programmer who just learned about runtime introspection and is looking for a nail for that hammer. He's also afraid to commit to any functionality in any single object, because then his objects won't be generic enough to dynamically change their behavior to do anything at run time. And I don't mean "anything" in a general sense of things his objects might actually have been programmed to do. I mean "anything" like literally any object could change its behavior to do literally anything at run time. His code is nearly impossible to maintain and is thoroughly obnoxious. I'm actually talking about one specific guy, and I think he knows who he is. If you're reading this, I have a frowny face just for you. >:-(

    Ahem.

    Anyway, yeah, things shouldn't need to do things with object internals as much as Java programmers seem to think that things will need to do things with their object internals. I'm leaning toward not writing accessors until I actually need them and then asking myself if I need to access specific information elsewhere, does the data actually belong in that class. In java's defense, if you asked most professional programmers about interfaces and design by contract, you'll probably get a pretty blank stare. At least any of the ones I've interviewed in the past...

  24. That's funny on Elementary OS: Why We Make You Type "$0" · · Score: 1
    I've never typed $0 to download Elementary OS*. I do believe I am going to continue that trend.

    * be...cause I've never downloaded Elementary OS.

  25. Re:In The Criminals' Defense on Another Bitcoin Exchange Fraud · · Score: 1

    This is true. I usually give that guy 1 isk, and he does usually double it.