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User: naasking

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  1. Re:For those who can read... on US Appeals Court Says NSA Phone Surveillance Is Not Authorized By Congress · · Score: 1

    It's information about me, but it belongs to the phone company, and they have it.

    Does the phone company have ownership over data about you? Should it? A person's "house, papers, and effects" recognizes a person's property rights. It doesn't seem unreasonable that use of a service, particularly a common carrier, generates new "papers and effects" that ought to be considered personal property.

    For instance, we already recognize a person's right to provacy protection over their medical records, even though by your argument, hospitals and doctors "own" those records in a very similar way a phone company "owns" your metadata.

  2. Re:We're so screwed. on US Appeals Court Says NSA Phone Surveillance Is Not Authorized By Congress · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You've tasked these loyal people with a job to do in order to keep the USA and its citizens safe, and then removed the tools they need to do the job effectively.

    Except there's no proof that these tools are actually effective, and there are plenty of arguments made by experts that they cannot possibly be effective (too many false positives ties up scarce investigative resources). So I reject your whole premise.

  3. Proof of normal distribution? on The Programming Talent Myth · · Score: 1

    If you could measure programming ability somehow, its curve would look like the normal distribution.

    Would it? I think that's probably true, but I haven't seen any real evidence of that claim.

  4. Re:This is not a photon drive on New Test Supports NASA's Controversial EM Drive · · Score: 1

    Bzzt. Wrong. Those conjectures were from from Paul March who is "an engineer at NASA Eagleworks". None of the authors are named March.

    The article text you quoted is completely ambiguous as to where "EM Drive propulsion conjectures" come from. If March had his own theory, then we'd be hearing about it more than the EM drive inventors' theory. I haven't. You find me the post where he claims to have this theory in the megathread the article was based on, and I'll concede the point.

    I see no signs of such evidence here.

    There is sufficient evidence of an anomolous result. Whether this result can be accounted for by conventional physics, either due to experimental error or because of some hitherto untested combination of physical mechanisms, remains to be seen.

  5. Re:This is not a photon drive on New Test Supports NASA's Controversial EM Drive · · Score: 1

    Those conjectures are based on the author's explanations of the mechanism, which we already know to be largely bunk.

    Compared to the actual momentum imparted by 1kW worth of photons, which is what current physics suggests would be the only source of momentum, the amount of force measured is much more significant. Hence, fairly efficient by comparison.

    Finally note that the one experiment that got close to one Newton/kW was not done in a vacuum.

    The NASA tests measured the same force in both vacuum and non-vacuum environments. Any results from China are suspect since falsification is much more rampant there.

  6. Re:This is not a photon drive on New Test Supports NASA's Controversial EM Drive · · Score: 1

    They put in metric ton-loads of energy and measure a very small effect. They say they will need to increase the efficiency by many orders of magnitude to create a practical device. I say they probably made a mistake somewhere and the tiny effect they measured is either noise or due to something else they haven't yet accounted for.

    They didn't actually put in that much energy compared to the thrust they measured. If the tiny effect is what you're worried about, then a proper metric ton-load of energy would immediately point out any error.

  7. Re:This again? on New Test Supports NASA's Controversial EM Drive · · Score: 1

    Let's see: we can violate conservation of momentum by invoking some sort of vaguely defined quantum woo.

    If the observations are confirmed and not explained (which is currently the case), there's still something to talk about. So yes, this again.

  8. Re:You do not discharge anger from engaging in it on Tech Credited With Reducing Nigerian Election Death Toll · · Score: 1

    The experiment excluded a certain class of catharsis theories. Fortunately, it's hardly the only such experiment. Catharsis theory has basically no evidence supporting it at this point, and enough evidence against it that it's pretty safe to say that indulging your anger does not "expend it" in any meaningful sense.

  9. Re:You do not discharge anger from engaging in it on Tech Credited With Reducing Nigerian Election Death Toll · · Score: 3, Informative

    You don't prove your point by mentioning people who have steroid rage. Normal people can absolutely get their anger out by spending some time with a punching bag.

    Wrong.

  10. Re:ignorant hypocrites on The Programmers Who Want To Get Rid of Software Estimates · · Score: 2

    You now have min, max, and average times for a maze of that size/complexity

    Estimating the size/complexity of a software project is exactly where all the error lies. The original quote was correct that it's like solving a maze, you just assumed they were talking about mazes on paper that you could estimate size and complexity at a glance. No, this is a full sized maze that you walk through and have no idea how deep and complex it is.

  11. These agreements are not void yet? on A123 Sues Apple For Poaching Employees · · Score: 1

    Didn't Apple just lose a suit over the legality of noncompete and nonsolicit agreements?

  12. Re:Did he read it? on Game Theory Calls Cooperation Into Question · · Score: 1

    It does not claim (as I understand it) to represent every scenario, merely a special case of a specific scenario. Explicitly, it requires the organism to have enough intelligence to remember what happened in previous games, so a bacteria without memory is not covered under this model. The strategy requires multiple rounds be played.

    Irrelevant. Genes that survive are the "memory" and successive generations are the rounds. If cooperation were an optimal solution to the iterated prisoner's dilemma, then it would explain the emergence of cooperation in evolution via natural selection.

    Of course, these game theory papers are searching for global optimal solutions, but evolution via natural selection does not necessarily find such points. If the amount of energy required to achieve a global maxima is quite high, then it is quite "happy" to settle in a local maxima. This might just be such a case.

  13. Re:how many times have scientists been wrong? on The Gap Between What The Public Thinks And What Scientists Know · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I notice that you don't balance how many times scientists have been wrong against how many times they've been right. What do you suppose a scientist's wrong:right ratio is as compared to a non-scientist's?

  14. Re:Lennart, do you listen to sysadmins? on Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users' · · Score: 1

    That is such an idiotic statement that I won't even bother continuing the discussion. This link is the wikipedia page.

    Perhaps you should actually read the link you specified. Linus himself describes the term "hybrid" kernel as simple marketing, which is exactly what I said.

    Pulseaudio is a brain damaged [beastwithin.org] piece of software and one of the first things to be removed in any distribution.

    And yet, it's not removed seeing as it's still around and still quite popular.

  15. Re:Lennart, do you listen to sysadmins? on Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users' · · Score: 1

    Yet for machines like home computers it is simply not possible. It is only with the relative advance of hardware that the microkernel can actually get close to a monolithic kernel in terms of performance.

    This is not true. The L4 kernel ran Linux as a guest OS with 5% overhead. This was the birth of hypervisors like Xen, which are really just a sort of microkernel. Virtualization is everywhere now, and no one seems to be complaining about overhead. If you can run a virtualized host with so little overhead, native execution is at least as fast as your guest.

    It's perhaps too easy to introduce performance problems via a poor choice of decomposition, but that doesn't entail that decomposed systems must necessarily perform poorly.

    It is this performance consequence that made Windows NT, originally designed on a microkernel architecture, move towards a hybrid kernel.

    Poorly designed systems perform poorly. The NT kernel might have been a nice kernel design from some people's standpoint, but then people thought the Mach kernel was a good microkernel too. Both opinions are incorrect.

    There are far more Mac and Windows installations than all Linux distributions combined. These are all microkernel or hybrid-kernel architectures.

    There is no such thing as a hybrid. You are either on fire, or you are not. You are either a microkernel, or you are a monolithic kernel. Mac's may use the Mach microkernel, but it's a poor kernel and the BSD subsystem really consists of most of the system calls, which all execute in kernel space. This is a monolithic kernel that has a poorly designed microkernel as its ancestor.

    Systemd is all about marketing, and nothing about engineering. It too will fail and be replaced, just like PulseAudio by ALSA.

    Except PulseAudio hasn't been replaced, it's still used by most distributions.

  16. Re:Lennart, do you listen to sysadmins? on Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users' · · Score: 1

    In the end the real debate was HOW to accomplish the modularity, not whether to make the kernel modular or not

    Right, so make the kernel modular via isolation which provides fault tolerance in your most critical piece of code, or make it monolithic, ie. everything lives in kernel address space.

    There is no reason on earth that an init system would need a specific journal daemon

    There is no reason on earth device drivers need to live in kernel space either. Performance arguments are simply false, and this point has been disproven many times over.

    Of course arguments and hard data aren't meaningful in these discussions, and monolithic has clearly won in terms of marketshare. Once again, why fight the tid of history instead of being more constructive? You are going to lose.

  17. Re:Lennart, do you listen to sysadmins? on Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users' · · Score: 1

    But systemd isn't actually monolithic, it's monolithic by fiat because the daemons refuse to play well with others, which (again) is against the Unix Way.

    Microkernels are arguably more "Unixy" than monolithic kernels. Each device driver is simply a process that has a well-defined stream interface that can be piped to any other process, not just the kernel itself. Microkernels are Unix taken to the extreme.

    So again, this argument failed for microkernels, so why should it succeed here? Perhaps some core functionality, not just system calls, should also be in some monolithic service and not a set of composable subsystems.

    It's taken until recently for Minix to become even vaguely usable as anything other than a learning operating system, it's lagged behind everything else in terms of features always.

    Tanenbaum and others weren't arguing that Minix was the microkernel OS that should be selected, merely that some microkernel should be preferred over monolithic kernels. The high performance L3 and EROS microkernels both existed at the time, albeit in early stages like Linux.

  18. Re:Lennart, do you listen to sysadmins? on Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users' · · Score: 1

    Yes, that is an excellent reason to add even more vulnerability vectors!

    Granted, but more granular fault isolation wasn't convincing when Tanenbaum and Linus were arguing microkernels vs. monolithic kernels, so why should it be convincing now? I'm certain your other complaints are fixable given the current framework, assuming there aren't other mitigating issues.

  19. Re:Lennart, do you listen to sysadmins? on Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users' · · Score: 1

    I have no opinion on systemd. However, more granular fault isolation wasn't convincing when Tanenbaum and Linus were arguing microkernels vs. monolithic kernels, so why should it be convincing now?

    Every condemnation leveled against the monolithic systemd are just rehashed arguments of monolithic vs microkernels. Monolithic kernels clearly dominate, and chances are systemd will similarly dominate, so instead of wasting your time battling the tide of history, perhaps you should be more constructive.

  20. Re:Lennart, do you listen to sysadmins? on Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users' · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What a lot of people are concerned about is that this entirely new and largely untested (in the 'wild', as it were) and very very large, complex piece of software which runs at a very very privileged level in the operating system is going to become the main source of security vulnerabilities in Linux.

    Linux has almost two orders of magnitude more code than systemd, and it changes all the time. Security vulnerabilities are far more likely to be in the monolithic kernel.

  21. Re:"AI" vs Strong AI on An Open Letter To Everyone Tricked Into Fearing AI · · Score: 2

    It's still limited by the FPGA's gate count, which is pretty low by CPU standards.

  22. Re:Killer AI will kill journalists for slandering on An Open Letter To Everyone Tricked Into Fearing AI · · Score: 1

    We cannot build a computer that can model a bug's brain activity

    Actually, I believe IBM emulated a rabbit sometime in the past couple of years.

  23. You can have yearly releases on Tumblr Co-Founder: Apple's Software Is In a Nosedive · · Score: 1

    You can have yearly releases as long as you're willing to ruthlessly cut features that aren't sufficiently stable. If frequent updates are more important than features, then that's achievable.

    The problem would be if marketing had a hand in both direction AND quality control. That's the recipe for disaster.

  24. Re:Frames in 2014 on MIT Unifies Web Development In Single, Speedy New Language · · Score: 1

    The demo site uses frames. FRAMES.

    This is the researcher's website. A RESEARCHER. Who cares if he sucks at web design? Ur/Web can generate any HTML you want.

  25. Re:Enlightening... on CIA Lied Over Brutal Interrogations · · Score: 1

    That gave me some hope for the world. At least some stood up and said "No" and likely ended their careers over it.

    Yup, it's a grand, sickening Milgram experiment writ large.