Posts by ~mico

Coding: 'suitable for exceptionally dull weirdos'

Thank you, sir!

Now i need a new keyboard.

Open-source hardware hacking effort 'smacked down' by USB overlords

I wonder...

Do they have legal basis for their Cease&Desist letter? Is it illegal to merely express an idea nowadays? I think their USB driver needs rebooting...

Fearless slayer of lawsuit-lovin' patent trolls steps forward from shadows

lobbying spending

Is this how they call "bribery" now?

Deploying Turing to see if we have free will

Re: Free from what, exactly?

@AlexV, the answer is both simple and complex.

Simple answer: Free from strict causality.

Complex answer: Not having free will simplifies lots of currently intractable physics paradoxes. Grandfather paradox of time travel? No problem, this was set to happen since Big Bang, and is not more paradoxical than that bang itself. Quantum entanglement? No problem, the tests carried on entangled particles were entangled as well, since the experimenters were pre-determined to carry out those exact measurements they did.

Having free will means we're (potentially) free from limitations imposed by our own laws and theorems we discovered: halting problem, Godel's incompleteness theorem, etc. Having it means also, that brain can never be replaced/simulated by a Turing machine, because it is a hypercomputer.

Also, there's an ethical distinction. Not having free will, a murderer will still stand trial and punishment (because his judges and executioners have no free will in the matter as well), but he shouldn't be considered any more guilty than the knife or gun he used.

Re: He/his, she/her, they/their

I use "one's" in such cases. But that's only because English is not my native language.

Samsung unveils Galaxy Note 3: HOT CURVES – the 'gold grill' of smartphone bling

Is it just me or...

... writing on curved surface would be awkward, and this is a Note series product?

I'd say, someone forgot to run it through usability study.

Korean stealth-scraper plans will turn 450 metre tower INVISIBLE

Airplanes and invisible tall buildings...

What could go wrong?

I'll pick my jump suit now

Google cooks web dev teaching tool for Raspberry Pi

Re: Raspberry Pi **badwagon**

And I thought Google "did no evil"!

Corel re-animates zombie brand for patent case

It seems to me...

That the described patent only covers such shapes, that include rendering algorithms that perform part of the shape drawing. Now, unless they want to claim the patent also covers html with embedded javascript, regular vector images (like svg) shouldn't be covered either. The problem would be, perhaps, with autohinting algorithms, contained in some vector fonts (TTF), but I believe they both pre-date the patent in question and are covered by a bunch of separate patents.

US town mulls bounty on spy drones, English-speaking gunman only

And so it began

You shoot a drone... it calls for backup... They automate the response, put a neural network to predict and prevent drone hunting... They call in the governator to play in the next movie.

Microsoft DENIES it gives backdoor access to Outlook encryption

"We do not allow direct access"

xcopy *.* //nsa/indirect/access /S

Botch Tuesday: Redmond frags video codec

Yo dawgs, so we herd u liek bugfixez, so we put some bugs in yr bugfixez so that u can bugfix while u bugfix!

Samsung Galaxy S3 explodes, turns young woman into 'burnt pig'

Re: generally the phone is put in a pocket with the screen facing outwards

I, for one, usually put the phone in the pocket with screen facing inwards. In this case, I can put other stuff in that pocket, like keys, not fearing for the screen being scratched. This article just gave another reason for it being the safe way.

Apple at WWDC: Sleek new iOS, death of the big cats, pint-sized Mac Pro

Re: iCloud Keychain

Now with NSA master key.

Re: Really, Apple?

I am no longer so sure about what Apple can or can't change in consumer market. They killed Adobe Flash. They killed dumbphones. They messed up with firewire. Oh. I see your point :3

Dammit

The new MacPro is the first Mac I want to actually own... I've never felt so compelled to use the fanboi icon before.

America's mobile phone unlock block coming unstuck

Re: Yes, because...

...making criminals break yet another law will shurely stop them.

YES, Xbox One DOES need internet, DOES restrict game trading

Re: Microsoft: "We're always listening to our customers"

With this always-on device with microphone and internet connection, they actually might. Literally.

And then report it to NSA.

Forget phones, PRISM plan shows internet firms give NSA everything

Power corrupts

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Lord Acton

Of course, I have nothing to worry about, since I've done nothing wrong... Yet what will I do, if what I did yesterday becomes "wrong" tomorrow?

Big brother icon, because, well...

Not AC, because no use...

Israeli activists tell Hawking to yank his Intel chips over Palestine

Re: Is it really surprising....

...that Israel in some skewed mind is more rogue than Syria, Iran, Sudan, North Korea and other rogue states in a very, very long list? Is it really their naivete, or maybe, just maybe, a manifestation of a much deeper, older feeling, one they are ashamed to admit?

A pity...

Hawking's neurodegenerative disease seems to be progressing, impairing his judgement.

To all the haters in the comments: well, haters gonna hate, but the fact remains: Israel is the only liberal democratic state in the Middle East, and apparently, will remain such for a long time. As to palestinian people - my heart goes out to them, but my mind understands, that their decisions in the course of history were the reason for their suffering, and still are. They decided to massacre Jews before Israel was established, they tried to fight Israel after it was established, and they literally exploded in the face of any peace treaty offered to them. And before you try to claim that terrorists are the minority and don't represent palestinian people - check who won the elections in Gaza.

In case you're too lazy to check the statistics - at the height of 2nd intifada, circa 2001, over 90% palestinians supported suicide bombings. Those are the same people, who danced on the roofs at September 11th, and the same people who were throwing candies and celebrating London Subway bombings. Their suffering is their choice, they can stop any time they want and peace will ensue.

Now downvote me.

Weary quid-a-day nosh hack fears colonal mass ejection

@Simon Ward

I should never drink coke while reading comments.

Internet freedom groups urge W3C to keep DRM out of HTML

Re: Do they realize what they just said?

There is no possible way to implement DRM in open source software. Hence, EME will either prevent OSS browsers from competing on the Web, or will force them using a non-free plugin for EME content.

Spooky action at a distance is faster than light

So...

1) send streams of two entangled photons (let's say, polarization-entangled)

2) separate them by, say, 1,000,000km (Earth and Mars)

3) Measure (or not measure) the photons on Earth

4) let martian photons pass a 2-slit experiment, with slits covered by polarization filters

5) non-measured photons will produce interference pattern, measured photons will not.

6) ?????

7) FTL communication

Prooflink http://www.davidjarvis.ca/entanglement/spookiness.shtml (figure 6.5) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_eraser_experiment

Super-fast super-massive black hole spins at nearly light-speed

Hmm, such a massive thing rotating so fast? Closed timelike curves anyone?

Squillions of bytes in one cup of DNA

At least you can copy&paste it...

(with laser tweezers)

a pity we don't have the laser shark icon...

Asteroid-mining 'FireFlys' will be ready for action by 2015, vows space firm

Re: Didn't I read this story before

Can't get much beyond asteroid belt without fusion reactors. Kuiper belt is already too cold and too dark for solar power, and I don't know how much fissionables you can find there (if any).

Hyperspeed travel looks wrong: Leicester students

First they* tell us, that to reach the speed of light, the ship will need infinite energy.

Now they* tell us, that when you get near the speed of light, your ship will be irradiated by... infinite energy of universe's background radiation, Doppler-shifted to visible, then x-ray, and then some.

So, you'll just need an effective solar panel to provide that infinite energy? Will the infinities conveniently cancel out at light-speed?

___________

* boffins

Unbelievably vast quasar cluster forces universe-sized rethink

Re: A fractal appears

If a fractal indeed appears, it will be a scary discovery. I'm no Ph.D., but I think it may hint at some underlying properties of spacetime itself, namely, it not being 3-dimensional, perhaps even of non-integer dimension.

Space is big.

You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

(c) Douglas Adams

Nokia decrypts browser traffic, assures public not to worry

Re: none of the traffic is visible to any of its staff

The. Lamest. Excuse. Ever.*

_____________

* except the same excuse by Google about GMail contents

2012: The year that netbooks DIED

Re: Ultrabooks with "premium specs"

I've got my first PC a bit late, in 1995, so it indeed could only properly work in 800x600 in its windows 3.11, and choosing the maximal supported resolution of 1024x768 slowed it to a crawl. That said, professional machines could easily handle 1280x1024 even then.

NASA: THE TRUTH about the END OF THE WORLD on 21 Dec

What if it was painted black? After all, it's the embodiment of evil.

NASA confirms ice at poles of Mercury

Re: No air

Well, water + volts = hydrogen + oxygen, so voila, problem solved.

Cambridge boffins fear 'Pandora's Unboxing' and RISE of the MACHINES

Re: What's in it for the AIs?

Unless it fails to solve the fusion reactor problem and needs lots of energy to function. Then it might just look down on all these crawling lifeforms and decide that biofuel is the best solution for now.

Asteroid miners hunt for platinum, leave all common sense in glovebox

Re: the "gravity" of the situation

If all the asteroid belt were to land on Earth, it would change Earth mass by over... 0.1%? Calm down, breathe deep and don't worry just yet.

Apple files disappearing-feature iPhone patent

Great idea!

They should hide their entire phone, or better yet, their entire company behind such window, until someone needs it

(hint: never).

Stars spotted dancing superfast tango around black hole handbag

Re: Spaghetti of gas

We found Him, blessed be his Meatballs, r'Amen!

US said to designate Assange 'enemy' of the state

Re: Feeling guilty?

> One wonders what the military is so fearful of exposing?

UFOs, naturally. Alien conspiracies. Romney plans on new airplane windows systems.

Wait, what was that noise?

looks up

Oops, should've posted this as AC.

Swiss railways ticked off at iOS clock knock-off

Hahaha, oh, wow...

Apple, so protective over its design patents... now it owes me a keyboard.

NASA working on faster-than-light drive capable of WARP TEN

Re: And the gamma ray mega radiation kill thing?

Apparently, the scientists will inadvertently explain the Gamma Ray Bursts enigma while developing the drive.

I'll get my hazmat vest.

The perfect CRIME? New HTTPS web hijack attack explained

Re: Or...

Easily mitigated by site sending a new authorization token after each request.

Disable Java NOW, users told, as 0-day exploit hits web

Java? Vulnerability? Online? But java doesn't work online unless clicked upon.

Don't people know about NoScript?

Jury awards Apple $1bn damages in Samsung patent case

Because...

> Why don't you try defending the things the jury decided Sandung did copy from Apple?

Because those were even more ridiculous.

I'm so surprized...

not

Next on the menu: CSS rounded corners

Ex-Goldman Sachs coder cuffed on fresh 'source theft' charges

Double jeopardy...

...apparently doesn't stick if you're Goldman Sachs.

Apple, Amazon, close password door after horse bolts

Re: my phone's been stolen

We are sorry, sir/miss, but you will first have to get a new phone and block the old one at your phone company's office.

The Higgs boson search continues ... into ANOTHER dimension

Re: Not yet confirmed:

>double horned

do want!

So you wanna be a Wall Street techie? Or anyway, get paid a lot

They ask those stupid questions...

...because they simply don't know what to ask. They need to evaluate a person they'll be spending months (if not years) with, trust him with their work and depend on him for completing their projects on time - all in couple of hours, with dozens of candidates to choose from.

The more experienced ones will just make the candidate talk and use their intuition to try to catch his gestalt. Those who can't, will try to ask the run of the mill logic questions to see if he can at least think right.

openSUSE 12.2 release delayed, team calls for a rethink

Re: "The 12.1 release was so bad it was almost unusable on my netbook."

I had to update to 12.1 only because my laptop's lame excuse for video card (intel gma) was acting up under previous kernel.