Posts by DN4 128 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2011
> They arn't ever gonna get to go to Uni, in the US, at the expense of the Taxpayers Dime. No matter how many times he makes that promise.
Yes, there are many reasonable laws/policies/... that are unlikely to be ever implemented in the US. The list is in fact so long that I do not want where to start... Your point?
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all communist? Such statement requires a staggering level of ignorance.
What rock you've been living under the last 20 years? Probably the only thing that would make your list even more silly would be the inclusion of East Germany (that ceased to exist in 1990).
BTW, lots of other countries on the list have various kinds of odd and hardly democratic but non-communistic regimes...
> Comment forums (like this one) are absolutely in the category of social media.
This would mean the moment a comment section is added somewhere, new ‘social medium’ arises. Which is ridiculously broad. You lose all the important distinctions between actual social media and ‘anything on-line and not completely static’.
> SF is now a dodgy download site and should be blacklisted.
There's still lots of good software hosted on SF and from your comment I suppose you tend to use it to download binaries -- which important but somewhat auxiliary function of such site. And it's the one most fucked up on SF.
Anyway, what are the suggested alternatives that offer beside SCM some basic auxiliary stuff such as
- mailing lists
- forums
- web hosting
- download of packages/binaries
?
> the core idea of a taxi license is setting up some much needed frequent checking on drivers, their cars and their insurance
And what if I just don't care? When I was hitchhiking, there was no checking on drivers, their cars and their insurance either. I took the risk and it was my business to do so.
I am not defending Uber specifically, just saying the reasoning something must be regulated because it must be regulated because it must be regulated... is just nonsense.
> the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem proves that a bandwidth-limited wave can be perfectly captured and reconstructed to be as smooth as the original.
Are you saying the music is a truly periodic signal, or that it is sampled in time from minus infinity to plus infinity or something similar? If not, how do you apply the theorem to get *perfect* reconstruction for finite non-periodic signals?
Of course, perfect reconstruction is not actually needed in practice. But that is a different matter and one has to go and do the hard work... Waving the sampling theorem in front of people is just bullshit.
> Strictly speaking, the Brazilian and Peruvian governments do not have rights over the name "Amazon"...
Well, there is your problem. Problem for everyone except US companies, that is. If you write the rules to permit companies naming themselves or their product after some existing entities, trademark that and force the original entity ‘out of business’, what do you expect to happen? Names like Amazon or Apple should be simply forbidden. I wonder how the congressmen would be pleased with a company named ‘US Congress’...
Here it is like half Windows, half Linux.
The dividing line goes approximately between people just using commercial software and people creating their own tools (the latter would not be considered normal users in an office but in a physics department it is different). While Macs can do both and there is usually a way to get most Windows and Linux software working, the appeal to people either locked deeply in Windows software or accustomed to open source environments and tools is kind of limited...
> Consensus is not science, and if you have to rely on it as a persuasion tool, you are not in a scientific debate, but rather a social one.
Well, this is unfortunately true only if we can reasonably falsify the statements by experiments. Which covers lots of science but not all.
For instance in pure mathematics, the purest of sciences, the consensus is everything. Yes, the theorems and proofs may be objectively correct or wrong. But that is something we cannot readily verify (leaving aside some simple cases). The only known method for checking them is that the original author tries to explain as well as he can and other people try to understand, go through and reproduce the proof. So at the end, mathematical proof is a social construct. It is verified by consensus, nothing else.
> Is Unicode finally running out of code points that they need to start desperately pursuing re-use over clarity of expression?
Maybe just saving space for useful things...
Considering the development from :-) to these emoji things, they will be superseded again in a few years by something else, probably animated and making sounds or whatever -- and hopefully falling out of the Unicode domain.
And considering clarity of expression, if Apple shows ‚envelope with downwards arrow above‘ as ‚envelope with rightwards arrow at left‘, it does not get much clearer than that, does it?
> How can we express righteous outrage with Facebook or Google's relentless privacy assault, when we continue to hand valuable stuff over?
Your ‘we’ is not us.
Apart from Google Search that I indeed use -- cautiously, with blocking and with a reasonable idea what can be mined from the search terms -- I do not indulge in handing valuable stuff over. So how can *we* express righteous outrage? Easily.
> one of the big advantages of Windows is that it provides a toolkit for things like input boxes
The big advantage over what exactly? Every relevant graphical environment has some GUI toolkit (often more than one) and there is even a choice of crossplatform toolkits...
Have not tried 4.12 yet but all the talk about major updates and huge leaps makes me nervous. If I do not want something from a desktop environment, it is huge leaps. In any direction. And XFce fulfilled this perfectly, with each version being essentially the same, just a bit better.
> I thought in Czecho, all food always came with beetroot?
No, that must have been some bad luck if you got everything with beetroot. It's true restaurants here tend to add all sorts of random vegetables to meals for no good reason, but there's more variety than beetroot. Often it's cabbage (of whatever kind and form) that I fortunately happen to like, but it can be really anything. Beetroot is actually relatively uncommon and used [properly] only in some specific meals.
> Our cybercriminal blackhat hero Nick Hathaway is the hunky, chunky Chris Hemsworth...
And this is a good thing. If you are the hunky chunky type you can easily became a superhacker. It's just another superpower that goes along with flying, instant regeneration and shooting lasers from your eyes, and that's the message everyone needs to get.
> We in IT must not overestimate our worth...
Even pure IT companies tend to have buildings, furniture, etc. So differentiating IT and non-IT based on that makes little sense.
I would like to see a criterion that can tell computer game development is an IT business while banking is not, if there is one. Buildings and furniture? Amount of non-IT expertise? Amount of core business carried out inside/by computers? How customers use/interact with their products? None actually cuts it.
> The problem with mathematical notation is that it is usually designed by accountants, physicists, and, of course, mathematicians.
That's not the problem, that's the stroing point. Mathematical notation is created (rarely designed) to express some concept consisely and in a way that helps *the person creating it* thinking about the concept/using it correctly. Anyone doing non-trivial math develops new notations all the time. If lots of other people find a particular notation helpful it sticks. It's a natural selection following the devlopment of the field.
The last thing we need is notation designed by cognitive psychologists who don't even understand the mathematical concepts. As for graphical design, notations are typically first created for writing by hand (scribbling, actually). The time for typographical refinement comes when (if) they do stick.
> The very fact that many messages are suddenly travelling encrypted means dragnet surveillance is much more difficult.
This in turn means more focus on getting the messages (and metadata) at the source, i.e. owning the devices. Not that it would not be happening anyway...
> ...and you don't speak English and you don't know non-Cyrillic alphabets and you use a Cyrillic keyboard...
i.e. any advanced use of computers is out of question for you, well, then you just use a contact list in your communication app. The little things with @s in them are not that important. They are some internal handles for computer geeks. You probably use social sites, not e-mail, to communicate anyway.
And if you have to you can still copy'n'paste an e-mail address when you see it even though you cannot type it. Which is excatly the situation *everyone* will be in soon.
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