Re: Fails at basic logic...
If 5 stars are a necessity, then they carry no information. Why bother faking it the complicated way? Do not actually allow any rating and simply display five stars...
Also,
https://xkcd.com/937/
367 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2016
> Adding an extra non-inverse square law term to "gravity" doesn't seem to work well and what is the theory anyway?
Of course people have been trying [something like] this [because we really talk general relativity here], with various corrections, but not with much success -- so, pretty much like anything else that we have tried so far.
One of the main problems is that you cannot say ‘We just change this equation and that fixes it. Done.’ -- you can do this in bogus science but not in actual science. In an actual theory the equation is connected to a bazillion other laws or observations we still consider correct, either it follows from them or they follow from it, it is not used to calculate just the one thing you want to come out differently but also other things... So you have to be careful and are quite restricted in what you can change and how.
> For a country with low PC penetration and a pitiful internet architecture, North Korea punches above its weight when it comes to hacking, if attribution claims turn out to be correct.
Whether it turns out to be correct or not, it makes perfect sense for them to take advantage of the asymmetry. Who is going to hack their critical systems and steal their sensitive data when they do not have any?
"Our democracy hinges on protecting Americans' ability to fairly choose our own leaders."
Since no tampering was [apparently] necessary to put Mr. Trump into office, voting machine hacking prevention is currently an interesting but largely irrelevant problem. Miscreants have already moved on to hacking voters' brains...
Sure, OO improved a number of things. At the beginning.
Then it became a religion. If you do not transform all code to a tangle of silly NounizorFactoriers you are heretic to be burned at stake.
OO created a class [no pun necessary] of ‘programmers’ who, when implementing a procedure to sum some numbers, as a side effect produce a hierarchy of classes for numeric types, arithmetic operators, representation of cardinals, abstraction of lambda calculus and a bunch of things that you never imagined could be related to the problem. Yes, and then their implementation also forgets to add the last number...
Well said.
My thought after reading the articles: And that is why I will probably never get anything published in Nature (or even one of the many Nature FooBars). I might or might not do sufficiently excellent science -- but I am definitely incapable of such excellent bullshit.
The prize is, of course, earnings of patent lawyers.
I hate when various ‘innovation’ rankings of countries and regions include the numbers of patents granted [per capita] as a clearly good thing. Higher numbers can mean more innovation -- or that the patent system is bonkers and anything goes.
It seems the Universe can be on the fundamental level described using mathematics, with a relatively few simple laws (for some values of ‘few’ and ‘simple’ anyway). If it is a simulation, that is exactly the thing to expect. If it is not, well, it can still work this way, but it is rather surprising that it does. Why should it?
> In the U.S. it may be better to avoid agreeing to anything you aren't willing to have enforced.
It is *always* better to avoid agreeing to anything you aren't willing to have enforced.
But nowadays there are essentially only two ways of doing it consistently: (a) living in a cave far from civilisation (b) being a billionaire or dictator, ideally both.
When something is too bright to look at, then bloody don't! When it is not then you can keep looking. This stuff should not be that hard to figure out.
If you are a moron that keeps looking directly into the sun despite it hurts because of magic glasses or something, you get what you deserve. And could you also jump from the root of the nearest building while you are at it? I installed magical air around the walls that will slow you down.
> If you wanna play with it, fire up a Windows 98 VM
How long before you need an emulator to run the VM that can run Windows 98?
> Nothing stopping you building an oldskool machine with 1995/1998/2001 era technology and software.
Yes, nothing, except possibly the enormous effort required.
Pirated Windows and lazy admins may be factors. Still, Ukraine is not exactly a wealthy country and $300 is lots of money there. If your goal is to make money from the ransomware, wouldn't you rather target a country where $1000/month is considered the poverty threshold? This looks more like the ransom part is a nice benefit but not the goal.
> customers don't have to wait at table
What do you mean by that?
The point of going to a restaurant is not to stuff yourself with food as fast as you can. You can always do that faster and cheaper than in a restaurant. Have some beer/wine/whatever you like, talk, meanwhile order meal, drink and talk more... If you do not enjoy the time there what the hell are you doing there?
Wait... are you from some place where McDonald's is called restaurant?
> More turnover = more profits = you get to kill the competition.
Your competition, yes. Actual restaurants, no.
Not here, we have also lots of art-like graffiti, some of it quite good -- but the best ones tend to be legal (at least AFAICT). It probably helps if you can take more time and don't have to prepared to run away all the time...
I wish social media somehow killed the idiots that scratch windows in trams and buses though.
Since the scams are a local religious practice, it must be protected at all costs. Obviously, it is an important part of their culture and identity -- and one that white men actively seek to eradicate. At least that is what I expect to hear from the confused regressive left warriors...
No need to reading up on how things were on this side of the iron curtain. The dangers were more direct and physical -- as was the surveillance. Media were state-controlled, and propaganda and other bullshit pervasive. Generally, the powers were owners of ‘the truth’ (remember when the truth mattered?) and quite openly tried to recast everything to conform to it.
This is not going to happen in the UK -- not because of UK, but because we are half a century later now. The means of control over the society do not matter, what matters is the level of control.
> No, this is deliberately giving false information to a police officer with an arrest warrant.
Must play the devil advocate here. Do Uber *know* they are giving false information to a police officer with an arrest warrant? Were they shown the warrant? It's not like their app has an ‘if you are a police officer upload your warrant here’ button. AFAICT they hide based on a guess, trying to avoid the officers (like many would do in the physical world).
BTW ‘car not showing up’ may be actually improvement of their services...
> You think there is something unique about the US government that makes it a threat to liberty beyond all others?
Yes, raw power and world influence combined with awareness of them.
Governments of small countries may be equally evil. But their ability to influence global developments (such as IoT) is pretty limited and they rarely think and act on world scale. And yes, the US is not even really *unique* in this regard, but still a member of a very small select group.
Everyone would have understood it but since it would break everything anyway, the implementation would progress only slightly faster. Low-level networking code would definitely not need to change as much, but higher level stuff would need to change pretty much the same: there the main burden stems from having to support two different address types at all.
And finally, most people whining here about IPv6 would whine here about such solution equally loudly and call it a stupid half-measure. I welcome your downvotes, bloody hypocrites.
> GM are clearly quite good by objective standards for most use-cases.
I doubt you have ever seen a good map.
A typical non-city-centre area:
GM -- some rough grey and green polygons, streams, a couple of roads. Useless.
OSM -- more or less the same as GM plus vegetation type, protected localities, much more roads and paths, some points of interest. Possibly usable, but it depends.
mapy.cz (our national competitor) -- more or less the same as OSM plus contour lines, marked tourist and cycling paths, nature trails, spot heights, rocks, dozens of points of interests, many more small paths, local names, springs, shelters, caves, monuments, every bloody cross beside the road, ... So people actually use it as an outdoor map.
In city centres GM is better, but then again OSM becomes much better there. For example, GM does not bother to show paths in parks, except the largest ones.
Also, GM is slow as hell. Objectively.
> If it gets stuff wrong occasionally it doesn't matter, because humans make mistakes and physical parts fail.
It matters unless ‘the machine said so’ ceases to be universal excuse for not only arbitrarily stupid decisions, but also their strict enforcement with no possibility to appeal or negotiate.
Humans make lots of mistakes so they are aware they can make mistakes (with some notable exceptions). Someday the AI that does not exist yet (TAITDNEY) may be advanced far enough so that you can explain it its mistake when it makes one. But currently those trying to replace humans with AIs seem to be doing *because* they can avoid this possibility.
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