Posts by veti 4489 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
Today's "VR" is like gaslight, circa 1860: it's a crude technology that clearly has much better alternatives, and will be replaced just as soon as those are up and running properly, but in the meantime - here and now - there's money to be made from it.
It's easy enough to combine the sensory input with paralysing the body so that it can't hurt itself, even though the brain still thinks the body is responding. That happens to us every night.
Being a non-signatory to Berne doesn't mean there are no copyright laws, merely that the country retains the power to set and change its own copyright laws as it sees fit.
Taiwan has its own copyright law, which applies broadly the same rules as Berne. I haven't tried to parse it in detail to see what the differences are, but it's certainly not true to say that "duplication of copyrighted works is perfectly legal in Taiwan".
And it's also not true to say that infringing copies can be freely imported from a non-Berne country into a Berne one. If that was the case at some time in the 90s, then that's because US law was a hopeless pig's breakfast (plus ca change...) and simply couldn't bring itself to implement the Berne rules. (Bear in mind that the US itself only ratified the Berne Convention in 1989.)
For the mental image of upskirt shots of J Edgar Hoover.
Even if the cross-dressing stories are untrue, he was still the proud owner of the biggest collection of soft porn to be found anywhere outside the Playboy mansion. Seems like he would have sympathised with the aim, although that may have been overruled by disdain for the incompetence.
Yeah, except that they found the guns when they were searching for something entirely different. The warrant has to "particularly describ[e]... the persons or things to be seized".
Unless the warrant they were using specifies "any arms potentially belonging to the landlord, who is not a suspect in the present matter", they're inadmissible.
The thing about the Russians is, there's no way of knowing what they spent on their campaigns. We've only heard about the advertising spend with Facebook (and even that number has been revised upwards at least once).
But that was only a fraction of the total. Much more important was the time invested by a team, of unknown size, of full time Internet trolls.
How many full time employees did each US campaign team have on social media? That's a number you can probably find out, if you want to dig a little. But how many did Putin have? Good luck finding that.
It doesn't matter what crimes you commit, so long as you win.
Fixed that for you. If you lose, that's another matter. But to a winner, anything is permitted.
That's a problem, because politics only works at all if people respect at least some of the rules. And if you think you don't like politics, just wait till you see the alternative.
"Cascade is putting it a bit strongly, I'd say. Sure they would make low earth orbit a substantially more dangerous place, but if you're just hitting a couple of satellites and then waiting for debris to take care of the rest - we'll, that's likely to be a long wait.
Decades. Long enough for your movement and its cause to be long forgotten. So the strategic value is pretty much zip.
... When the front door is so easy to kick down?
I have nothing against the feds doing whatever it takes to crack any system that is physically in their possession. Once they've - done whatever they need to do to seize it from its owners, they can go nuts.
If they're not willing to do that, fuck right off.
And that's my idea for a compromise.
You know how much disruption it causes, to hundreds of thousands of people, when a whole fleet of planes is grounded? Even briefly (and we don't know how brief it would be)?
That's an order that only goes out when they find something really dangerous. This hazard is easy to manage, once you know about it. Indeed, if it's been in service for two years without anyone noticing, that suggests it's pretty easy to manage even if you don't know about it
The endgame here is to ensure there will never again be an administration that he doesn't agree with. That's the logical trajectory of US politics right now.
That's why the Supreme Court has disclaimed all interest in gerrymandering, and the last act of the outgoing Rep state governor in Wisconsin was to sign a law stripping his own office of powers. If you really believe, as increasing numbers of these scumbags do, that the other side is Evil, then you can't allow democracy.
(And yes, the Democrats are moving the same way. Arguably the only reason they're lagging is because they're the underdogs, so have more to gain from pluralism. If Americans can't get over this, the country is finished.)
The European elections were subject to many of the same flaws as the original referendum, plus several more that it didn't have. It's hard to interpret a vote - even for the Brexit party - as unequivocally about Brexit and nothing else.
I would favour two more referendums, to be held a week apart. The final referendum would be "should we leave or remain?" The penultimate one would be "If we vote to 'leave' next week, should that mean 'this deal' or 'no deal'?" And both referendums should be considered as binding on parliament, on the strength of a simple majority.
That way everyone would have the chance to vote for what they want, and it would be clear which of the three currently available options they were voting for.
You are missing the point, which is that a .uk TLD is only useful if you're scamming - sorry, I mean serving - the UK market. You may be based in Nigeria, but that TLD will give a useful false sense of familiarity to only one market segment. It wouldn't help you scam, e.g., Germans or Americans.
Wraparound cameras would capture some but not all of the relevant data. You'd also need to examine the LIDAR logs, and rerun the decision algorithm to see if it thought that pigeon over on the left was in fact a small child who was about to run across the road...
At some stage, you start wondering "how much data is enough to analyse 95% of incidents, and how much more would we need to spend to figure out that last 5%?" And likely come up with numbers that make a city council look a bit thoughtfully at their budget.
Shooting at one guy, who was given plenty of warning, is one thing. (If that even happened. Can you link to a report?) Shooting at a huge crowd of people who might, for all you can tell, include your brother and your mother, is something else entirely.
If nothing else, it would guarantee a one way ticket to federal prison for everyone concerned. Even in Trump's America, you can't just turn military weapons on a crowd of unarmed civilians - not without starting a real war, anyway.
Well yes, probably. Also in all likelihood the guards would refuse to open fire with live rounds on such a large crowd of civilians. And the officers would refuse to order it.
Probably.
But it's not going to happen anyway, because ticking boxes on the Internet is a lot easier than driving out hours from nowhere into the Nevada desert. And of the maybe 30 people who do turn up, at least 28 will decline to risk their lives because the crowd won't be big enough to make them feel safe.
So that leaves the potential for an incident involving maybe a couple of people who will either be swiftly and non lethally overpowered, or more surprisingly will be allowed to wander round a few warehouses and see nothing. Unless of course the base commander has a sense of humour, and gets some nice props ready for them to find.
I just told you how to make money. If you can't do it, then we will draw appropriate conclusions about your technology.
If you simply choose not to do it, that's another matter. I sympathise, I'm a lazy bastard myself. But then we'll draw another set of conclusions about your technology.
If your database architecture is so great, why are you shilling it here? Build something useful with it and blow away the competition. That's how you can make a name for it.
There are hundreds of industries that rely on databases. Here's an under-served market you can have right now: strata billing. People who buy commodities in bulk, then retail them to a niche or captive market. E.g., an apartment building owner billing their own tenants for electricity and water. There are tens of thousands of buildings like that in the world, and right now most of them are doing their billing in Excel.
No, it's great. If they can't spy on US citizens, they can't spy on anyone. The constitution is crystal clear on that.
"Equal protection of the laws", it's called. Any person within US jurisdiction has all the same legal protections as a citizen.
Keep that in mind, Americans. If they can do it to us, they can do it to you.
"Keep coming back every year" is no help. They'll just make small changes every now and then, each one individually not big enough to rouse much opposition, and in ten years you'll be there all the same.
We've seen this before. It's what happened when the US began fingerprinting tourists. Even the reassurances were the same: the immigration database was separate from any other set, they'd never be compared. What they didn't say was that this was not policy, it was sheer incompetence on their part - they were storing the data in an incompatible format - and two years later, that bug had been fixed.
If his direct employer really had no idea what he was doing, that suggests a degree of negligence on their part. They have a duty to ensure the accuracy of invoices they present to the client.
I can see taking the guy at his word for a few weeks, but this went on for years. At that point, I'm less inclined to accept the claim that they acted "in good faith".
The fact is, every time we see these statistics we only ever see one side, usually the false positive rate.
What was the false negative rate? Without knowing that, we don't know whether it's a good deal or not.
If you're screening a million people, and you get 42 alerts, of which 8 turn out to be correct - that means you've checked out 42 people, instead of a million, to identify your 8 targets. That's a pretty good deal.
If the original sample included another 1000 people who should have triggered matches, then - no, it's not good. But if it only included half a dozen or so, that's not bad.
Menezes' death was a tragedy, but that was fourteen years ago. There are people old enough to vote today, who are too young even to remember that story. If you can't come up with some more contemporary examples than that, you should consider the possibility that perhaps you really are making a lot of fuss about nothing.
In a bad year (such as 2016 and 2017), police in the whole of the UK may kill as many as six people, including deaths in custody. That's far fewer, per population, than France, Germany, Italy, Australia or Canada, and don't even ask about the US. I know it may not feel like it, but the facts speak for themselves - the UK (still) has one of the most civilised police cultures in the world.
I don't see him as an idiot. I think he's a very clever and very nasty man.
Economically he's doing disastrously for the US. Sure, the economy is booming - that's what happens if you pump in trillions of dollars of newly printed money at the height of what was already an economic boom. There is a special place in hell for the congresscritters who blustered and protested about the deficit during the Obama years, but are happy to stoke it up now that an (R) is in the White House.
(Mind you, this is exactly the same as they did under both Bushes, and Reagan. It's why Clinton balanced the budget - it wasn't any particularly great management on his part, it was the Republican congress trying to crash the economy.)
The trade wars were completely unnecessary, and kicked off to make Trump look tough, while leaving open the option for him to declare victory whenever he wants. Take China, for instance - he's never spelled out what it is he wants the Chinese to do, so anytime he feels he wants a victory, he can simply announce that they've given in and the war is won. Of course, that's given China some leverage over the US that it didn't previously have - it can demand concessions from Trump to back up his bullshit - but that's fine - Trump can profit from that too (as in the present story, for instance - he's just created a whole new channel for himself and his henchmen to receive kickbacks, that's what "licenses" mean - as Republicans would be lightning-quick to point out, if it was the other side doing it).
Don't get me wrong, I think Obama and Clinton were both pretty poor presidents. But at least they had some respect for the ideas of law and democracy and republican government. Trump is a whole new level of two-bit, four-flushing, slimy, cheating turd, but he's pulled off the remarkable confidence trick of convincing over 40% of US voters that he's in some way "on their side". Anyone who thinks, at this point, that he's stupid just isn't paying attention.
With the trade war going badly, Trump needed to pull out some sort of "progress" this week. So we got the announcement that "talks with China were on track".
Now obviously, the Chinese could call that statement out quite convincingly. So he needed to get them to play along, and to that end he's tossed them this bone.
In the first place, is it "the same people"? You would need to cite specific names and posts to establish that.
in the second place, your starting and final positions look like caricatures. If they are only slightly more nuanced, your point disappears. For instance, "should" can cover a wide range of meanings, from "this is how things would be in an ideal world" to "everyone is morally obliged to feel this way" - there's a lot of ground between those positions.
In the third place, lots of things have changed in the past 20 years. If you haven't changed your mind about anything in that time, you're not thinking.
In the fourth place, "SHAME ON EVERYONE!" is a strawman position in itself. If you really don't think there's something a bit off about faking nude photos of real people and distributing them on the Internet, then please come out and say so - then we can argue that case on its merits, whatever they may be.
Exactly. Immortality is just a perennial storytelling conceit. It used to come from divine power (like Nicholas Flamel, Tithonus, the Wandering Jew). In the age of exploration it came from finding secret places, like the Fountain of Youth or Shangri-la. Early science fiction roots it in Science (Frankenstein). And it's not surprising that modern SF says it comes with IT.
None of the above have any particularly well thought out mechanism for endowing it, but that was never the point. It's just a story device.
What is a bit surprising is that apparently intelligent people seem to believe in it, to the extent of paying to be frozen. Lunatic.
Both Homeland Security and NASA have seen budget increases in the past couple of years. The DHS in particular - locking up children, conducting dawn raids on immigrants, putting up hundreds of Secret Service agents at every major golf course in North America... none of these things come cheap, you know.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
