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Comment Re:Why is this news? (Score 1) 443

dead red laws

I see Virginia is listed. I wish there had been such a thing back in the 80s. I sat for what seemed like 5 minutes on rt. 50, waiting for a left turn arrow. It was mid-day so there was very little traffic (it's a parking lot during rush). I had at least 1/4 mile line of sight, maybe more. I honestly thought the signal was broken, and that's what I told the cop who was either behind me or camped under a tree where I didn't see him. There was no arguing on the spot, and it's the only time I ever went to traffic court, where the excuse didn't fly either. But hey, at least the 70 year old half-blind lady who caused an accident got to keep their license. I learned a lot of lessons that day.

To this day, I also wonder if that cop was dicking with the signals to make his quota.

Comment No one cares, so why does it matter? (Score 5, Insightful) 278

So what if the NSA stores your data? Who cares if it's "Constitutional"? The Constitution is just a piece of paper and doesn't mean a damned fucking thing because even if some uppity people over at the ACLU or EFF make a case out if it, it will be discarded under the veil of "National Security" Face it, the USA is a Police State. AND YOU WONT DO A FUCKING THING ABOUT IT BECAUSE YOU ARE A WEAK POWERLESS WAGE SLAVE WHO VALUES YOUR SUV, JOB AND GADGETS OVER "LIBERTY" and look to someone else to fix the things you don't like. So I don't see why anyone should care -- because no one cares and nothing will be done. Perhaps these articles get posted because people like bitching about how powerless and helpless they choose to be in their pathetic existence as peons of the wealthy elite whose interests the NSA serves.

Comment Dubai will love this (Score 1) 162

In Dubai, they already arrest and convict people if they find race amounts of marijuana on the soles of their shoes, I can only imagine they will be among the first to implement these detectors at their airport so they can have fun arresting even more infidels who come to visit their dystopian tourist trap.

Comment Because Nothing Bad Ever Happens (Score 5, Insightful) 109

Thank you Google for protecting me from reality no one should have to know about bad things that happen, in fact, why should we know anything at all except for Google approved happy thoughts. Every year Google seems to do something that makes me hate them more and more. So fuck you Google - you're a bunch of authoritarian asshats who think you should control the information we have access to while trying to turn everyone into your personal little database to mine and sell info from. Just go fuck yourselves.

Comment Business search sadly broken (Score 1) 132

Business search is sadly broken in many ways. Whenever I google for a service that I actually need, there are dozens upon dozens of sites at the top of the results. No doubt they're all SEO'd there. When you follow the links, what do you get? A boiler-plate script along the lines of $foo is an experienced contractor in $bar who serves the $locality area. In fact, he does nothing of the sort if he even exists.

The surveillatizing industry does a fantastic job of tracking us and shoving shit-ads at us for stuff we don't want.

And yet, when I'm searching for a service that I ACTUALLY WANT TO PAY FOR, I have to deal with all this dreck.

I figure it must be click-bait, since I've clicked on it because it's misleading. I have a couple ad-blocking methods running concurrently, so I almost never see 3rd party ads there; but I can't imagine what other motive there would be to provide absolutely useless boilerplate like that.

BTW, I guess you could extend this out even further to say that many things other than searching for a business are broken by click-baiters.

Take any question, really. "Who won the 1950 World Series". And although I haven't tested this yet, I'm willing to wager somebody has a site out there that will tell you something like, "The 1950 World Series is available on eBay. Click here to learn more about 1950 World Series products, etc..."

The AI that does this shit is usually pretty smart, but sometimes you get gems like, "The best cleaning products for your World Series".

Comment Theology now? (Score 1) 285

This business of the developers not knowing how it works. It reminds me of the question "How can God create a being that sins. Doesn't that make Him responsible?". One way to answer that is that God withdraws his authority within the a locus that we call the "soul". What happens there isn't his action. This implies that while knowingly taking actions that lead to wrong is immoral, withdrawing your power from a particular locus and opening things up to potential wrongs is not immoral.

It has nothing to do with intelligence though. The "soul" could be as dumb as a post.

Comment Re:pointers (Score 1) 415

On *NIX systems you will usually get a segfault. I'm not sure if you will *always* get a segfault. The term "segfault" is specific to *NIX. On Windows it was called "invalid page fault" and I don't know what old school Apple stuff called it. That's beside the point.

The truly heinous bugs don't come from accessing memory outside your allotted segments anyway. They come from accessing memory within your allotted segments in erroneous ways. This leads to stuff like, "Hey, the 2nd time I called that function the structure's 2nd element had a different value, even though I did nothing to the structure". You know the bug is someplace else, potentially anywhere in the program where you could have walked off the edge of the sidewalk.

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