Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment As a lawyer he should have known better (Score 4, Informative) 560

by Arker (#47325487) Attached to: Mass. Supreme Court Says Defendant Can Be Compelled To Decrypt Data
The ruling appears flawed, I sympathize with the dissent, but yeah. This guy screwed himself, in typical lawyer fashion, with excess arrogance.

He did not have to tell the police anything here, he has probably lectured his clients many times on exactly why they should never talk to the police, does not matter if you have nothing to hide, does not matter if you think you have done nothing wrong, and if you have done something but think you can talk your way out of it you are a fool. Ask for your lawyer then shut your mouth, and do not answer any questions, I dont care if they ask you about the weather, the reply is 'ask my lawyer.'

From the language used in the opinion, if he had simply shut his mouth and not started bragging/volunteering information, he would be in a very different situation today.

Comment Re:Huge pile of assumptions (Score 1) 151

by Arker (#47325271) Attached to: Neanderthals Ate Their Veggies
It does require some protein but that does not require exclusive or even preferential meat eating. Apes typically supplement a primarily fruit and veggie diet with various types of easy to acquire "meat" - insects of various types, termites in particular, are commonly consumed for supplemental protein. Larger animals are killed by Apes very rarely, and consumption of the corpses is even rarer, not entirely unheard of but certainly not part of the normal diet.

Comment Re:Cooked! (Score 1) 151

by Arker (#47324009) Attached to: Neanderthals Ate Their Veggies
"It's not just that they ate veggies, they cooked them. Was there any other animal which we know that cooked its own food besides us?"

If you expand 'cooked' to the more generic 'prepared' then plenty of animals would qualify. In fact if you consider things like pickled herring and kimchee 'cooked' then we could probably argue that many animals do cook their food - crocodiles, for instance, are known to stash their kills in underwater caches for long periods before eating which 'cooks' the flesh using the chemical processes of decomposition, the resulting meal is roughly as 'cooked' as lutfisk or surströmming.

But no, I cannot think of any animals outside of hominids that have learned to start and control fires, which is a prerequisite for 'cooking' in most senses.

Comment Re:stupid comparison (Score 1) 501

by Arker (#47323633) Attached to: A Physicist Says He Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest With 1,000-Foot Walls
"Yes, but you can't build the wall just to survive prevailing winds, what happens if it *does* get hit by a tornado?"

Presumably one section of the wall would be badly damaged. It would still be a relatively small section, and I would guess the wall would probably continue to function effectively even with several small sections taken out of it.

I'm not saying the idea isnt ridiculous and impractical - just that it isnt ridiculous and impractical for the reasons the guy I was replying to gave.

Comment Re:stupid comparison (Score 0) 501

by Arker (#47321143) Attached to: A Physicist Says He Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest With 1,000-Foot Walls
Except as you said the hoover dam is far from uniform, it varies from 45 to 600 feet thick, and the walls themselves are only part of it - a large part of that cost has to do with the turbines and generators and associated machinery, not just the walls. Plus you have that whole deal about diverting a major river during construction, and of course the whole "we are turning the river back afterwards and making a lake" thing adds requirements and expenses as well.

That's pretty clearly not comparable to something very uniform that only needs to stand on dry land and obstruct some wind.

Comment Re: Yeah sure (Score 0) 371

by Arker (#47303445) Attached to: Court Releases DOJ Memo Justifying Drone Strike On US Citizen
" Finally, I'd also like to point out that while the US abides by the Geneva convention and other treaties and accords, it is not a signatory of the same, so while the Geneva convention sets good rules, the US is only bound to them as long as they voluntarily comply."

This is absolutely incorrect.

The US is a party to all 4 Geneva conventions, and one additional protocol (protocol 3.) These have been ratified by the Senate and are law of the land.

Comment Re:Strawman (Score 1, Insightful) 270

The benefit is only asymmetric if you (as Comcast appears to do) define 'fulfilling our contractual obligations to our customers' as a non-benefit.

Comcast sees more benefit in refusing to provide the service they are being paid for than in living up to their obligations, and that's the big problem here. The fact that they have no effective competition for most of their customers is a big part of why. The fact that they provide their own services at higher margins that compete with third party services accessible on the internet is the other big piece of it.

Both problems could be solved at once by simply making it law that ISPs have to be ISPs, and cannot be part of a larger business. Existing conglomerates like Comcast would have a period of time to spin off the ISP service which would from that point forward be ONLY an ISP and statutorily disallowed from acquiring or being acquired by other sorts of businesses.

And yes, I am a free market 'fanatic' so to some this will be a shocking view from me, but 1. the existing market is far from free and 2. a simple statutory restriction is a lot better than giving more regulatory power to the bureaucrats which will only be captured.

Comment Re:Actual Math + AP CS teacher here (Score 1) 155

by Arker (#47293551) Attached to: Computational Thinking: AP Computer Science Vs AP Statistics?
IMOP the two subjects that are critical here and get neglected are logic and number theory. Logic typically gets covered as a first or second year course in college - after many years of courses that depend on it. Teaching it much earlier would make more sense and result in better comprehension of other subjects.

Number theory is, in my experience, the branch of mathematics most relevant to programming. Far more relevant than either calculus or statistics, and (for me at least) much easier as well. Like logic it's really foundational for a lot of other stuff. Yet it's essentially unheard of. No?

Comment Re:Sorry but... (Score 0) 143

by Arker (#47290601) Attached to: Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Steps Up Its Game & Runs Much Faster
"So, again, where is anyone but you claiming things don't compile?"

It's not something you can contest, it's known and obvious. You cant compile it because you do not get the source.

The source for a shim whose only purpose is to load a binary into the kernel where a driver should have gone instead is certainly not a substitute, let alone a good substitute.

"And to be frank, I care a LOT more about things working, than being able to examine 100% of the source code."

It's a false dichotomy you (and many others) setup here, trying to claim pragmatism. It's not pragmatism though, it's simply short-sightedness combined with laziness.

"X works well enough for me, with my stuff, right now, today." There's your 'pragmatic' justification for being lazy. A real pragmatist would be concerned about how it would work with the next stuff he gets, and the stuff after that, and someone who is not intellectually lazy would certainly have some serious concerns about corrupting an otherwise Free system by integrating a black-box binary directly to the kernel, to say the least.

Frankly this is the sort of thing that should cause alarm bells to go off inside your head so hard you fall to the ground clutching your bleeding ears - solely as a pragmatist. If you had any intellectual commitment to Free Software that might intensify it even further, but it's certainly not needed.

Comment Re:Sorry but... (Score 0) 143

by Arker (#47290339) Attached to: Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Steps Up Its Game & Runs Much Faster
"Unless you're using a platform that isn't a PC"

Oh bullsquat. A PC is a Personal Computer. I am in my fourth decade of using PCs, and I have used PCs with many diverse architectures, build around chips ranging from the Z80 and x86 to Motorola 68k, MIPS, Alpha, etc. Hardware changes almost as often as skirt lengths, and often for similar reasons. A system that will work in that environment MUST include real, human-readable code, not a brittle binary written for a single monad out of the entire universe of hardware and software combinations.

What you were trying to say is 'unless you are using something other than the currently popular x86 compatible intel/amd hardware' which leaves a LOT more room outside it, but even that is not actually accurate - even if you are using exactly that it STILL wont work properly. You can claim otherwise all you want, but you admitted it does not compile so you are only contradicting yourself at this point.

That's a show stopper bug right there, absolutely unacceptable. "Works as long as you do not use the system" does not describe something that truly works. Compiling the kernel is basic, if you break that, fundamentally speaking you have broken the entire system.

Slashdot Top Deals

Systems programmers are the high priests of a low cult. -- R.S. Barton

Close