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Comment Re: "forced labor" (Score 1) 183

Actually, the war on poverty was working until the GOP insisted on surrendering.

And yes, businesses that mooch on the taxpayer to supplement their inadequate payroll are evil. They know damned well they are mooching off of people with a lot less than they already have.

We don't claim the car thief is blameless if you leave your keys in your car, do we?

Comment Re:"forced labor" (Score 1) 183

That's the new innovation of forced labor. In the bad old days, slaves were quite expensive so you had to provide food, clothing, shelter, and at least minimal healthcare.

The new improved forced labor lets them pick up the slaves cheap, provide them minimal food and shelter and just let them die from overwork.

Comment What is really happening here? (Score 1) 981

We are in a War on Faith, because Faith justifies anything and ISIS takes it to extremes. But in the end they are just a bigger version of Christian-dominated school boards that mess with the teaching of Evolution, or Mormon sponsors of anti-gay-marriage measures, or my Hebrew school teacher, an adult who slapped me as a 12-year-old for some unremembered offense against his faith.

Comment Re:Anti-math and anti-science ... (Score 1) 981

Hm. The covenant of Noah is about two paragraphs before this part (King James Version) which is used for various justifications of slavery and discrimination against all sorts of people because they are said to bear the Curse of Ham. If folks wanted to use the Bible to justify anything ISIS says is justified by God's words in the Koran, they could easily do so.

18 And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.
19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.
20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

Comment Re:Simple set of pipelined utilties! (Score 1) 385

Both upsides were already easily solvable. Most distro's rc scripts already call a function to start a daemon. That could easily have called a helper program to set up the cgroup and register on dbus to act as a controller for the group.

Meanwhile, at least Debian's rc scripts already had dependencies listed in their headers that could be used to compute a start order. It could as easily be used to compute a makefile to start in parallel.

The problem is, now that the init process will be such a hairball of dependencies, it becomes harder to implement such solutions without seemingly unrelated bits breaking. For example, no reasonable person expects the GUI desktop to break if you switch out init. (and no reasonable person creates such a dependency)

Comment Re:Attacker is your Peer (Score 1) 85

Or, you go with signed routes. That is, you use a public key system to prove that you have the right to broadcast a route for a particular subnet.

In practice, it will probably mean some router upgrades. No more router cpus that were considered a bit underpowered for a calculator in the '90s. However, as an interim measure, it could be used to set some BGP filters to limit the potential damage.

Comment Re:Because of capitalism. (Score 1) 85

The problem is, we're tipped over into corporatism where the net is controlled by a very few very large legal sictions tha tthe courts insist are somehow people.

You worry about the bad old government censoring the net but forget to worry about the ISPs censoring the net.

I can't imagine why you think the overmetered network protects us from the market cornering legislation and the pompous asses. Without proper net neutrality, we get all of the above and nowhere to turn.

Submission + - Ethical trap: robot paralysed by choice of who to save (newscientist.com) 1

wabrandsma writes: From New Scientist:

Can a robot learn right from wrong? Attempts to imbue robots, self-driving cars and military machines with a sense of ethics reveal just how hard this is

In an experiment, Alan Winfield and his colleagues programmed a robot to prevent other automatons – acting as proxies for humans – from falling into a hole. This is a simplified version of Isaac Asimov's fictional First Law of Robotics – a robot must not allow a human being to come to harm.

At first, the robot was successful in its task. As a human proxy moved towards the hole, the robot rushed in to push it out of the path of danger. But when the team added a second human proxy rolling toward the hole at the same time, the robot was forced to choose. Sometimes, it managed to save one human while letting the other perish; a few times it even managed to save both. But in 14 out of 33 trials, the robot wasted so much time fretting over its decision that both humans fell into the hole.

Winfield describes his robot as an "ethical zombie" that has no choice but to behave as it does. Though it may save others according to a programmed code of conduct, it doesn't understand the reasoning behind its actions. Winfield admits he once thought it was not possible for a robot to make ethical choices for itself. Today, he says, "my answer is: I have no idea".

As robots integrate further into our everyday lives, this question will need to be answered. A self-driving car, for example, may one day have to weigh the safety of its passengers against the risk of harming other motorists or pedestrians. It may be very difficult to program robots with rules for such encounters.

Comment Re:If there was only one viable choice ... (Score 1) 159

I switched to DuckDuckGo and haven't looked back. They used to be noticeably worse in results quality, but Google has gone a long way downhill. Occasionally I don't find things with DDG and try Google. When I do, I have to wade through pages of totally irrelevant stuff to find that there are no matches, whereas at least DDG tells me straight away that it can only find half a dozen possibly-relevant things. I especially like the way DDG integrates with a number of domain-specific search engines.

Comment Re:Replacement Organs (Score 1) 75

I appreciate the offer, but I'm really not qualified. My interest is of the avid armchair variety. As I understand it, the dialysate is the key to making it work. Previous experiments achieved some removal of urea but it wasn't adequate or it caused electrolyte imbalances. In all forms of dialysis, it's something that could easily be mixed up at home but for the requirement of a sterile solution for hemo or peritoneal dialysis.

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