What I could confirm otherwise is somewhat old news. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/f...

Keeping net neutrality is a huge win. Other articles in the bill are very positive too.

The shitty part is the record keeping. As far as my legalspeak goes, and that is almost nothing, what I understood is that if I have a website I have to maintain a 6 month record of all my visitors. I'm guessing that they refer to general access logs, just like Apache access log files or some equivalent. What I did understand is that ISPs cannot keep those records. But I might be very wrong. Either interpretation is bad anyway, so it does not matter much how bad it is.

What bothers me more is that our equivalent to the FCC (Anatel) is building a database and backdoor access to all ISPs client data. If what I heard is right (two sources working in a third party developer for a local ISP) they will have access to every byte sent through every Internet connection in the country. The buffer size I do not know. THAT bothers me a lot.

That is not the issue. The issue is if the regulator, instead of stopping abuse, let it slide for the promise of a future high paying job. In my book that is bribery, and I'm sure many people agrees with me.

You are joking, right? Do you really think lateral thinking can be achieved doing basic algorithms and complexity theory proofs? Algorithms are just a mechanic way of expressing yourself. Needed, but not the skill that is really important. Because sooner or latter all the software engineers that search for the holy grail in graphical languages will find the answer, and then a monkey will be able to express himself and "teach" the computer how to do what he just thought.

Complexity study. Again, useful. Specially to search for better algorithms or justify such search. But you can only proof complexity and compare algorithms with each other if you can think in many ways to tackle the same problem.

IMHO education does not teach how to explore new possibilities. It teaches rules and discipline. Some times, if you are lucky, you find someone that can jump start your brain to think critically and try to find new answers to old questions, that people already answered for you. That is the beginning of the process to find new questions and the respective answers.

In Computer Science the education issue is specially bad because we are taught how to think like the machine. How to constraint our thoughts to fit that little box that is good with math and nothing else. And then teach the machine how to do that. Ow... the irony.

It is a platform by itself, sure. There are games only available on Steam. But there is no marketing effort there. I cannot say for ads on the Internet overall because I use AdBlock, but I don't see Steam trying to grab attention of gaming media. I don't live in the US but I'm could guess that Steam does not use TV ads just as MS and Sony does. Their public is on another place already. Sure they get a lot of attention on the Internet because they matter a LOT, but nowadays they don't need to try to get attention. A simple Gabe's sneeze sends ripples through the entire PC gaming community right away. I think the difference between Steam and hardware platforms is that a console adds an entirely new capability to a television. Steam depends on an already present computer, and for some reason people likes to play in front of a television, that is usually far away from computers. To make Steam more like a console they made the Steam Machines. That is the entire point of the Machine, even if they seem quite lost about it.

big, coordinated marketing efforts. PC has no such coordination. Steam could try to do that, and I think that will still be the biggest contribution of the Steam Machines. Quite ironic if you think, as I do, that the Steam Machine effort seems quite uncoordinated nowadays.

Dear Anon, by your logic, since I play RTSs and TBSs, will you be a grunt in my army?

No? Oh sh*t. I knew I should have trained a little diplomacy playing some Neverwinter Nights 2.

Instead of saying that science is running out of interesting stuff to find out I could say that scientists are simply too concerned in publishing meaningless articles to stride forward and find the "great" stuff.

Or that we hit a point in our natural science studies that does not offer that many opportunities for major applications.

Other way to look at this is that with so much information available scientists can exchange more information and many people works in smaller fractions of the same problem and help each other in a more predictable way. There is no huge, instantaneous development, or said development takes time to become really meaningful on that area.

But in the end here is my opinion: Here in /. I find, every week, things that are truly amazing scientific developments. Maybe the writer is just numb due to so many incredible discoveries.

Women and men are equally bad at math. Specially at teaching math. It's not an easy subject and it's not a natural way to think about anything.

If smart is the capability of intellectually adapting to accomplish tasks then computers are in trouble for now. If academia overall stops chasing it's own tail worried about publishing papers in great volume of questionable relevance and resumes the publishing of meaningful developments then maybe we can get a good breakthrough in ten years. And that is a big maybe.

I am not particularly thrilled to create an AI good enough to be like us. /. is nice enough but humans overall are dicks. Anything we create will follow this tendency. We are not good enough to avoid that.

Sure, the Internet was not designed to stream HD videos, but neither it was designed to play games, or make telephone calls. The only thing they designed it for in the beginning was simple http. But all those things work now. The Internet is flexible. The companies want to kill net neutrality because the Internet is a strong competitor in many services they have a stake in too. Examples: Skype can replace telephones. Netflix can replace cable. And the Internet allows for people to create new, better solutions at any time and over the already established infrastructure. Having a tenth of my download rate as my upload is already a spit on my face, and now they want to control what services I can properly use or not? That's not acceptable.

Besides, if they charge more to not limit Netflix bandwidth, most people will likely pay for it and keep using the same amount of bandwidth, only now the ISPs are getting some money for that. This is only about profit, that they have more than enough.

Im not a physicist, but hear this. Imagine for a second that most of the photons that gets trapped on a black hole will certainly head towards the singularity. Now, there is a certain distance where the orbital speed is the same as the light's speed, and that is not at the core, presuming that at the core the gravity must be strong enough to stop light from going out even at the perfect escape vector. Therefore it is possible, but very unlikely, that this orbiting light around the black hole is enough to melt or crisp any objects that care about being burned.

Please correct me if I'm in any way wrong.

Just remember: When you try to patent such idiocy I will be pretty pissed off. Nice rule of thumb.

... if /. will be the first site to have flesh-eating posts.