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Comment Re:Useless (Score 1) 177

According to http://www.scotusblog.com/stat... the Supreme Court recently affirmed 27% of lower court decisions and reversed 73%. This means that if you guess that the Supreme Court reverses the lower court every time, you'll be 73% accurate. 70% accuracy is ridiculously low if you can get 73% accuracy *without* taking into consideration the records of each justice or any other kind of details.

Of course, the usual reason why the case got to the Supremes in the first place is because there were two cases by different Appeals Circuits which conflicted.

Comment Re:cretinous because (Score 1) 316

Speaking strictly about wireline ISPs, no wireline ISP sells a consumer grade plan as 20Mbps for 24/7 usage.

Mine did, but doesn't now: their lowest grade plan is now faster than that. The upper tiers might have throttling, but I don't thing the base grade tier can hit the level at which they care.

But then I'm not in the US. We have real competition between communications providers.

Comment Re:Public transport will be obsolete (Score 1) 84

Once driverless car technology has sufficiently matured, there will be no need for buses, underground trains, or any other current public transport system.

Are you sure about that? You seem to be assuming that everyone will be travelling from and to different places and that there will be no concentrations of people attending the same location at the same time. It's been my experience that people don't work like that. I also suspect that the price that these vehicles would charge would make them rather less economic than you think. Unless there's evidence that what you propose would be cheaper than public transport currently is, or that there will be no common locations and times for people to go somewhere, there will be an incentive to have public transport of some form.

Comment Re:Trains sound like a good idea. (Score 2) 84

US moves 10 times as much over rail as Europe does, over 25% of all freight is moved by rail in the US

I suspect that this difference may be in large part due to the more widespread use of water-based transport in the EU; it's a lot more efficient than even rail (provided you've got a suitable river going in the right direction or are close to the sea, which describes more of the EU than the US).

Comment Re:ATO - GoA 4 (Score 1) 84

Operating the doors in a safe manner. (hard)

How so? You don't even need a computer. Just make it so the train doesn't move if the doors aren't closed, the doors move with little force, and if they fail to close they re-open and try again in 5 seconds.

I've seen a few driverless trains around the world (e.g., in Paris, Copenhagen and at ORD in the US for transfer between terminals) and they usually operate with two sets of doors: one set on the train, and the other on the platform. This keeps people from accessing the track area except when the train is there to let them board. Combine this with obstruction detection when the doors are closing (without which millions of automatic doors wouldn't be safe) and I think we can say that this particular problem is solved.

Or was the GP foolishly assuming that they had to use the existing equipment? That no investment was possible?

Comment Re:Laziness (Score 1) 150

Amazingly, security libraries are often in this category. Is there a really good writeup ANYWHERE about SSL, certificates and signing practices? And IPSec with all its intricacies?

Funnily enough, on Stack Overflow! Not all of the security-related questions are overflowing with shitty misinformation. (SO might not be great, but it's better than the squillion shitty places for question answering that preceded it.)

Comment Re:National Boundaries (Score 1) 186

Nor do these arrogants "USA and other countries" (merrily forgetting there is something else in the world than Europe and the USA plus its satellites) who think there is no second chance ever, and no right to ensure one's personal data are correct, and no rigth to privacy either -- to mention only some of the personal-data-related rights that are given to me by my own European country (note that, as some have said, other European countries may have these rights in a less formal way, as a result of case law) and that I can successfully use to deter French spammers while I still have to suffer US ones. :/

You do not have the right because the government says so, but rather because you are a human being. Though that is a principle that is explicitly stated in the US constitution, it applies everywhere. However, it is a right that is made explicit in the EU and where the conditions under which the right may be infringed are perhaps more clearly stated (and better enforced) than elsewhere. There is a danger in explicitly stating rights, in that some stupid people might think you have no other rights — not true! — but leaving them all implicit has other risks in that it becomes hard to say for sure when they've been unreasonably infringed and to get other people to help you out defending them.

Comment Re:Group Policy (Score 1) 92

Cheaper and easier to convince the PHB to buy a certificate signed by a public CA, than install your own CA certificate on every browser in your company.

Then your organization's IT department needs to learn about Group Policy and its counterparts on other common personal computing platforms.

Yeah, but getting all that to work when dealing with the reality of BYOD in many organisations (universities have a particular problem with this) is massively more complicated and expensive than ponying up for an externally-signed certificate. Heck, even getting an externally-signed local CA certificate is cheaper. Group policy (and equivalent) works relatively well for desktops and other wholly-owned devices, but ceases to be nearly so useful once you have to deal with anything external, and that's more and more common.

Get with the programme.

Comment Re:it depends on what "skilled worker" means. (Score 3, Insightful) 401

To put things in perspective - the old owners had plants in 5 different states. Each of the other plants consistently lost money. Our plant consistently MADE MONEY, despite mismanagement. Quarter after quarter, the accountants posted profits from our plant. In effect, we carried four other money losing plants for years. The owners could never bring themselves to unload the money losers, instead taking the profits we earned to shore up the other plants. They followed that policy until bankruptcy put them out of the game completely.

Were any of those plants making key inputs for yours? If they were, and it wasn't practical to consolidate that function, then closing them down would have crippled you. Which individual plants make money is one thing, but where there's internal transfer of items between units of the business, the value attached to those items is fairly nominal in practice; it's the overall business that really makes the profit or the loss.

Or maybe they're just incompetent fucks. That could be true too. Hard to say without the full facts, but the fact that bankruptcy hit is strongly indicative.

Comment Re:So what are good languages to get into? (Score 1) 197

A masters in computer science program means taking about 10 three credit courses to get the degree. That means learning potentially 10 different languages. Which 10 would you choose? Which of those 10 are a must to learn, which would be merely advantageous to know?

Take at least one OO language (Java's fussy and bureaucratic, but its a pretty good example of the breed and is likely to be useful after you get your masters), at least one functional language (probably Haskell these days), at least one declarative language (Prolog or SQL), and don't just learn programming languages. You also need to learn about data, about data structures, about algorithms and their analysis, about parsing and compilation, and about concurrency; these are all independent of any programming language.

But computing is well served by not just learning about computing. If you have time, learn about math, stats and logic too, and learn how to communicate your ideas effectively; you'll never get far if you can't communicate with other people well.

Comment Re:Transcendence (Score 1) 564

And by booboo I naturally mean something along the lines of

if(target->ThreatRating == ThreatRating::American) { target->Kill(); } // booboo

I'd guess something like:
        if(target->ThreatRating = ThreatRating::Trrist) { target->Kill(); }

Let that be a lesson to you: Trrist must evaluate to 0, for humanity's sake!

Comment Re:The frustrations of AI. (Score 1) 564

If hardware isn't the problem, then it must be an algorithmic one. So, why can't an algorithm be discovered that is a breakthrough?

The problem is that it requires a true breakthrough, and there's no way to predict when that will happen. It also doesn't help that we don't really know what intelligence really is; all we've got is lots of things it isn't. I suspect that when someone cracks it, there'll be lots of people going "Is that all?! Anyone could have got that." and they'd be right, except that nobody did and it involves something both trivial and non-obvious. It might also require a lot of parallel processing, which we're still learning how to do well.

As we don't have any handy breakthroughs right now, we should instead study how brains really work and how to make computers do useful things (including stuff like "understanding" speech, "understanding" written natural language, drive cars safely, etc.) Those might or might not make the breakthrough easier, but they'll have other benefits along the way so they're still right to do.

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