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Comment Re:It is not a zero day. (Score 1) 134

Has it been exploited? A zero-day attack is an exploit on the same day that the information is released. No-one has said anything about an attack. If it gets attacked today, it's a zero-day. If it's already been attacked, then it's an already-exploited vulnerability, there's no point in attaching positive or negative numbers to it. An exploited bug that never gets detected would be a minus infinity day attack!!!! Anyway that's a "zero-day attack", I don't know what a "zero-day vulnerability" is, the term doesn't make any sense. I think people are just saying "zero day" because it sounds cool.

Comment Re:Anticompetitive when its free? (Score 1) 142

Your second sentence seems to contradict the first. Microsoft never made any money from Internet Explorer. Making money has nothing to do with monopolistic practice, in fact monopolistic practices lose money all the time in order to maintain a lock on a more lucrative market. It's pretty much the definition. If someone's losing money (e.g. manufacturing consoles at a loss) then they are doing it in order to gain market share (possibly to acquire or maintain a monopoly) in something else (e.g. console games).

Comment Re:So, my bet: (Score 1) 142

A "truly free market" is an anarchy, and the most powerful players will abuse their freedom to remove everyone else's freedom. Anarchy leads to feudalism. The only way that humanity has discovered to control the power of the powerful (and therefore to avoid feudalism) is to regulate it in a governmental structure.

Comment Re:New Perspective (Score 1) 457

  • Episode 3... Having characters like Chewbacca show up at the end didn't quite make sense with the continuity, but actually overall I thought it was a strong movie.

You don't think Ben met Han by chance, do you? That was clearly set up by Chewie, the Rebel Alliance secret agent. IMO the biggest mistake in that regard was having C3P0 being the 'droid that Anakin built. Clearly he built R2D2 to help him build and test pod racers.

Comment Re:Screw other people (Score 1) 800

What idiot would get into a machine that values there life less than others?
Less? Who's suggesting that your life would be considered worth less than others?

For any given algorithm, you can come up with bizarre situations that make that algorithm look silly, so I'm not going to attempt to pick your situation apart. And trying to code an algorithm for assigning blame and punishing it within fractions of a second is asking for trouble far worse than going for a quick minimum harm estimation. And a minimum harm algorithm will inevitably tend to favour the safety of the vehicle itself, as that is probably the easiest calculation to make. If there is no clear path to swerve into in order to gain more stopping distance, it will probably just stay straight as swerving reduces braking.

Comment Re:Car driver ethics: What do I hit? (Score 1) 800

New technologies will always be in the minority while they are still new, but that's the right time to start trying to get them right. We, as technologists, can influence and inform the creation of autonomous driving algorithms (we aren't all kids in a basement, some of us are grown-ups with important jobs). We cannot change the way that people drive, that's one for legislators and psychologists.

And, the algorithm isn't written for you. It's written for the whole of the road-using population. No-one's going to write you an algorithm that makes your car aim for a group of fat people for a soft landing, sorry. And just how do you determine the person at fault in a fraction-of-a-second algorithm?

Comment Re:Lack of patents aside... (Score 1) 148

Just what original work has Carmack done in VR? All this VR stuff is decades old, there's very little truly original work in an Oculus Rift and what there is was not done by Carmack from what I can tell (sorry John, you're awesome but not original in this instance), so this claim is double nonsense.

How much do you know about John's work at Oculus? Just because VR has been done before, that doesn't mean that it can't be done better than before.

Anyway, all of 3D gaming is ancient, I was playing Elite on the BBC Micro in 1984. Therefore everything that has been done since then is unoriginal and derivative of Elite.

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