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Comment Re:Why is this news? (Score 1) 443

dead red laws

I see Virginia is listed. I wish there had been such a thing back in the 80s. I sat for what seemed like 5 minutes on rt. 50, waiting for a left turn arrow. It was mid-day so there was very little traffic (it's a parking lot during rush). I had at least 1/4 mile line of sight, maybe more. I honestly thought the signal was broken, and that's what I told the cop who was either behind me or camped under a tree where I didn't see him. There was no arguing on the spot, and it's the only time I ever went to traffic court, where the excuse didn't fly either. But hey, at least the 70 year old half-blind lady who caused an accident got to keep their license. I learned a lot of lessons that day.

To this day, I also wonder if that cop was dicking with the signals to make his quota.

Comment Re:Simmilar experiences ... (Score 1) 265

I've had 'yum update' do things like change completely where data files for a service are stored, update the configuration, but not move, link or otherwise do anything with the existing data. I've also had 'yum update' introduce kernel level file system bugs that result in data corruption. Both on vanilla Centos installs with no extra repos.

Comment Re:As plain as the googgles on your face (Score 1) 56

As intrusive as the Google Glass has proven to be, it will only be worse when observation recording tech is more difficult to detect.

I disagree. The exact opposite: when people stop noticing, they will stop caring. It won't be perceived as intrusive anymore, and people will be less annoyed by it.

It's the conspicuousness of the camera in Google Glass, the constant reminder that you might be recorded, that makes most people feel creeped out. For the previous decade leading up to that product, nobody cared about small+cheap camera tech itself. And people walk/drive by fixed-position cameras all the time, and don't give a fuck there either. Peoples's behavior shows that "intrusiveness" happens when a cameras looks like a camera, and I suspect it also has something to do with being face-level, literally "in your face" and you're making eye contact with it, unlike the case with less conspicuous cameras. It was never about privacy; it's some aspect of self-consciousness kind of related to privacy, but a different thing.

You might say "maybe you, but I sure care. Hell yes it's about privacy." Of course you say that. I'm talking about how people behave and the emotions they display. Not their innermost secret thoughts that they are always terrified to express in voting booths or policy decisions, yet are happy to speak of on the Internet.

You know, the Internet, where they don't have a camera in their face making them all self-conscious! The Internet, where instead of a terrifying 1x1 pixel image that makes you think "WTF is that? That's weird! Are you watching me?" you now instead see a bunch of "like buttons" which are obviously for liking things, not getting your browser to send a request to an unrelated tracking server.

In addition, there's a certain inevitability about it all. The cameras have been there a long time, there are more today, and there will be even more tomorrow. You can't do anything about it, except stay at home. So you'll either accept or you'll go insane and get selected out. You'll handle it. (Contrast that to Google Glass, the one small camera out of the hundreds out there, that you actually recognize and is also rare enough that there's little social cost to shunning. With GG you can refuse to accept and also stay within social norms, so GG is different.)

Comment Business search sadly broken (Score 1) 132

Business search is sadly broken in many ways. Whenever I google for a service that I actually need, there are dozens upon dozens of sites at the top of the results. No doubt they're all SEO'd there. When you follow the links, what do you get? A boiler-plate script along the lines of $foo is an experienced contractor in $bar who serves the $locality area. In fact, he does nothing of the sort if he even exists.

The surveillatizing industry does a fantastic job of tracking us and shoving shit-ads at us for stuff we don't want.

And yet, when I'm searching for a service that I ACTUALLY WANT TO PAY FOR, I have to deal with all this dreck.

I figure it must be click-bait, since I've clicked on it because it's misleading. I have a couple ad-blocking methods running concurrently, so I almost never see 3rd party ads there; but I can't imagine what other motive there would be to provide absolutely useless boilerplate like that.

BTW, I guess you could extend this out even further to say that many things other than searching for a business are broken by click-baiters.

Take any question, really. "Who won the 1950 World Series". And although I haven't tested this yet, I'm willing to wager somebody has a site out there that will tell you something like, "The 1950 World Series is available on eBay. Click here to learn more about 1950 World Series products, etc..."

The AI that does this shit is usually pretty smart, but sometimes you get gems like, "The best cleaning products for your World Series".

Comment Re:Bitcoin isn't money but it's still a financial (Score 1) 135

Bitcoin's primary purpose is to traffic/launder money and goods.

Objection. Will stipulate that its primary purpose is to traffic. But I call mega-bullshit on its primary or even secondary purpose being to launder, though there might be a way one could use Bitcoin for that.

Comment Theology now? (Score 1) 285

This business of the developers not knowing how it works. It reminds me of the question "How can God create a being that sins. Doesn't that make Him responsible?". One way to answer that is that God withdraws his authority within the a locus that we call the "soul". What happens there isn't his action. This implies that while knowingly taking actions that lead to wrong is immoral, withdrawing your power from a particular locus and opening things up to potential wrongs is not immoral.

It has nothing to do with intelligence though. The "soul" could be as dumb as a post.

Comment Re:pointers (Score 1) 415

On *NIX systems you will usually get a segfault. I'm not sure if you will *always* get a segfault. The term "segfault" is specific to *NIX. On Windows it was called "invalid page fault" and I don't know what old school Apple stuff called it. That's beside the point.

The truly heinous bugs don't come from accessing memory outside your allotted segments anyway. They come from accessing memory within your allotted segments in erroneous ways. This leads to stuff like, "Hey, the 2nd time I called that function the structure's 2nd element had a different value, even though I did nothing to the structure". You know the bug is someplace else, potentially anywhere in the program where you could have walked off the edge of the sidewalk.

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