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Comment Re:Why is he worried (Score 1) 583


He obviously must see and be directly involved in some aspects of AI that are causing him to be concerned.

You're assuming a rational person. The fact that he used the metaphor of freaking demons, pentagrams, and holy water is evidence that's not true. Obviously he doesn't think they're actual demons, but you can see where his mind is when he brings up the horror genre. That doesn't smack of people programming cars to making life/death decisions.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 283

Umm.. OK.

Lest you forget, Microsoft was ruled both a monopoly in 2000, and ruled they miss-used their monopoly power. They were going to be split into multiple companies until the 2000 election changed the political landscape and the Federal government dropped the suit.

What makes you think Microsoft STILL doesn't hold monopoly power over the PC business? They don't hold as much of a stranglehold anymore, but I'd say it's still very much a monopoly.

Comment Re:my thoughts (Score 4, Insightful) 372

*sigh*

The guy in Texas who had Ebola transmitted it to exactly two people, both of which were caring for him while sick. He didn't transmit it to ANY of his family members. I'd say that's a good indicator that the virus really is very hard to catch.

As far as your "idiot" theory goes, smart people screw up, and constant vigilance is hard, especially in an environment like in west Africa. At the moment, you're thinking with the fear generating part of your brain, not the thinking part of your brain. That's very bad, and causes more harm than good. Health officials are telling you it's hard to get because it IS hard to get. The average number of people that Ebola is transmitted to is about 2. That's a very low number. AIDS, which is also hard to catch is transmitted to an average of 4 people. Measles, which is very contagious is 18.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...

So please stop with the conspiracy theory. It's a disease, not a government secret. You can't keep a tight lid the real facts about a disease that people study and publish papers about in medical journals.

Also, consider there's thousands of health care workers in west Africa. There's been a handful of American healthcare workers who've caught the disease, but MANY OTHERS who haven't.

Comment Re:Summary (Score 1) 124


Actually the problems are the potential side effects of new vaccines, and not if it works or not...

If they're comfortable enough to give it to 10s of thousands of health care workers, who are wearing protective clothing, trained to deal with the exposure, and are highly monitored and controlled who they come into contact with, why wouldn't they give it to people at high risk of developing ebola?

If the risk is so high from the vaccine, then you sure as hell shouldn't expose 24,000 healthy people to it.

Comment Re:Summary (Score 1) 124


That's what you do if you already have a proven vaccine, yes.

And also what you should consider doing when you have a worldwide pandemic in a country that threatens to kill millions of people.

Doing this doesn't tell you what trials need to tell you:

That's why you do it with a small amount of the available vaccine. Note I said use a portion, not abandon the clinical trial. There's absolutely no reason why you can't use SOME of the vaccine to combait the disease. It might not work at all, but it's a decent gamble.

Comment Re:Summary (Score 1) 124


  If someone can think of alternative which delivers a better result, then I'm all ears

Simple. Use a portion of the 24,000 doses (a few thousand?) to spot vaccinate anyone who's had close contact with someone with Ebola, say all immediate family members. Those peoople are arguably at risk or at greater risk than health care workers. That's how polio is being eradicated. The WHO comes in and vaccinates an entire community when a poliio case is detected.

Comment Re:We have more but we USE more. (Score 4, Informative) 170

Exactly. The question is strange (and the attitude of the poster is odd too... 20 years ago is "days of yore", and "olden days"?) Methinks dusting off the word "whippersnapper" might be appropriate here.

Oddly enough, a similar question fell through a wormhole in the space time continuum from Usenet, circa 1994. "Now that we have massive HDs of 100s of megabytes, and not the dinky little ones of several megabytes from the Reagan era, do we still have to worry about having 95% usage alarms?"

The truth being, if you got to 95% usage somehow, what makes you think that you're not going to get to 100% sometime soon? Maybe you won't, but you can't know unless you understand how and why your usage increases. That's not going to be solved by a magic algorithm alone, it involves understanding where your data comes from, and who or what is adding to it. This isn't new. The heuristics and usage question, and estimating when action needs to be taken is just as relevant now as it was 20 years ago.

Comment Re:holy cr*p look out the window. You'll be so hap (Score 1) 291

Interesting. The world population is about 7 billion now. 1% of that population is 70 mllion. So you think only 70 million people in the world have access to computers?

That's very easy to show you're way the hell off. The US population is 300 million, of which 75% have internet access at home. So that's 225 million people in the US ALONE that have access to a computer and internet access.

You also might want to update your view of the 3rd world from 50+ years ago. It's not simply a mass of people that are all farmers anymore. That exists in much of the world, but it's very quickly changing. Many people have computer access. I wouldn't venture a guess as to how many, but your view is clearly incredibly wrong just from a cursory examination.

Comment Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? (Score 1) 287


  If I was walking across an intersection, I would trust a Google SDC far more than someone late for an appointment, driving a Chevy Tahoe with a cellphone in one hand, a Starbucks latte in the other, and two screaming kids in the back seat.

If you think that's supposed to instill confidence, you might want to re-think that. Your're compairing a computer to a severely distrtacted human. A human, I might add that's breaking the law. Distracted driving is illegal.

You need to compare the SDC to a fully aware human being, not a fully distracted one. You sound like someone that might have inside knowledge. So listen carefully. EVERYONE thinks they're an above average drive that's fully aware. THAT'S your standard, not a distracted latte sipping soccer mom with kids yelling in the back seat. If this think is ever going to succeed it has to be better than an actual good driver, since everyone thinks they're that.

Comment Re:Why is shitload spelled sh*#load? (Score 1) 387

So the rest of us have to be censored because a small minority read at a library, or have infantile filtering software at work? If you, your employer, your school, or your nanny want to do that, fine. But if major sites started using real lanaugage that people use, there'd be more pressure on the infantile filtering software to allow people to view sites that use "forbidden words".

Also, there's other methods to fool the filtering software. That's even a better option. Turn it into a cat/mouse game, which would increase the costs for the filter writers.

Comment Re:Bitch-ass whiners got their feelings hurt (Score 1) 387

Would Apple be where it is if Jobs wasn't an asshole?

Do you think Linux would still be a success if Linus wasn't there to keep dumbasses from accumulating more political clout than technical competence and steering it toward ruin?

Being a fuckhead like Jobs or Torvalds is ONE way of enforcing order. But it's not the only way. It's probbably the most obvious and easy though. But no, I don't agree that Jobs and Torvalds have to be shitheads for Apple and Linux to succeed.

Comment Why is shitload spelled sh*#load? (Score 4, Insightful) 387

We all know the word is shitload. We all know Linus is swearing, and he didn't bleep himself. This is an adult website, not a child website. So can we please have an honest depiction of what's actually said rather than some silly characters replacing the full spelling of the word like this is a cartoon? FCC rules don't apply to slashdot, that's radio and TV.

I'll never understand this weird deception people have that if you miss-spell fuck as f*ck, shit as sh-T, cocksucker as c*cksu**er, piss as p*ss, motherfucker as motherf*cker, cunt as c*nt, and tits as t*ts, you're someone "not swearing". Uhh.. yeah. (My regards to the late George Carlin)

Comment Re:How legacy is legacy? (Score 1) 68

Yes, it's possible for IE6 to use TLS 1.0. But it's not enabled by default. Since it's not on by default, it'll essentially be broken when users visit a site with SSL 3 disabled.

I don't have an old IE6 machine to check myself, but I've found several references that say it's not on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

Comment Re:How legacy is legacy? (Score 1) 68

I think you missed my point. The point was about the implications of removing SSL3 from the server side. Many times you can't just simply change something on a webserver to fix one browser without breaking another.

In this case, the effects seem to be minimal, and would only break IE6. That's not a problem in 2014, but would have been a major problem if this was discovered in 2007.

Comment How legacy is legacy? (Score 3, Interesting) 68

The last major browser that doesn't support TLS 1 was IE6. Even Microsoft doesn't support that piece of crap anymore. I'm sure there's some special cases of embedded systems out there that rely on SSL3 only, but that's a small minority.

So the question to me is, what would break if you disabled SSL3? Breaking the web for IE6 users happened a long, long time ago.

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