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Comment Machine intelligence (Score 1) 9

I had an idea that might not be so dangerous and pulled out my fone. âoeComputer,â I said, âoewhat's the best way to knock that bitch out?â
        The fone said âoeParse error, there are no female dogs on board and âknockâ(TM) is not in context. Please rephrase.â
        Who programs these God damned stupid things, anyway? Back when computers were new, science fiction movies had computers that could think. These stupid computers sure can't. God damn it, I was going to have to talk like I went to college... only I ain't went to college, damn it.

Comment Re:Cultural Differences (Score 1) 110

Is it ever okay to "grease" an official's palm?
If the payment is only intended and only results in an official carrying out his or her job duties a bit faster (without breaking any other rules), then it MAY be legal. If the payment speeds up the process by ignoring the local laws or regulatory process, then the payment is still an illegal bribe. So in addition to the FCPA, you must check written laws of the host country.
link

You can find many other sources, the case law around it is a bit nuanced, but basically if you're just trying to get stuff off someones desk that should be moving along under local law then you're probably ok. Congress obviously didn't mean to make it impossible for US based companies to do business around the world so the courts have to take that into account. Since most folks aren't lawyers practicing in that area of law corporate training tends to be very black and white on the issue (this also works to absolve the company if their employees tread into areas that are dark shades of grey).

User Journal

Journal Journal: Mars, Ho! Chapter Fifty

Mars!
John and Destiny left the houseboat parked on a space port pad they had rented at the spaceport at the Meridian Bay dome and got in a cab. Destiny said "I don't want to shop on an empty stomach. Taxi, take us to a restaurant that serves eggs and pork sausage this time of day."
"Wow," John said. "That's going to be an expensive place."
"Well, I'm buying. You said you never tried pork sa

Comment Re:Cultural Differences (Score 1) 110

No, this is much more than the tip style bribery, in fact the foreign corrupt practices act specifically excludes payments to officials who are just doing their normal function (your tips to get paperwork moved), this was out and out corruption to get sweetheart deals. Nobody is paying one official $600k to get paperwork moved along, they're doing that to get millions in contracts with little oversight and hence tons of profit margin. Trust me, nobody in DOJ is going to upset powerful multinationals over some greased palms.

Comment Re:Is this the new emulator story for Android devs (Score 1) 133

You can get a refurb 2013 Nexus 7 for less than $150, it will run 4.4.4 today and is guaranteed to get L. Asus MemoPad 7 is available for $124 new at Walmart.com and runs 4.4, though for a developer the Atom might not work (it depends on if you're using native code, though if you're going there you shoudl probably get a sample of the top x devices you plan to support)

Comment Re:Of course they don't need the full spectrum (Score 2) 80

The problem is that a 6MHz channel only allows ~18Mbps of usable bandwidth using 8VSB (current ATSC standard OTA encoding) which isn't a lot if you're using MPEG2 for 1080i/720p @30fps, cutting it down to ~9Mbps means you're getting worse than DVD bandwidth for what's supposed to be an HD signal.

Comment Re:Bikes lanes are nice (Score 1) 213

Your statement should apply equally to pedestrians and cyclists. However, pedestrians aren't the ones arguing that they'd be safer walking down the middle of the road than on the sidewalk.

Neither cyclists nor pedestrians travel down the middle of the road.

Because most pedestrians that are hit by an automobile are not on the sidewalk, they're in the road.

As I said, only a small fraction of cyclists are hit while traveling down the road not near an intersection.

At an intersection, by definition, YOU'RE IN THE ROAD, whether you had been on a sidewalk or not. Now read that last sentence again, because you seem to be incapable of understanding that simple geometric fact.

The issue is that motorists rarely look for objects moving faster than 0.5mph coming from a sidewalk. Maybe instead of making cyclists stop and dismount at every goddamned driveway as you want, we should address the original source of the risk and institute a nationwide comprehensive 15 mph speed limit.

I never suggested they didn't get killed by cars all the time. I said they manage to handle intersections just fine. That is, with an acceptable surivaval rate.

Where did you come up with that idea? Pedestrians are routinely killed at intersections, coming from sidewalks. Where do you get the idea that that's acceptable?

I don't hear nearly as much whining from pedestrians rights groups as I do from cyclists rights groups, so I assume that pedestrians have greater success in intersections than cyclists do. Of course, it's possible that cyclists are more whiney. Could go either way.

Maybe they're whiny because they hear unsubstantiated crap like this all the time from ill-informed people like you.

Comment Re:Bikes lanes are nice (Score 1) 213

Somehow pedestrians manage to handle intersections just fine, all while staying on sidewalks and crosswalks. Perhaps if navigating intersections is too challenging on a bicycle, one might dismount and walk the bike cross?

Pedestrians get killed by cars all the time. Please stop talking out of your ass.

Comment Re:Bikes lanes are nice (Score 1) 213

Yet only something like 5% of bike injuries involve being rear-ended by cars on roads.

Almost all other cases would involve intersections of some sort, where being on the sidewalk doesn't help or is counterproductive. You're still vulnerable to the high-speed cars while crossing roads, and you're more likely to collide because they're not looking at where you're coming from.

Comment Re:I don't see how MS can comply (Score 1) 123

I imagine that criminal law has been updated to the same standards as civil law, under FRCP you can no longer bury the opponent with paper, if they make a request for digital records in a digital format then you must supply the records in that format if it is at all reasonable to do so (ie if you ask for PDFs from email that is reasonable, as would be TIFF, but .123 files would probably not be reasonable unless the source documents were in that format)

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