Trump will bring Nixon's kind of surveillance back, therefore "Making America great again"!

Anyway, you know you are screwed when you hope the most an US President does is in line with the Nixon's administration.

At least then you can hope for a resignation eventually, right? *sobs*

Please don't arrest me, Punctuation Police! I promise that I'll try harder!

I understand and agree with all objective stuff you say. I never meant that everyone should enjoy the kind of troubleshooting I enjoy. There are some cases where I really get pissed off. But when I set myself to, for instance, compile source code from a third party developer I'm accepting and expecting trouble, with little to no support from the original party, and I get proud of myself when I figure it out. That is true for me at least.

No. But that was the intended joke.

Just because I enjoy troubleshooting some stuff myself does not mean that people has the time or the inclination to do the same. Since I like to troubleshoot I try to do it so other people does not have to.

When you spend 8 hours troubleshooting an open-source project to compile with a third party proprietary library it feels damn good to make it work. Coding is good because it's hard. The higher the stakes the more the accomplishment of that task will make me proud/happy.

Sure... there are some places where things should be simple. When I install an IDE I expect it to compile a hello world just after typing the proper code.

In the mid 1800's artificial satellites were only science fiction too. As was robotics in the mid 1900's. Now all the global telecommunication depends on satellites and robots are faster and stronger than humans, even if they do not have cognitive capabilities comparable to ours yet.To have a plan is the simplest form of preparation. It's not like they have extra infrastructure or personal around the clock to stop something like a zombie infestation from happening, but they have a plan. And they will spend their time and resources with exercises anyway. Might as well go bat shit crazy.

But anyway, it's not like my country's army has money to buy ammo for live ammo exercises.

I think I speak for all non-Americans when I say: Let the US Army burn money with harmless thoughts instead of black R&D, torture camps, wars on other countries and so on.

Don't have them.

First: If the concern is really about automated killing then we have to establish the following:
No object capable of generating enough kinetic energy to kill a human can be directly interfaced with an electronic circuitry.

But that would include cars and all kind of machinery. So the rule above would be a 95% insurance that AIs would not be able to kill humans. The other 5% is accounting that an AI would self-destruct to short-circuit and generate enough electromagnetic current to electrocute a human from a few centimeters away. And with my CS knowledge I would say that the electrocution scenario nowadays is impossible due to the physical properties and disposition of the materials involved in computer construction. But I don't know if an AI is only possible with materials and devices capable of such currents.

This rule also prevent external hacking from turning one's arsenal against himself. If I had an army I rather take my chance with good old meat bags for the trigger pulling.

What I could confirm otherwise is somewhat old news. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/f...

Keeping net neutrality is a huge win. Other articles in the bill are very positive too.

The shitty part is the record keeping. As far as my legalspeak goes, and that is almost nothing, what I understood is that if I have a website I have to maintain a 6 month record of all my visitors. I'm guessing that they refer to general access logs, just like Apache access log files or some equivalent. What I did understand is that ISPs cannot keep those records. But I might be very wrong. Either interpretation is bad anyway, so it does not matter much how bad it is.

What bothers me more is that our equivalent to the FCC (Anatel) is building a database and backdoor access to all ISPs client data. If what I heard is right (two sources working in a third party developer for a local ISP) they will have access to every byte sent through every Internet connection in the country. The buffer size I do not know. THAT bothers me a lot.

That is not the issue. The issue is if the regulator, instead of stopping abuse, let it slide for the promise of a future high paying job. In my book that is bribery, and I'm sure many people agrees with me.

You are joking, right? Do you really think lateral thinking can be achieved doing basic algorithms and complexity theory proofs? Algorithms are just a mechanic way of expressing yourself. Needed, but not the skill that is really important. Because sooner or latter all the software engineers that search for the holy grail in graphical languages will find the answer, and then a monkey will be able to express himself and "teach" the computer how to do what he just thought.

Complexity study. Again, useful. Specially to search for better algorithms or justify such search. But you can only proof complexity and compare algorithms with each other if you can think in many ways to tackle the same problem.

IMHO education does not teach how to explore new possibilities. It teaches rules and discipline. Some times, if you are lucky, you find someone that can jump start your brain to think critically and try to find new answers to old questions, that people already answered for you. That is the beginning of the process to find new questions and the respective answers.

In Computer Science the education issue is specially bad because we are taught how to think like the machine. How to constraint our thoughts to fit that little box that is good with math and nothing else. And then teach the machine how to do that. Ow... the irony.

It is a platform by itself, sure. There are games only available on Steam. But there is no marketing effort there. I cannot say for ads on the Internet overall because I use AdBlock, but I don't see Steam trying to grab attention of gaming media. I don't live in the US but I'm could guess that Steam does not use TV ads just as MS and Sony does. Their public is on another place already. Sure they get a lot of attention on the Internet because they matter a LOT, but nowadays they don't need to try to get attention. A simple Gabe's sneeze sends ripples through the entire PC gaming community right away. I think the difference between Steam and hardware platforms is that a console adds an entirely new capability to a television. Steam depends on an already present computer, and for some reason people likes to play in front of a television, that is usually far away from computers. To make Steam more like a console they made the Steam Machines. That is the entire point of the Machine, even if they seem quite lost about it.

big, coordinated marketing efforts. PC has no such coordination. Steam could try to do that, and I think that will still be the biggest contribution of the Steam Machines. Quite ironic if you think, as I do, that the Steam Machine effort seems quite uncoordinated nowadays.

Dear Anon, by your logic, since I play RTSs and TBSs, will you be a grunt in my army?

No? Oh sh*t. I knew I should have trained a little diplomacy playing some Neverwinter Nights 2.