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Comment Re:Can a computer do this in the drive? (Score 1) 449

I'd imagine any autopilot that goes on sale will already have to avoid potholes, so it will have some sort of terrain management logic built into it.

Would it even know to avoid them on the 2nd pass?

Would you accept avoiding them on the first pass?

Exactly. That was a pretty poor example to hypothesize on the limitation of computers. I'd imagine if there was _any_ way around those bumps at all, the autopilot would find it in the blink of an eye. Furthermore, its chosen trajectory would most likely be more optimal than the one chosen by the human through trial and error. What the GP has described seems like a situation where an autopilot would _excel_ at.

Comment Re:Throwing in a little conspiracy theory here, (Score 1) 194

In China, many people felt that the movie Avatar was social commentary about the occupation of Tibet.

What?? Which China are you talking about?

No Chinese would ever see themselves as colonists, only as victims of colonialism (first the British, then the Japanese).
No Chinese would ever think of Tibet as an "occupation", only as an "Autonomous Region". Tibet has never been an "issue" in the minds of most Chinese. Chinese travel freely in Tibet, seldom aware that foreigners are often denied access.

As such, if the Chinese sees any message in the movie Avatar, it can only be about the struggle of indigenous people against the colonial powers, and they would most likely see part of themselves in the navi (especially the signature pony tails) and not the colonists.

The source you link doesn't even mention Tibet anywhere. The Chinese sources referenced from that page are all mistranslated sarcastic rants against the Chinese government, not really having much to do with how the Chinese interpret the movie Avatar, and most certainly have nothing to to with Tibet.

Comment Re:SteamOS (Score 2) 237

Meanwhile as of 3.11 the kernel "radeon" driver is already fully functional, complete with power management and KMS support.

Frankly I'd wager nvidia has already lost on Linux, even though it may currently appear they are still the preferred platform with their higher quality binary driver. But binary drivers have a very limited future on Linux, especially such a critical one as the graphics driver. AMD may have a shitty binary driver, but the "radeon" driver is miles ahead of "nouveau", and once they start seeing the signs on the wall it will be a simple matter for them to put in a little effort and make "radeon" the best graphics driver for gaming on Linux. It's hard to see how nvidia can ever catch up with AMD even if they somehow miraculously changed their attitude toward open source in the near future.

Comment Re:So firing 90% of their admins (Score 1) 634

Or, they just set up massive auditing everywhere and aren't really going to fire anybody. Now they just sit back and watch which admins start accessing stuff they aren't supposed to. A bunch of little snively Snowdens we'll grab before they can flee justice.

Well except it won't be Snowdens they catch. Snowden aint your average opportunist who seeks to profit from classified info, Snowden is an idealist who chose to forfeit his life for something he believed in. You don't catch a Snowden with such a petty scheme. On the other hand, whoever does get caught by this totally deserves to get ass fucked for life.

Comment Re:keep trying (Score 1, Insightful) 197

"The universe is enormous, no doubt there's *someone* out there."

So, you believe in the "invisible man in the sky" too huh? ;)

The belief in extraterrestrial life is at least based on the observation that life exists on Earth, and the number of stars and planets like our Sun and Earth in the universe is .. astronomical.

The belief in God has no such basis.

Comment Re:This is true (Score 4, Insightful) 111

I find SSH tunneling to be much less efficient than OpenVPN. With OpenVPN I can have a more-or-less usable remote VNC desktop from Beijing to New York, which is not possible using SSH tunneling.

Anyway, that is not a real solution, as there is nothing to prevent them from cutting off SSH connections when they feel like it. There is no technical solution to a political problem.

Comment This is true (Score 5, Informative) 111

I was just in Beijing for two weeks. I have access to two OpenVPN servers, one in New York another in California. These are personal servers so they aren't on the IP based blacklist. However, my connection from Beijing to either of the two would crap out after a day or two, and the only remedy was to change the OpenVPN server port.

It seems right now they update their blacklist every 24~48 hours. I did not test whether the amount of traffic (idle vs. busy) would affect the time it takes them to block you. Blacklists last longer than two weeks, as the original ports I used was still blocked by the time I left. SSH connections does not seem to be affected at this time.

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