Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: The long-term impact of this on the US (Score 1) 155

Wait... you're going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (founded in 2003, signed into law by George W. Bush) and you're shocked that there was - somewhere in the 400k square foot building - a chart of stereotypes about white people next to a chart of stereotypes about black people?

Comment Re: Putin (Score 1) 155

I'm sure you'd be welcome if you ever wanted to - you're already ideologically highly aligned (and never really were with the US...) :) Honestly, economically and geopolitically it'd be a very strong alliance for both parties, as what Canada offers vs. what it needs is a good match for what the EU offers vs. what it needs. Though admittedly both parties need to rearm fast - but the EU has a lot more resources to do that than Canada has on its own. Canada has raw materials, EU needs them. Canadian automakers/parts suppliers need an alternative market, EU can provide it, etc.

Shifting eastward wouldn't be frictionless - for example, your oil infrastructure is designed to send it south, not to ports that can export it to the east, and European refineries would need to set up to process it, for example. But it's pretty clear that the current status quo can no longer be relied on, as the US is intent on extortion.

Comment Re:The long-term impact of this on the US (Score 5, Insightful) 155

They're certainly trying. I was listening to an exoplanets researcher the other day (in response to "How are scientists adjusting the way they work during the Trump administration?") grumble about how they're afraid to use the phrase "diversity of exoplanets" in their work because of a (well-grounded) fear that having the word "diversity" will get their paper flagged for rejection. This sort of environment is toxic.

(My favourite response was "Spell it 'divers' and throw in the occasional 'thou art' and 'exeunt' " ;) )

Comment Re:Put your mouth where your money is, Bill. (Score 1) 106

AI isn't actually smart. It's an at best average intelligence thing with an insane amount of available knowledge. Like the village idiot with eidetic memory.

As soon as you do any work with AI that's not available as a ready-to-apply solution from its training data, you begin to notice how much you need to correct it, keep it on track, remind it of basic constraints you already mentioned five times, etc. - it's performing at a level I'd accept from an intern, but not from a co-worker.

What it does have is data. Tons of data. Any question that would take you and me half an hour on Google and Wikipedia to answer it can answer in 10 seconds. That's a great tool. It is not intelligence, however.

Comment Re:No.... (Score 1) 83

lol

Welcome to the 21st century, you might have to catch up on a few things. Start with Mozilla Media Engine and AVFoundation / WebKit Media Stack.

Your website sends me an H.264 stream (or whatever you decided you'll use). It doesn't need to know shit about my graphics hardware.

Comment The only books they're destroying... (Score 4, Informative) 105

....are books that they can buy by the meter, for pennies on the dollar, if that much. These are surplus books that publishers - the world's leading destroyers of books - would have to destroy anyway.

Trainers can't afford to buy actually rare, desirable books.

It's a shame that all of this data is locked up on private servers, but that's really more of a problem of the copyright system than anything else. Anyone who scanned these books would be banned from making it public.

Comment Re:No.... (Score 1) 83

Congrats, you just broke every video player on the internet. Nothing fullscreens anymore.

Complete bullshit. Even for fullscreen video, the website doesn't need to know my screen size. It should tell the browser "here are the resolutions I can offer you" and the browser picks one of those. All the website needs to know is if I prefer 1080p or 4K. And I might pick 1080p even if my screen is 4K because, say, the hotel wifi is slow.

You just broke layout, encryption, media delivery, fonts

Complete bullshit. None of these things break if I don't tell you my OS. I've got extensions in this browser that can fake my agent string and nothing breaks. Fonts? Are you kidding me? Be more specific, what exactly do you mean by that?

Errr it's the browser rendering engine that actually tells the website the graphics capabilities.

And there's no reason it needs to. What legit use case requires a website to know whether my GPU is an NVidia, AMD, Intel or whatever chip? A shitload of the capabilities are only needed for 3D scenes (like max texture size), which is 0.1% of the websites I visit - they can ask and I can whitelist just them. Why does it need my refresh rate?

Again: All of these things have a legit use case, sure. Often exactly one. That is rarely if ever used. There's absolutely no reason that EVERY WEBSITE can query information that only one website in a thousand actually needs.

You don't tell the baker, florist and car dealer your shoe size just because the shoe shop needs it to serve you, right?

Why? You'd be such an irrelevant bit of noise in the dataset.

Because I want to be irrelevant to the fucking ad industry. I don't want them to track me, profile me and try every trick in the book to manipulate me into buying shit I don't need.

Comment Re:No.... (Score 1) 83

Your browser leaks uniqueness out of every orifice and every single one of those things has a legit use case.

Sure, the same way that putting a finger into another man's ass has a legit use case (prostate examination) - but that doesn't mean I want every man to do that to me all the time.

The point is that tech companies are exploiting the legit use cases by abusing them when you're not in that use case. Basically, they think they can finger up your ass whenever they want, because once a few years ago you consented to a doctor to give you an exam and maybe you will do that again in the future.

which is capable of

I don't mind it being capable of. I mind it doing all kinds of shit without telling me and without giving me a choice. For example, I absolutely do not want websites to access my microphone. Or even know that I have one. For the once-a-year case where I might actually use that, I can enable it.

The problem is the same problem that the cybersecurity field has been fighting for 40 years: Permit All being the default.

Slashdot Top Deals

One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis

Working...