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Comment Re: Cool Cool (Score 1) 76

Necessary? I thought we were talking about what was legal. My mistake.

Appropriateness of the response to the emergency is part of the legal considerations. Congress granted the power for a reason. Taking that and assuming it means arbitrary power is not operating within the law, not for Trump, not for Biden.

And you clearly misremember the legal posture of suspended payments and interest.

In what way? Please correct me.

Comment Re:The standard pro self-driving argument (Score 1) 54

If you want to make it a scientific number, you need to compare like against like. Same driving times, same driving conditions, same driving speeds, same roads (for example, Waymo avoids tricky intersections)

Bah. If a human driver increased their safety and reliability by avoiding certain situations, would you call them a worse driver for it?

Waymo would have to be transparent and open with their data.

They provide full access to the regulators, and they've allowed academic researchers full access. Putting it all online would be more transparent, but they're a business and they have up and coming competitors.

Comment Re: strncpy never made sense (Score 3, Insightful) 25

strncpy() was not intended for null-terminated strings at all. It should have been named copy_null_padded_buffer(). Then its operation would have made sense to almost anyone. People wouldn't have minded the longer name much either, because hardly anybody uses null-padded buffers in modern software.

Note that a null-padded buffer that is completely full doesn't have any nulls in it at all. That's why strncpy() doesn't necessarily add a null termination. It also fills the entire destination buffer with nulls after the end of a short copy, which can be very inefficient when used with null-terminated strings.

TL;DR: don't use strncpy(). It doesn't do what anybody thinks it does.

Comment Once the console's servers are shut down (Score 1) 116

Developers can make the license whatever they want including on consoles.

Not once the console maker shuts down the platform's reactivation servers.

Or say the publisher wants to publish a multiplayer game where players 2 through 4 can download a limited-functionality version of the game without charge so long as player 1 is a paying licensee and on their mutual contacts list. This resembles the model used by StarCraft spawned installations, single-Pak multiplayer on Game Boy Advance, and DS Download Play on Nintendo DS. I don't think all consoles support this sort of game sharing.

Comment Re:Two statutory carveouts: first sale and RAM cop (Score 1) 116

Which is not an ownership issue, it's a DRM/license enforcement issue.

Correct. The digital restrictions management regime on paid downloads from PlayStation Store doesn't grant rights to a licensee that are equivalent to those that the law reserves for the owner of a copy. The complaint, as I understand it, is that the required notice of inequivalence is not conspicuous enough.

The plaintiffs can still get the same benefits of the product even if their purchase is just for a license.

The benefits are not the same if the publisher or the platform gatekeeper retains the ability to remotely disable licensed software.

Comment Re:What does someone think "owning" a game would m (Score 1) 116

The only thing you really lose is the ability to resell your license easily.

Or, in the case of certain failure modes of PlayStation Store (such as end of support for a particular platform), the ability to restore your license to replacement hardware.

Comment Re: Cool Cool (Score 1) 76

Do you honestly believe that mass debt forgiveness -- after COVID was already over! -- was a necessary emergency response to the pandemic? Suspending payments (and interest) during the pandemic made perfect sense, and that was not struck down. I don't recall that it was even challenged.

No, the debt forgiveness clearly had nothing to do with the (already-ended) emergency, it was just an attempt to skirt the law, and the courts were quite correct to strike it down as executive overreach. If Biden wanted to do that, he should have lobbied Congress to change the law. He didn't do that, of course, because he knew Congress would refuse -- even though his party held both houses.

Comment Re:Cool Cool (Score 1) 76

Your comment mischaracterizes what has happened. The Supreme Court has absolutely bent over backwards to let Trump do what he wants in temporary rulings, including jumping in to to stay lower-court orders that no previous court would even have responded to. But their on-the-merits rulings, when they have to issue a full opinion, have been much less friendly to Trump. There have been some incredibly bad ones (e.g. immunity) but Trump has lost more than he has won in SCOTUS final judgements.

Comment Re:On AI design and also irony (Score 1) 51

It has seemed to me, for a very long time, that modern AI systems would need to be integrated with standard RDBMS systems for reliable persistant storage of raw information, some sort of no-sql database (memcache or some variant) for persistant storage of associations, some sort of document database for blocks of textual information, a SPARQL system for searching semantically-marked information within the document database, and a more old-fashioned back-propogation NN to provide a store of understanding that the user can directly manipulate.

Probabalistic classifiers are all fine and good, but only for a subset of the tasks needed. The above structure is a very loose, wildly-speculative initial framework. It's almost certain that if you actually tried building an integrated multi-model system, that you'd end up making a lot of changes to this basic idea, but that you'd end up having to implement the same core concepts that are identified in it.

Comment Re:"Alan Turing, one of the more famous people" (Score 1) 22

From their careful selection of text, they WANTED it to mean something else so badly that they couldn't handle putting in the full text. It's a common blight on today's Internet, where people want other people's writings to mean something other than what was meant by the writer, so carefully select the words they read.

Comment Re:That's 12-year-old thinking (Score 1) 56

That's the entire point. Trying to solve other people's problems NEVER WORKS. You CANNOT control others into responsible behaviour, but you CAN place them in a position where they will choose to be responsible of their own accord. It is the ONLY way that works. It is the only way that has ever worked. If you look at computer programming, you will see this repeated over and over - well-meaning "hard rules" are ignored, STANDARDS are kept.

You must give them parameters and force them to find their own solution within those.

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