Ha! Found the perfect solution!

Bye Slashdot, go fuck yourself!!!

Dim? I don't know. It's more like smoking another cigarette even though you want to quit.

I stopped smoking years ago, though, so my general prospects to leave /. one day are overall good. ;-)

Sure, I've never claimed that people don't use free stuff if they can get it and I'm also not saying that people should not display ads if they like them. I just happen to dislike them.

But I've also never heard of any ISP then and now who didn't offer some space for your web pages. In my opinion, Geocities was not popular primarily because they offered web space but because the neighborhood metaphor that gave them some special flair (plus, something like an integrated webring). It was fun browsing around and putting stuff on it that you wouldn't want to put on your primary homepage. But it wasn't more than that. I was there around the same time.

And you can hardly deny that most of the useful web sites are only useful because they provide user-generated content that formerly could be found on usenet and various university or personal homepages.

Last, hotmail... sorry, but that was always crap. Just like AOL.

You're the clueless idiot. I can display web pages in my browser as I like. It's my machine and I pay for the bandwidth. I have zero obligation, neither morally nor legally, to watch advertisements or even display them, just as I don't have any obligation to click on links in spam mails sent to me.

Moreover, I don't have to discover new products. When I want to buy something, I inform myself and then buy the product that best fits my needs. And I am seriously not interested in the flawed business models and whining of self-proclaimed entrepreneurs who have no genuine product to offer.

Total bullshit. I've said it elsewhere as AC, but let me repeat it:

The fallacy of many web-sponsored startups is to believe that their "content" is good or even worth anything, just because people look at it for free. Mostly it's not. (There are exceptions, of course.) If Facebook would die tomorrow, nobody would give a shit about it, people would simply move on to another site. The same holds for most of the other adware sites. If you have a good product, people will buy it. Ad-supported "content" is just a soap bubble.

There was no problem getting such technical information before the Web was commercialized. In fact, Usenet, FAQs, personal home pages and swapping a few emails with other enthusiasts are usually better for this purpose today than any ad-driven sites you can come up with. Most technical information sites base their "content" on the free work of their users anyway, which is exactly what Usenet was and is intended for, plus its decentralized by design.

I'm using uBlock Origin and think it's better than ABP, because you can easily pick elements of any page for cosmetic blocking. For example, I've created my own rules on the fly to block sneaky ads at Arstechnica and unwanted youtube "recommendations".

However, it seems to me that its easier to detect by anti-adblock services, but perhaps that's also just because the advertisers have improved their techniques. Hard to tell, as I haven't used ABP in a while.

I block absolutely everything that even remotely resembles an ad, and don't want anyone to earn single dime from my website visits.

Where is this "good content"? I can't find it and, frankly speaking, would have no problem if all ad-sponsored business would disappear from the web tomorrow, including this site.

Oops, typo. I've never worked in the aviation industry.

I honestly thought that I'd heard that at least one big player in the aviation industry used Haskell, but after looking around myself, I believe you're totally right in asking for some evidence. Perhaps I've fallen prey to some Haskell aficionados who wanted it to be used for safety-critical systems. But e.g. these guys:

https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~lepike/pubs/pike-rv2011.pdf

only use its type system for their own language, and only for research purposes. So yeah, sorry about that.

Yes, I also want to apologize for that, although you could perhaps have given me the benefit of the doubt. This list was meant as an example of technologies that are dubious from the perspective of safety-critical systems. Machine learning definitely belongs into this category. BTW, just to rule out another potential misunderstanding, in the context in which I am using the word "deterministic", it means fixed runtime and memory consumption guarantees within a given system (including the hardware).

Yet perhaps I only seem so. Anyway, better not write things like that! It will antagonize people needlessly.

Why do you think so? My point is that any technology that potentially endangers the lives of other people should satisfy some stringent safety requirements. Nobody would argue in the aviation industry "look we can only make it fly by using inherently unsafe and unpredictable technology, so that's what we should do". On the other hand, I've worked in the aviation industry, so perhaps I am being too optimistic...

Fine. Your opinion. Luckily that doesn't affect my knowledge in any way.

Exactly, and that's what I want them to do, before unleashing their cars on millions of pedestrians. That's a very simple and coherent position.

Exactly!

*chuckles* No, that didn't come as a surprise. All I want from the makers of self-driving cars is that they use some safety standards that have been accepted in the aviation industry despite being expensive. Frankly speaking, it kind of weird to argue against this, given the fact, which you have pointed out so eloquently, that autonomously driving a car under varying conditions is a way harder task than autonomously flying a plane. But I do understand that monetary concerns would speak against higher safety standards ...

Haskell has been used for safety critical code in the aviation industry because its type system makes automatic verification easier. Whether hard realtime is needed depends on the specification of the respective component. If it needs to be hard realtime, you cannot use GC or dynamic memory allocation. That's plain obvious.

I never claimed that.

Never claimed that either. I don't what makes you think that I believe that machine learning should be used. It probably shouldn't.

No of offence intended, but this claim makes me doubt whether you know what you're talking about. Formal code verification, at least for safety critical parts of the code, is commonplace in the aviation industry. You probably thought about the Halting Problem and believe that it somehow shows that no program can prove that another program is correct and will halt. Well, it doesn't. Formal correctness proofs are done all the time for Ada/Spark programs, that's what the additional annotations are for.

Nothing new here either.

My point of view is that the safety standards for self-driving cars are not yet at the level at which they ought to be before the technology is released to the rest of the world. If you disagree, fine - not my problem.

1. Write all the code in Spark or at least Ada or another language with a similar safety record (e.g. Haskell, perhaps Rust). It can be a formally sound and static subset of C++, if it must be, but not just any C or C++.

2. Use only deterministic code, no dynamic memory allocation, fluffy A.I. heuristics or machine learning. I don't care how hard it is. I want real engineering based on real physics with provable security margins, guaranteed response times.

3. Formally validate the code in a theorem prover, as it is done for planes.

4. Let the whole design be reviewed and checked by external expert commissions, according to previously defined safety standards.

After that, we can discuss whether they are allowed to break the rules.

Why all that? Well, nobody should give a damn about safety statistics compiled by the companies who produce the self-driving cars, and it doesn't even matter whether they are safer than human drivers or not. What matters is that these companies have tons of lawyers, whereas the end-consumer has not. So good luck if you have an accident and it could be their fault. There needs to be some tight regulation like in the aviation business.

I was planning to watch it, but the aggressive marketing has really put me off. I'll probably skip this one or watch it much later.

The same thing happened for me with the Hobbit movies and Fallout 4. I have no problem with normal amounts of advertising, but too much is just too much.

How about an experiment? Next time when you're pulled aside in a traffic control and get really angry at a policeman, just vent your anger and tell him to "Fuck off you stupid cunt!" repeatedly, again and again. Then let us know whether he was able to stop you from expressing your emotions or not.

No problem for me.