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Comment W E A K (Score 3, Interesting) 83

If you know French, "faible" means weak. Pronounced very close to Fable, and in the usual french order for modifiers after the noun. I'd prefer "infirm" which means lame!

Having worked numeric neural-nets, I'll add that NNs are very hard to tune in any desired direction. Often you have to do the opposite of what you'd expect.

Comment SLOPPY POLICE WORK (Score 5, Insightful) 67

Hardly new, sloppy police work has been around for at least 800 years (Magna Carta) and will persist so long as the drive to punish outweighs the costs of error.

This being egregious, and CA, I do hope the falsely jailed wins supersized compensation to caution others with a higher than zero cost of error. A feature (not bug) of the American system (McD coffee scald).

Comment S O _ M A N Y _ W R O N G S (Score 2) 144

I don't know where to start:

trolling electronic DBs without suspicion? (Laws were written for individual search)

Interstate trolling DBs by non-TN acredited LEOs?

Issuing arrest warrents without any corroboarating evidence?

acting on a warrent without any checking?

Other?

Mistakes will happen, you are guaranteeing more if they are not effectively prevented and ultimately punished.

LEOs are all about seeing people punished for mistakes. They must accept same for their own.

Comment Re: [] More effective as a treat than delivered (Score 1) 100

Not only can neural nets "understand" nothing, humans are not tremendously better: Nukes are far more effective as a threat than as delivered. There's so much fear (from Hiro/Nagas horrors) that an actual nuking would recalibrate. Hint, not the end of the world except for small/local values of "World".

Comment Re:Romance schmomance (Score 1) 104

Agreed. 40 years ago I read a few to understand what the then-new publishing sensation was all about. Newer stuff might be better, but that stuff did nothing for me. Not stimulating, not even enjoyable. And I was reading Tom Clancy. The blunt fact was even my failed attempts at romance and getting a GF were far more detailed, interesting and compelling to me.

I've come to conclude (contrary to advertising) that far more men are capable of pair-bonding and romance than women. So they have to work at it.

Comment D I A T R I B E !! (Score 1) 116

I'm not sure what is so expecially horrid about Amazon who seems to be the Target of this diatribe. All Large retail boxen have similar nasty supplier arm-twisting ( hidden rebates, co-operative advertising, etc). WalMart, SafeWay, TarGet and even TraderJoes (AldiNord) appear as angels.

As for ensh!ttification, is Cory unfamiliar with entropy? Everything, everywhere tends towards lower-value states. Any local contradictions (life) are only explained by greater disorder elsewhere. This applies to communications, too.

Comment Re: U S E N E T ?? (Score 1) 112

Agreed. ISPs did not want to feed Goggle any content. Perhaps also why they dropped their personal website hosting. An oligopolist cannot help their competitors lest they bash them with it. (Chuck Prince gotta dance.)

Big Brother FCC is likely too stupid, but both of these moves corral the net somewhat (pops elsewhere).

Comment U S E N E T ?? (Score 1) 112

USENET aka NetNews was the immediate discussion predecessor of social media (amongst which I count /. as one of the first and lasting). If you want to know whether and how social media is fading, look at it.

AFAICS, USENET has distributed costs and no revenue model. Social Media has serious centralized server costs by like print, but can charge for [much] advertising and some subscription. USENET died when ISPs noticed few users actually used it, so little customer value. Significant costs, running a newsspool is as hard as running a mailserver.

Social media will not die until the traffic [revenue] does, albeit there may be some rotation like MySpace giving way to FaceBook.

Comment diff on text (Score 1) 181

I'm much older and use links (similar to lynx but with tables) in text-mode as my main browser. Occasionally I'll have to load something graphic for java[script]/... which is otherwise detestable and to be avoided.

So I have a simple script that dumps a list of URLs into a text file (~100kB). Then `diff` on an earlier version give a few pages of interesting changes. Done and not dependant only YAP (yet another protocol, RSS).

Comment Ever tried calling-in yourself ? (Score 1) 83

I can understand some frustration with customers mistaking Voice-Recognation (Artificial Stupidity) for AI. But put yourself in their shoes, have you ever listened to the back-tape (if available) or tried calling-in yourself and wading past the gauntlet of questions? Most appear carefully designed to frustrate the caller. Calls cost the company money.

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