Posts by Eddy Ito

Re: that sort of advantage does make winning somewhat easier!

I don't know, crows can fashion hooks out of a straight twig and use it to dig grubs out of wood. Many other animals have been shown to be able to solve various problems where the solution isn't obvious and some even recognize the need for teamwork to solve some problems.

In short, I'd say solving problems isn't a defining characteristic and the older I get the more I think Andy Kaufman's character Latka from Taxi was right, it's mindless superstition and pointless ritual.

It's kinda what laws do, something that was once legal suddenly isn't albeit most of them are at least avoidable but here even a DNS hijack or website defacement can get you.

That's just silly, clearly the dogs would shit on opposite sides of the road where the opposing foot traffic would fall, both in clear view and, if they could, they'd piss on your shoes as you walked past as well. I mean the DMCA passed with a unanimous vote IIRC. Not so much as a peep of dissent from either side.

Meh, the Trump campaign isn't the first and won't be the last to fall foul of the silly fair use eliminating law.

Re: If ever...

It may seem odd but the answer to both is the same; only in small groups. Once the group gets large enough there is usually some authoritarian looking for more power over the others.

Re: Comission

Here I was thinking that my telco was actually doing a fair job of it. Most every robocall or telemarketer call that comes into my phone displays "Scam Likely" on the caller ID. It's a handy feature as it allows me to choose of whether to answer or not.

I don't see how burdening the telco with filtering would work without them crawling ever deeper up the colons of all their customers. If you're going to threaten prison time for not being Big Brother then I'm not sure I want to be part of that system. How long before I'm asked for the tele-equivalent of my papers before I'm allowed to place a call to my sister or anyone else or would it be an audio captcha before a call is allowed to go through?

The easy answer would be to make every call say "Scam Likely" unless it's overridden by the recipients address book. Of course, these days one could argue that should be the assumption anyway but perhaps seeing it first would get enough people to stop falling for these scams and make the scams unprofitable. Either that or just make them dial out only devices with emergency services as the only valid call, that's where it's going anyway as Line, Wechat, et al. take over.

It does nicely illustrate that this was more for the appearance of propriety than anything else.

Re: "Making false statements to a federal officer"

^This.

Of course the alleged "ambiguous nod" to the resort manager's suggestion that she was the daughter of a member is probably one trigger after she said she wanted to "go to the pool", not necessarily "use the pool" as suggested in this article.

That said, there are a number of other oddities in the story. It seems there was a similarly named event scheduled for that day but it had been canceled so it's entirely plausible that was merely a miscommunication and she could equally have thought that Trump would be attending or speaking at the cancelled event.

More interesting to me is that the passports are said to be from the ROC (Republic of China) a.k.a. Taiwan and not the PRC. Of course that doesn't rule out her being in Shanghai when her friend "Charles" invited her to Palm Beach and it's highly likely the only thing she did wrong was answering questions without a lawyer. Folks have to learn you can't talk your way through these situations because all you're doing is giving them more ammunition.

No need to worry, it will be blown out of any reasonable proportion as pols try to use it for political gain then it will fade away once they figure out it was largely a misunderstanding and/or miscommunications on Ms Zhang's part and they'll lock her up for 5 years anyway.

Re: "a shiny-happy PR op"

@TheMeerkat, I don't understand your response. I don't care who is on the panel. The point of the panel is to have a nice dog and pony show so people think Alphabet cares about AI ethics. Like I said, it's a #hashtag.

Re: Well, that's it for me buying a Volvo...

... which it hopes to achieve in part by altering driver behavior.

I imagine a good portion of that altered behavior will involve buying and driving a different brand of automobile. Maybe Volvo will become the brand for well to do parents who buy their kids a brand new car when they're just starting out.

But as mentioned, this sort of thing may wind up being mandatory and hopefully I'll kick off before my current car does.

Re: Both in the wrong tbh

That makes sense. Good thing these cops didn't mistake their duty weapon for the air-soft "training aids" like the often do with their tazer.

Re: Since when...

Ahem! I believe what you're referring to is American cheese food. It's like those kreme filled donuts. We wouldn't want to run afoul of truth in labeling laws, now would we.

On a multi-national platform, criminality is not black and white. There are no easy answers, which doesn't mean we just give up, but it does mean it'll be hard.

With all due respect I believe you're making more of this "criminality" issue than is actually justified. There are some very universal guidelines that would be fairly easy to follow. I know of no place where murder is not considered a heinous crime and video of same has no place on the internet where it can be viewed by all and sundry.

I agree that there are some very stupid laws like one local ordinance I'm violating right now by drinking a beer in public view. I think the sane and rational response would be a simple test such as violence and harm. Non-violent actions would get a pass as would anything that doesn't harm anyone. We probably don't want to limit things that are generally humorous in a slap stick way or instructional safety video.

Thus stated the obvious things like murder and torture would be out and exceptions can be made if a particular thing helped in identifying the perpetrator of a crime. Of course, we can always hem and haw over the definition of harm and violence another day but workable stop gap measures likely exist.

Re: Open source

But, but, floppies are foldable albeit slightly harder to read afterward.

Who?

She seems to have fallen out of the celebutante spotlight over the past several years, are you sure anyone even bothers with those pen tests any more?

Re: The reason that the Max series need MCAS

Essentially it depends on the plane but for some, perhaps most these days, the short answer is no. Keep in mind I haven't flown for some years due to old eyes and few dollars but some planes are fly-by-wire only meaning there is no mechanical or hydraulic backup. Typically there are "sufficient" redundant computers in the event of a failure, IIRC that's 3 so in the event of one being different it essentially gets out voted and ignored and assuming that two failures on a flight should be exceedingly rare.

Re: "Congress is a joke."

Oh I don't know about that. I think lots of people see Congress as a joke but the problem is they don't realize the joke is on them.

I'm not sure that would work as well as you think it might.

Re: Quality

What? Wait! I thought hashtags stopped tear-wrists.

Not to be outdone, the USAF finally shows its own.

TLDR; "FYTW"

Re: the rear brake lights not illuminating.

Who would put them in the boot? You'd need at least one in a seat so you could drive in the HOV lanes.

"Yes officer, I understand. It's just that I didn't see where law says the second occupant has to be alive."