Posts by breakfast

Re: Boney? ( Part 2 )

He finally finished the upgrade from a wired to wireless home network.

There was a cat 5 that really was gone.

Or they didn't vote because they were being actively suppressed by one of the many legal measures that were in place to prevent citizens from voting in the US elections. That happened to a lot of people, particularly in swing states ( as the rules tend to be instigated by republican administrations who want to help out their own side ) and very likely enough to swing the states needed for an electoral college win.

Re: I'll note one other user case and one other failure.

From an agricultural point of view something like this can be useful for monitoring livestock - one of my friends currently has a camera along these lines set up to keep an eye on a sick horse in the stable.

Like a lot of these types of gadget, it is quite practical in a few very specific circumstances. Whether any of them are common enough to make it a viable commercial endeavour is another matter.

"Ve cannot afford to risk breaking ze Geneva Convention."

Re: Actually a quantum leap will not be enough

As I understand it ( and it may become clear shortly that I am not a physicist ) a quantum leap in computing would result in a machine that will execute any task it has been handed during its own lifetime in an arbitrary order. Processing would commence with an "Oh boy" statement, whereupon the main thread has to identify where and when it is located, resolve some kind of dilemma and move onto the next process. Meanwhile a secondary thread will slap a small piece of perspex and spout percentage chances regarding the purpose of the current job, which will all turn out to be incorrect.

It seems a little bit complicated TBH.

Re: Knowledge ≠ understanding

This is where a lot of people in AI research go wrong in my view. They are treating the problems of intelligence as technical, when the underlying questions that we need to answer are overwhelmingly philosophical.

That is bad news in terms of getting reliable answers because philosophers seem to be pretty bad at that, but until we have a much clearer idea about what consciousness and understanding are, how can we imagine we could simulate them. Even if one relies on the concept of consciousness as an emergent property of the system, relying on something mysterious appearing in a system of sufficient complexity seems little different from superstition.

Re: No, No, No, GOD NOOOOOO

I never understood why one would want to take a terrible language from the browser and put it on the server instead of finding a good language and putting it in the browser. Always seemed totally ass-backwards to me.

More likely she found it straight away and now, realising where it is, has gone into hiding.

Re: And people wonder why I don't trust modern technology!

Knowing how these things go, they probably whipped up a simple proof of concept prototype to demonstrate how it might work and that immediately got seized on and released as production software.

Re: 2006 wants its technology back, indeed!

One can actually run a podcast through Soundcloud - it's got a passable RSS feature hidden away in the background.

Even a local power outage got things to the shocking situation where I had to plug a phone into my land line if I wanted to talk to people outside shouting range. It's easy to forget that base stations are on the same power grid as everyone else until the whole lot goes down for a while.

In fairness rebinding caps-lock solves a lot of problems, including ones where you accidentally find yourself shouting for no good reason.

I typically find the latter reaction is quite common when I use Vi...

Re: J.J. Abrams

As far as I can tell, running about, shouting and big spectacular explosions are easy to sell internationally in a way that more thoughtful or considered film making seldom is. They save a lot on translation.

Re: Monster's inc?

Be careful! I think your pocket might be full of bees.

Re: **Applause**

A search for "Super Cali" reveals that Vulture Central have used this format about ten times so far, mostly in reference to this story. I actually thought it was more, but certainly a good running gag.