Posts by Captain DaFt

Re: IT'S FRICKIN EASY

As a minority party Democrats can propose schemes like this with impunity. Once they have the

majority back they'd have to answer questions on why we're spending more per broadband customer

for rural voters than we do for urban voters.

The whole idea of this proposal is to woo back some of the rural voters that they alienated in the last two elections*.

Once they grab the majority again, (stop laughing, it always cycles between the two parties unless something cataclysmic happens) They'll never pay it anything but lip service: "We tried, but those &$^#$% Republicans blocked it!"

*House/congress have two year terms, but neither party pays attention to those unless one party starts suffering major losses.

This means just as much as when Bush announced we were going back to the Moon, and you can see how that turned out. China was the only one to actually go.

Yep. No budget, no plans, but they're talking about it!! (Again)

<sarc> Can you feel the excitement?</sarc>

Re: Small steps...

> (3) using some form of chemo-electrical reaction to create the electricity needed. No idea what, I'm not a chemist.

Using some sort of magic fairly dust to keep the plane in the air for free. No idea what, I'm not a magician.

Innit obvious? Just stick a windmill on top of the plane! ☺☺☺

Not even going to pretend to apologise

Wheather it will happen how most people expect it to happen.

Wheather it will happen on a time scale people expect.

I'll be staying indoors today; this is the worst spell of whether I've seen in ages! ☺

He doesn't need to be President

Well, would you rather try to govern over three and a quarter million people with the World's press watching, waiting for you to make a gaffe, or have near absolute control over over two Beeellion 'Dumb Fucks' (as he calls his users) online activities?

Re: Sponsored = don't bother reading

I saw that, dropped straight to the comments, wasn't disappointed. ☺

My violin is not small enough to properly express my level of sympathy.

All my sympathies are expressed here. ☺

How true. If the management at Xerox hadn't been so hide bound to "We're a company that makes copiers", today we'd be talking about Xerox instead of Microsoft, or even Apple.

Re: Wannamker's Dictum

I thought the modern version was something like:

Half the money spent on advertising is wasted, the rest was spent on Yachts and nose candy.

Re: Cats are neither a solid nor a liquid.

One wonders if the inserted beat makes mommy-to-be ... uh .... er ... "smile", that's it ... and baby gets the endorphin rush.

On the other hand: The fetus spends most of its time sleeping.

So is that "strong response" to music the same one I have when the neighbors start blasting their music at 3am?

Re: Where is this going?

I'm guessing that the long term aim is to have a computing engine that fits on a single quark, and runs at several trillion GHz.

And inevitably someone will ask it, "Is there a God?", and it will reply,

"There is now!"

Re: re: Contacting someone implies you were successful;...

"i will be doing the necessary"

I learned it as "I will be doing the needful."

Whatever. Just don't accidentally the whole thing again, OK?

Re: I fscking loathe PETA

People Exterminating Terrorfied Animals

Re: Replacements

So what are they replacing them with ? Different machines, or a proper auditable trail ?

Precinct 12 replaces theirs with machines from precinct 11, 11 replaces theirs with machines from 10, and so on down the line with precinct 1 replacing theirs with machines from precinct 12.

(Gads, I hope I'm kidding!)

Re: Anonymity is necesary.

I think it's unarguable that sometimes anonymity is necessary in a free-functioning society.

Absolutely, and if it's suppressed on the internet, it'll take place in the streets, among neighbors, the cafes, anywhere a word can be shared in private.

By blocking it on the 'net, the authorities are just blinding themselves to a window to gauge how the people in the streets are feeling... well, at least until they're storming seats of government.

Then the inevitable: "But, but this cannot be! Online everyone is so happy and content! Everyone loves us!"

Re: seem to be breeding a special kind of 'dumb'

The industry needs to design for people as they are, not as they'd like them to be, and it needs to design for a larger chunk of the bell curve.

NO! Think for a moment about what you're saying!

You want even dumber people to easily get on teh interwebs!?

Re: Really?

Well the bats are laughing.

Laughing at ultrasonic hacking? More like grossed out, I'd say. ☺

Re: Praise or accusations of work not done?

In Brazil we call this "BIOS" (Bicho Ignorante Operando o Sistema) - Something like "Ignorant Animal Using the System". :D

With a tweak, that'll work in English too: Brainless Idiot Operating System

Thanks!

Re: An unbreakable backdoor would be nice

backdoored software would be classified as "munitions" and made illegal to export to other countries.

Of course, The US has no qualms about selling munitions to friendly countries and allies, Like say, Their old allies in the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, and the Taliban.

Sure came in handy later when we were fighting in the Middle East with... Iran, Iraq, and the Taliban? Uh, wait, hold on...

Re: TIME TO RETRAIN

One clown managed to go pretty far in US politics...

Just one? You haven't been paying US politics much attention, have you?

Re: Competition

Should be an interesting couple years ahead of us.

The ancient Chinese curse at work. ☺

"May you be doomed to live in interesting times."

Re: Just sub armless fun

Frankly, the whole thing smells fishy.

So it only works on old white men then?

It works better on white males above 30. Why? Look who taught it... Unintentional bias at play.

Therefore it means more false positives against women, black people, and those aged 18-30, as well as false negatives.

Lower accuracy means perps missed, innocent people targeted.

(That's a bad thing)

Re: Motorway median

The motorway bridge blocks them too, not just the pillar

Not to mention power lines, Traffic lights, traffic islands, pedestrians, and festival banners.

Plus, how does this contraption handle intersections?

Stop and wobble? Barrel through with horn blazing?

Once they have left you then they no longer require any further performance evaluation. Safer not to say anything.

Of course, there's the apocryphal reference, famous for its ambiguity:

"If you can get this individual to work for you, you will indeed be fortunate."

Re: do something that literally has never been done before

I think that has been done before. What makes it unique?

Doing it at a price that's not a largish chunk of a major nations GPD?

Re: Now this is intersting

However, regardless of this, you would have thought these organisations are aware of what they have and what has been photographed and therefore, even if it's low priority, would take a look at it.

Take the various organizations, the number of satellites, and the time scale (weeks), we're talking about yottabytes of data to sort through, mostly manually.

For example: A lot of data gathered by NASA during the seventies was lost, either because the format it was in was obsoleted before anyone had time to examine it, or it was lost or corrupted over time, because there was so much data gathered, and only so many people (a few thousand) to examine it.

Data collection is easy, going through it all takes a lot of time, manpower, and resources.

Re: This is getting really tiresome

Putin learned that lesson, and learned the lesson of asymmetric warfare in Afghanistan (that the US should have learned from)

The US Government learned that lesson in Vietnam, vowed, "Never again!", and then promptly forgot.

Maybe if the House and Senate member,s median age wasn't over seventy, They'd remember things.