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Comment it's hard to automate things (Score 1) 340

Say "it turns out it's hard to automate things people regard as simple. People carry an enormous amount of context and consult it without ever being aware of doing so. Telling a computer how to do what you do as naturally as walking means identifying every neuron, every muscle, getting every detail right, or the whole thing falls over. Once the work's done, once it's understood and specified to the level of detail computers need to operate properly, there's immense value in that,and then somebody wants it to hop or skip or pirouette. The problem is, the technical details bore most people right out of their skulls, and a lot of the tasks better suited for computers than people are _already_ boring. But for people who like code, just like people who like math or politics or whatever, the details of how all the parts are put together, how they all operate together, it's just fascinating. Even some of the tiny little parts are fascinating all on their own when getting the most out of them starts to matter."

Comment Re:Pricing for Abusers, or Abusive Pricing (Score 1) 91

Maybe there are two sides to this argument

There are. One of them is a greedy and abusive minority sucking in the ignorant with lies.

as with any "open access" to a resource

Network bandwidth isn't open access.

The challenge for an ISP or telco is to strike that balance between reasonable pricing and protecting the reasonable majority from a handful of excessive users

That's not a challenge for anyone. Congestion avoidance is a solved problem, an automated algorithm, _the_ automated algorithm that picks what to send or drop next. If "excessive users" are interfering with anybody else, causing that interference was an explicit choice by the ISP.

Comment Re:Snowden opines on something (Score 1) 144

I really don't think his value to humanity consists of him spending his airtime talking about what self-entitled theocrats and oligarchs and warlords and just plain kleptocrats want him to talk about. I think his value to humanity consists of him spending his airtime talking about what they _don't_ want him to talk about, because he's one of the few people who actually know that stuff first-hand.

Submission + - Human limbs 'evolved from SHARK fins thanks to Sonic the Hedgehog gene' (mirror.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists believe human limbs evolved from the gills of sharks — thanks to a gene named after Sonic the Hedgehog. The discovery comes from analysis of skate, a cartilaginous fish which has much in common with sharks. Limbs, like gills, grow thanks to a vital protein known as the 'Sonic hedgehog gene' — named after the video game character. The new discovery backs up a theory suggested 138 years ago that legs and arms evolved from prehistoric fish gills.

Comment Re:Report + Judgment (Score 2) 174

Murder requires intent to kill

A person is presumed to intend the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his voluntary act

[Technically,] cases that involve negligence or reckless disregard for safety [...] are NOT "murder"

Yes, they are. The line between manslaughter and murder is "behaves in a way that shows extreme, reckless disregard for life and results in the victim's death".

Comment I'll be very _very_ interested in DX12/Vulkan perf (Score 1) 97

Apparently AMD's hardware absolutely rocks on the next-gen architectures like those two, and Vulkan being directly based on Mantle can't hurt even a teensy bit.

AMD being the king-of-the-hill for VR would make a world my ooooh-goody-competition-means-good-prices little heart is just piiiiining for.

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