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Comment Re:Non-lethal weapons must be tested on the promot (Score 1) 71

You do not have to get tased in order to be qualified to carry it. You can even become a Taser instructor without ever receiving an exposure. There are a lot of benefits to getting an exposure, but it is not mandated. So yes most police have been tased, but it's not a hard requirement to carry a taser in most departments.

Comment Non-lethal weapons must be tested on the promoters (Score 2) 71

Before any non-lethal weapon can be used it must first be tested on the people trying to champion it. Then everyonoe who uses the non-lethal weapon must have it used on them. It's the only way for them to understand the impact of these weapons.

No one should have a pepper ball gun or rubber bullet until they have been shot with it.

Comment Finally, we can afford ad-blocking classes (Score 2) 28

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

Comment It makes a lot of sense (Score 3, Insightful) 130

Tesla really has done no product refreshes and their stock price is based mostly on promises of rocket cars and robots that replace all jobs. Its P/E is off the charts and in reality they sell 2 cars and a pixelated box. Musk needs to keep the price high to leverage it for the loans that fund his lifestyle.

SpaceX has modern working products and gets funded by government contracts as well as private space launches. They sell internet and AI models. They are only not making money becuase of R&D. So they can take the Tesla speculation bubble and rocket ship that stock price while at the same time having less risk due to having real products. It doesn't matter if spaceX fails to deliver a rocket car because they deliver actual rockets to space for their customers.

Comment Elon Musk == Wish.com Arthur Jensen (Score 1) 124

And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world, in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. [emphasis mine]

-- Arthur Jensen, Network (destroying his golden goose)

Further viewing.

Comment Re:"if you pay for it, you own it" (Score 1) 152

Normally, you don't license media (whether it's digital or analog is irrelevant). That CD or tape or vinyl record is sold, such that you own that copy. Title is transferred just exactly the same as how title is transferred when you buy (not license) a loaf of bread, or a screwdriver, or a book. (WARNING: Though I say "normally," what's normal does change. I'm aware that a lot of people use proprietary streaming to consume media now, instead of playing locally-stored purchased copies, and those people likely did agree to a licensing contract rather than purchasing anything.)

But with software, they've been claiming that a piece of paper that they inserted into the box, retroactively causes the sale to not have really happened, even though the information that the sale was a fraud, is hidden inside the box until after the fraud has been perpetrated. The customer thinks they bought the box rather than licensed it.

There was some monumental decision reinforcing this a while back. I'm not sure this is the best example, but it's well-illustrated in this decision in favor of Blizzard against a cheatbot named Glide, where the judge supports the outrageous assertion that WoW purchasers actually did not purchase what they thought they purchased. And then instead of throwing Blizzard's executives into prison for a decade to deter future fraud, he found in their favor instead. Dirty judge. He actually fucking says this:

section 3 of the EULA provides that Blizzard explicitly retains title to “all copies” of the game client software

[emphasis mine]

For whatever reason, nobody's tried that outside of software (that I know of). I still haven't seen a EULA packed in a loaf of bread or a music CD case. But maybe some day....?

You wouldn't necessarily be wrong to expect this form of fraud to happen some day, so perhaps you're right that Congress should nip it in the bud ASAP. Sure, ok. But Congress is normally reactive so it also makes sense they're seeing it just as software problem. None of their constituents are complaining about media companies defrauding them, just software companies.

Comment Re: Huh (Score 3, Interesting) 106

More people should spend more time trying to enjoy their own lives instead of obsessing over what other people are doing

I mistook your sig for a final paragraph in your post, and did a double-take!

Reading other people's code is a big part of how I learned to do things. I enjoyed Abacus' "Anatomy of the Commodore 64" for it's commented disassembly of the C64 ROMs. But it was easy for that to make sense, because it had been written in assembly language.

But once you're looking at to binaries compiled from higher-level languages, it gets more complicated to .. uh .. recreate the original intent.

Now they got computers to do that? Fuck yeah!

Comment Re:1 ... 2 ... 3 ... (Score 1) 36

But this is a count-in too. He even wrote the first line of the song for you.

Shitstorm because of AI
The computer is making me cry
Hallucination's a bitch
But they say it'll make me rich
[first guitar solo]

Comment This is a Halo Car with a Halo Trim (Score 2) 223

> Tesla's website says there will be three trims: Performance, Thrust, and Rocket. The Performance requires a $50,000 deposit. The Thrust, the one needed to hit the supposed sub-1-second 0-60 time, costs $250,000. The Rocket â" the one that can fly â" is a single-seat version of the car and is "Invite Only".

The Roadster is a "Halo Car" for the Tesla Brand and the Rocket Trim level is a Halo Trim of the Halo Car.

The purpose of the Rocket and the lower two trims of the Roadster are meant cast the entire brand as aspirational - that's what a Halo Car does, and nearly all the Automakers have brought out a Halo Car at various times, models like the Dodge Viper, The Ford GT, the Lexus LFA, the Ferrari F40 and so on. Expensive, Rare, often with major downsides, but they make people dream of owning one, and wind up on posters on bedroom walls.

There are all sorts of issues, regulatory and otherwise, with the Rocket Trim that get in the way of letting them out on regular roads (or even near them), and I am not sure that version ever will be. But it's not the first - right now brands like Ferrari and McClaren have special models which are not street legal, and considered "for track use only". And that's ok, because there are a number of people who are fine with that and do manage to get those cars out on the track.

I suspect there will be similar restrictions and limited areas where the Rocket version can be "driven" err.. "Flown", but there are going to be people who can not only afford it but want the unique thrill and novel experience it will provide. The Thrust Trim will likely be restricted to track use due to the rocket boost, leaving the Performance version the one you might actually encounter on the highway or more likely see parked in front some expensive restaurant. And when people see it, some will point and say "look, there's the car that can fly!"

Comment Re:Bad study (Score 1) 86

This is fair, but that really just reinforces the point that the article makes. Solo dev is currently different, team output is limited by other factors than pure code output. I've worked on games with literally hundreds of concurrent programmers, and even when you're using something like Unreal Engine and your team is small ( 20 people), you've effectively got all the engine team at Epic generating code for you on a relatively regular basis.

It may indeed be possible for AI to actually make teams faster at some point (even in the nearish future), but right now, it's just more code, which isn't always the best solution.

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