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Comment Re:Hope the Z-Library Team wins (Score 0) 19

Thus, the efforts of Z-Library are committing or facilitating mass intellectual property theft, (A.K.A., copyright violations,)

Sorry, but no. You do not get do redefine copyright violation as theft. They are two totally different things.

Copyright had the moral high ground when it balanced the needs of creators and the common good. It not longer does, so naturally many people do not feel morally compelled to obey an unjust law.

Submission + - Slashdot Alum Samzenpus's Fractured Veil Hits Kickstarter

CmdrTaco writes: Long time Slashdot readers remember Samzenpus,who posted over 17,000 stories here, sadly crushing my record in the process! What you might NOT know is that he was frequently the Dungeon Master for D&D campaigns played by the original Slashdot crew, and for the last few years he has been applying these skills with fellow Slashdot editorial alum Chris DiBona to a Survival game called Fractured Veil. It's set in a post apocalyptic Hawaii with a huge world based on real map data to explore, as well as careful balance between PVP & PVE. I figured a lot of our old friends would love to help them meet their kickstarter goal and then help us build bases and murder monsters! The game is turning into something pretty great and I'm excited to see it in the wild!

Comment Re:both encode and decode (Score 1) 96

Flac is designed to be encoded on a fairly powerful system once, and then decoded as many times on a much weaker system.

Again, you're partially right... I can confirm as the inventor that my intention was to push as much of the complexity of higher compression onto the encoder. But it was carefully designed to not preclude the applications you are describing. Dig into the format some more; the simpler modes are very low complexity/latency and give most of the bang for the buck on compression.

Comment Re: Aging is preventable (Score 1) 75

But think of it this way: when you sleep your body tears down your skeletal tissue and replaces it with new tissue. Very little of the matter that composes you is the same matter that existed when you were born or even when you were twenty (assuming you're not extremely young). The Ship of Theseus problem already exists with people as our individual cells have lifecycles that are much shorter than our own lifespan. You are, literally, not the same person you were when you were young. Your memories deceive you into believing that more continuity exists between your former and current self than actually exists. This is likely why the notion of a soul seems so intuitive to peopleâ"it provides the comfort that one can be defined as an individual, that one is more than a curious biological process or worseâ"a chemical reaction..

You nailed it. Thousands of years of philosophy and modern neuroscience make a pretty strong case that what is commonly thought of as the self is a process not a metaphysical entity -- the process of the mind experiencing itself. Because there is a delay between initiation of thought or action and the self-experience of it, the self "feels" that it has agency, a will, but that's an illusion on an illusion (or per Sam Harris, doesn't even qualify as an illusion [1]).

The answers to the big questions about death, cloning, teleportation, etc. follow pretty quickly from that.

[1] https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Comment Re:both encode and decode (Score 1) 96

Reality is, Flac is utterly unfit for purpose because encoding it on the fly with low latency on devices with very limited computational power and low power usage is just not a thing. It's not what it was ever optimized for. As you correctly mention, it would need significant buffering, which definitionally makes it unsuitable for real time audio.

I wouldn't say "utterly unfit". 10ms latency for CD audio is 441 samples. You could choose a small blocksize and fixed predictors with FLAC and get very fast, low complexity encoding with low latency. You won't get the maximum compression and the framing overhead increases, but it's close and anyway, if the application has a bitrate cap below the source rate it will have to be able to drop to lossy for some input (because no lossless compression can guarantee a rate below the source rate for all input).

As a matter of fact, if you break this codec open I would venture to guess that is what they did: start with FLAC and tweak it a little. That's what I would do.

Comment Re:They didn't (Score 1) 422

A solitary, fraudulent vote could have tossed an entire election.

Oh please. A race that close could be decided by one of many kinds of error, including miscounts. Any result within the margin of error has that problem.

"Voter fraud" is a red herring being used to try and deny the right of some people to vote, under the flawed assumption that it would benefit one party. That's undemocratic no matter who is doing it.

Comment Re:Zoom is hyped: why? (Score 4, Interesting) 121

Code review time. Try this little experiment:

$ wget https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fzoom.us%2Fclient%2Flatest%2F...
$ xar -x -f Zoom.pkg
$ cpio -iJvF zoomus.pkg/Scripts

Now open the pre and postinstall scripts in your favorite editor and ask yourself if that would pass code review.

No. No it would not.

And that is for the code that the customer can see.

Comment Re:At least someone is mentioning the real issue (Score 1) 405

Stabilizing population is necessary but not sufficient. The current global economy is structured in a way that absolutely depends on exponential growth of production and consumption, and hence exponential growth of the population. We have major recessions when GDP growth drops to a lower-but-still-positive rate. If we went straight to a zero population growth rate tomorrow, very soon there would be a catastrophic economic meltdown.

This is a big problem I have with singularity-ists: what they see as an exponential hockey-stick graph is actually just the first half of a sigmoid where resource constraints start to kick in. There are no productivity advancements on the horizon that can maintain the current economic system long-term with a stable population. Humanity is in for a world of hurt in the next few decades; the only variable is how many of us will come out the other end, which will be largely determined by how we address this obvious problem now.

Comment This isn't a victory for Behring-Breivik. (Score 3, Insightful) 491

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

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