Viewing profile — brmj

From what we've seen in the movies, the entire planet seems to have landing pads and such throughout the upper levels. If they've got a sizable fraction of the planet's surface are…

This strikes me as extraordinarily foolish. It's not that hard to have a hard shutdown mode in which most of those parasitic loads are gone and trigger it if the battery charge dro…

I suspect that any truly adequate automated essay grader would imply strong AI or at the very least some optimization process good enough that it might as well be strong AI.

I doubt it. Very little annoys users more than taking away something they are used to and trying to sell it back to them.

No, armed cops were called over a prank call. That's different.

Can we please get a link to the actual thread, rather than an article in the Daily Fail reporting on it without even linking to it?

Is that a real photo? The atmosphere is thicker than I'd expect and something about it looks subtly wrong.

Yeah, but there are plenty of cases where that isn't feasible. Imagine one of these being used to collect passwords, credit card numbers and so on at a coffee shop's wifi network, …

Perhaps it's because most people aren't purely self interested.

Here's a heuristic: Questions of the form "I'm 17. Should I drop school for X?" should be answered in the negative for essentially all plausible values of X.

On the surface, this appears profoundly stupid. We don't need a unified interdisciplinary theory of life, beyond the one inherent in a proper understanding of physics since life ex…

There's been a class war here for a long time. The difference is that it isn't one-sided any more.

I see nothing wrong with this. If desktop 3D printing, 3D scanners, amateur friendly CAD software and so on get good enough that this can "destroy capitalism" (at least as it perta…

At the risk of being blatantly trollish, let me state for the benefit of the commenters apparently still caught up in it that Ayn Rand's works are to Philosophy what Twilight is to…

I take issue with the viewpoint that behavior is best understood by treating all involved minds as if they were perfect Bayesian reasoners motivated only by increasing the frequenc…

I reject as false the idea that copyright is desirable. Assuming that it is desirable, I reject as false the idea that copyright infringement on the internet is a special problem i…

Wait, when did DVI become obsolete?

I'm of the opinion that asking that question is almost akin to asking what technological solution should be used to give Russian organized crime your credit card numbers, if malwar…

This may inspire massive overreaction, not just /b/tards calling their congresspeople. Back when AT&T blocked access to 4chan for a few hours due to a DDoS attack, some of them ass…

This is stupid. High quality, memorable passwords are easy once you throw away the conventional wisdom that they ought to look like 10 characters of line noise and move to a non-ob…

As far as I can tell K&R is still the best. Its reputation is entirely deserved.

In other news, drywall isn't particularly nutritious, water is wet and ferrets engage in comical antics.

Well, in all fairness the claim that we can't have either would also be consistent with his statement, sort of.