News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

resonation

Yeah, but, like, you don't have to use Facebook?
Re:How a Machine Learned to Spot Depression on Sunday May 31, 2015 @07:02PM (#9635941)
Christ almighty, these god damned unicode smiley faces are the bane of my existence.
Re:Germany passes Japan to have world's lowest birth rate on Saturday May 30, 2015 @10:30PM (#9632788)
Space filler operations stuck in infinite loops trigger out of memory crashes.
Re:Germany passes Japan to have world's lowest birth rate on Saturday May 30, 2015 @10:26PM (#9632779)
Ha ha! Right you are, oh well...
Re:MIT cheetah robot lands the running jump [video] on Saturday May 30, 2015 @09:51PM (#9632686)
Waiting for artificial intelligence to surpass humanity, particularly as if it were a desirable inevitability, and then letting it happen sounds precisely like pain and inaction to me.
Re:Germany passes Japan to have world's lowest birth rate on Saturday May 30, 2015 @09:48PM (#9632674)
I think he means there's a difference between births arising from couples in love, as opposed to births arising either by accident or from couples bound by other arrangments forced out of motives of survival, hence the qualifier being a "lover's birth rate."

As for quantifying which births are "lover's" births, and which are not, well... good luck with that.

Re:Germany passes Japan to have world's lowest birth rate on Saturday May 30, 2015 @09:42PM (#9632660)
So you're drawing distinguishment between birth rate and fertility rate?
Re:MIT cheetah robot lands the running jump [video] on Friday May 29, 2015 @05:55AM (#9623637)
Whenever I see a wasp or a bee or a hornet, I present it with my arm and pray that it will grace me with it's sting, and summon its siblings to join in.

What a privilege it is to be subjugated by nature's sentient, motile organisms! My only regret is that these magnificant creatures don't sting me more often, but alas, it is the right of any autonomous insect to do whatever it wishes with it's sting, and who am I, but a lowly mammal, to coerce its gifts?

Re:Military technology: Laser weapons get real on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @11:38PM (#9615942)
Seriously, this community can be a cruel mistress sometimes.

  Pick bananas. He trudges through black compost in 
  to the hothouse. He feels he's about to shit. The 
  missile, sixty miles high, must be coming up on 
  the peak of its trajectory by now... 

  beginning its fall...

  now...
...forgot to call run().
Re:Privacy Behaviors After Snowden on Monday May 25, 2015 @02:39PM (#9601145)
God, that was the least informative research project I've ever encountered. The premise of the research is something akin to:

  Based on recent news reports, where a whistleblower
  revealed that tobacco farmers routinely fertilize 
  their crops with human brains, which then inadvertantly
  leads to contamination of tobacco products, leaving all
  smokers at risk of developing human prion related diseases, 
  we've conducted a study to see if this increased the 
  frequency of hits on the Phillip Morris website's 
  ingredients page. Our findings show that numbers only
  increased by 0.00001%.
Gee, thanks.

Nevermind questioning why anyone would look at the list of public ingredients, when the problem is contamination, which, by definition, means that unintended ingredients ruined the desired product.

Why would a company list an accidental poison as part of its normal product?

Why would Microsoft's privacy policy reveal any useful information about secret government programs?

At no point in time have I ever met anyone who would have imagined that Microsoft's privacy policy would protect them from the NSA.

It's almost like someone decided to study the things people DON'T do, after learning of some significant revelation.

Like, hey let's conduct a study of how many people prefer to watch Family Feud over Price Is Right after being in a car accident! Oh, interesting! The difference is barely measurable!