Slashdot Mirror


User: Bengie

Bengie's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
6,462
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 6,462

  1. Re: Not a chance on Why CurrentC Will Beat Out Apple Pay · · Score: 1

    When I used a bank, deposits were instant if they cheque from was from the same bank, otherwise you had to wait for the cheque to clear.

  2. Re: Not a chance on Why CurrentC Will Beat Out Apple Pay · · Score: 1

    It's hard to balance your account when you don't know how much you've spent. Using a debit card, you know how much you have left over without manually logging every purchase. Credit cards have that lovely delay that means you think you've only spent x amount, but really you've spent y. It's bitten my wife and I many times, and we hate not having a 0 balance on the CC at the end of the month. Since our budget has virtually no flexibility, we can't just make up for it the next month.

    Why can't we just have a "this is how much you've spent"?

  3. Re:Meet somewhere in the middle on FTC Sues AT&T For Throttling 'Unlimited' Data Plan Customers Up To 90% · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Unlimited means there are no limits. By definition, throttling after a certain "limit' is a limit. Their usage not only does not agree with colloquial usage, but it also disagrees with logic. "No limits, but if you use too much, we'll punish you."

    Unlimited: without any limits or restrictions

  4. Religious conference on Creationism Conference at Michigan State University Stirs Unease · · Score: 1

    So it's a religious conference, they happen all the time at state unis. What's the problem? Just as long as they abide by the rules.

  5. Re:critical thinking book/resources on Employers Worried About Critical Thinking Skills · · Score: 1

    Knowledge can't fill the gap. You learn critical thinking by practicing solving unique problems, thing that most people find boring. People who enjoy solving issues, overly practice critical thinking and became better than most at it, while everyone else steer away from it and have nearly no ability.

    Like wise, someone who enjoys playing the piano and becomes obsessed as a child, will rarely be over taken in skill by someone who showed no interest and suddenly starts in their thirties because their boss said people who can play instruments have a higher correlation with problem solving, so raises for those who can play chopsticks. Books won't do much.

    The best way to learn critical thinking is by interaction. I found college classes a great way to exercising critical thinking because of the many different points of view and typically a decent teacher to help moderate the discussions and many times join in if a point of view is under-represented.

  6. Re:What is critical thinking? on Employers Worried About Critical Thinking Skills · · Score: 1

    You managed to liken believing in a god to crossing the street.

  7. Re:What is critical thinking? on Employers Worried About Critical Thinking Skills · · Score: 1

    "Critical thinking is the study of clear, reasoned thinking", it is not about be skeptic. If you think it's about being skeptic, then conspiracy theorists are every good at critical thinking.

  8. Re:This is silly on Automation Coming To Restaurants, But Not Because of Minimum Wage Hikes · · Score: 1

    May times it is. I know people who get paid more for being unemployed than if they found a job and lost their unemployment. Yes, nothing can be worth more than something.

  9. Re:This is silly on Automation Coming To Restaurants, But Not Because of Minimum Wage Hikes · · Score: 2

    It should be enough for a single person to survive and not turn to crime, because crime costs more. The average person in prison costs tax payers $60k/year. To me, this means we should be willing to pay people $60k/year to have a job and add value, rather than effective pay someone else $60k and remove value.

  10. Re:wrong on Dwarf Galaxies Dim Hopes of Dark Matter · · Score: 1

    Special relativity may not work well with black holes or quantum level stuff, but it seems to predict everything we can measure at the atom level or higher, perfectly. If special relativity is as wrong with something like handling whatever Dark Matter is trying to fix, then special relativity should be nearly useless as a tool for anything. Yet we use special relativity for every day items such as computers, cell phones, and GPS. Well, I may be mixing up "special relativity" and "relativity". I am a bit laymen.

  11. Re:They're better off avoiding CS on Solving the Mystery of Declining Female CS Enrollment · · Score: 1

    Speaking about advertisements, "Marketing" is probably the place to be. Something like top 10% programmers are in the $120k range and top marketers are in the $160k range, and the median programmer was in the $75k range and the median marketer was in the $120k range. Even better was the low end. The bottom 10% programmers were $45k and the bottom 10% marketers were $62k

    There are a lot of women in marketing(68% female on average). Maybe they should quit their much higher paying jobs in marketing and become programmers. At my job, all of the management positions in marketing are women, and that's quite a few positions.

    I don't know how much our marketing people get paid, but we have as many people in marketing as we do programmers, and we're a company the lives and dies by its software.

    Maybe we should be just as concerned about getting men into marketing as women into programming. I wouldn't mind the pay raise.

  12. Re:They're better off avoiding CS on Solving the Mystery of Declining Female CS Enrollment · · Score: 1

    I suspect that Asian societies do not view computer work as primarily male-oriented work, and that talented women are encouraged to work in the field.

    No, they view it as a good source of income that is not going to cost you life or limb. Women applying are artificially high because it's relatively easy work that is good pay. In the USA, the pay isn't as good unless you're really good, and the family time is markedly worse than the alternatives.

  13. Re:Listen Up, Morons! on Dwarf Galaxies Dim Hopes of Dark Matter · · Score: 1

    Even if it was "brown dwarfs", if there was 8x more brown dwarfs than matter that we can see, all of those brown dwarfs would just turn into stars in the first place. Matter that we see naturally coalesces over time, so it seems quite ludicrous to assume that the "hidden mass" is somehow normal matter that does not coalesces. It's still a good enough hypothetical that should be ran through the math grinder just to be sure as we're already grasping at straws, but I don't know how it passes the sniff test for people regurgitating this disproven idea.

    I guess what I'm getting it at, is why do people think that it's normal matter that does not act like normal matter? That makes absolutely no sense. But like I said, was still worth running through the math grinder, just to be sure, as it's still plausible.

  14. Re:The glitch on Dwarf Galaxies Dim Hopes of Dark Matter · · Score: 1

    Just wait until they "fix the glitch" in accounting, without telling Dark Matter. He'll be back for his stapler.

  15. Re:wrong on Dwarf Galaxies Dim Hopes of Dark Matter · · Score: 1

    They're creating a decently highly resolution map of dark matter around many galaxies. They can map it via its gravitational lensing. It distorts space and it is quite visible in that sense. They've already found dwarf galaxy sized clusters of this "unseen" mass. If it was any form of normal matter, we'd be able to detect it, as it would interact with light and block and or emit light in some way, but we do not see that, all we see is space warping from mass.

    So yes, there is A LOT of evidence of Dark Matter.

  16. Re:Hardly Either Or on Dwarf Galaxies Dim Hopes of Dark Matter · · Score: 1

    And that "something" is Dark Matter. No matter what it is, something is causing unaccountable effects. Since we know those effects are facts, we can say with 100% certainty that Dark Matter is real. It is whatever is causing those effects. It could be something we know, but not very likely.

    It's like saying we fall towards the Earth, so we're going to give that force a name of "Dark Force". Some time later, we call it gravity. As far as I care, from a hypothetical standpoint, it could have been almost anything, it didn't have to be gravity, as long as whatever it was could account for us falling towards the Earth.

  17. Re:statistically on Dwarf Galaxies Dim Hopes of Dark Matter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Then we need someone else to explain the excessive spacial distortion. We assume it's matter, but no matter what it is(pun), it does not fit anything we currently know about. I guess something other than matter could distort space time like matter, but we'd not quite sure yet. But as it stands currently, the only thing that can distort space is something that has mass, and anything with mass is "matter".

  18. Re:Snowden on When Snowden Speaks, Future Lawyers (and Judges) Listen · · Score: 1

    The ideas of countries are stupid anyway. We should all be working together towards a better tomorrow. People who think this is a rat race can overdose on antibiotics and tell their bacteria to GTFO.

  19. Re:Fancy version of FTP on BitTorrent Performance Test: Sync Is Faster Than Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox · · Score: 1

    Sync supports storing your data on untrusted nodes because of transparent encryption. You even have the option to share your data with certain other people in read-only or read-write. Well, it's designed to support that. I'm not sure if they've enabled it in the interface yet.

  20. Re:It sucks. Plain and simple. on Employers Worried About Critical Thinking Skills · · Score: 2

    I felt like I learned more in one semester of intro classes at a University than 2 years of basic schooling; And it was more enjoyable.

  21. Re:What is critical thinking? on Employers Worried About Critical Thinking Skills · · Score: 1

    In other words, many people think that "critical thinking" is just being "critical" about stuff.

    Customer: Why doesn't my website work?
    Consultant: Well, your website is not reactive, that's your first problem. I can critical think.

  22. Re:Bennett Haselton on the implications on Recent Nobel Prize Winner Revolutionizes Microscopy Again · · Score: 2

    Nearly all technology starts out this way. Even if we don't directly use it, someone will use it to find out something new that could not otherwise be known.

  23. Re:This is silly on Automation Coming To Restaurants, But Not Because of Minimum Wage Hikes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    By not paying their employees enough, they'e effectively subsidizing their business via welfare. If a commercial business can not pay a livable wage, that business should not exist.

  24. Re:Counterfeiters not competitors on FTDI Removes Driver From Windows Update That Bricked Cloned Chips · · Score: 1

    A fake battery pack is probably a fire hazard, having to be destroyed, and were under no obligation to send you back a replacement.

    Doc, my chest hurts. Ohh, seems your heart transplant was from an unofficial donor, we'll just destroy that for you.

  25. Both of those INX's are just Internet Exchanges for peering. Assuming your ISP is very good at peering then all is well. Many ISPs are bad at peering and let some of their connections get congested. Many do this on purpose, because they can control how congested. Since your ISP already uses Level 3, I assume they're quite decent.