Slashdot Mirror


User: RightwingNutjob

RightwingNutjob's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,883
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,883

  1. Re:TFA is a Tesla PR piece on Tesla Fires and Firestorms: Let's Breathe and Review Some Car Fire Math · · Score: 4, Interesting

    To a first approximation, the most dangerous thing under the hood of a gasoline or diesel powered car isn't the engine, it's the battery. It's fuel and oxidzer packed together in very close proximity.

  2. Re:The rest of the test on A Math Test That's Rotten To the Common Core · · Score: 1

    It would be very confusing for a 5-year-old who hasn't figured out that addition and subtraction undo each other and that A + B = C is an identical statement to C - B = A. Even in the Philadelphia public schools some twenty years ago, they *did* teach that, and the lovely technical terminology for it, to first and second graders.

  3. Re:dumbed down on A Math Test That's Rotten To the Common Core · · Score: 2

    Math with numbers? Where are the Greek letters?

  4. The have your punk kid nephew do it mentality on How To Lose $172,222 a Second For 45 Minutes · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Didn't RTFA, but summary makes me go WTF in several places:
    1. Python. I thought all the quants liked C, assembler, and even VHDL for their high frequency stuff. No matter
    2. "2nd technician to review". If this were flight hardware or a bridge or skyscraper, there would be a second "technician" to review and at least one "engineer" to personally sign off that what was built/deployed is a) done right and b) is what you want
    3. "no written procedures". There are a very small number of things in life about which it is absolutely imperative to keep a rod firmly up one's ass: a. moving machinery, b. formal mathematics, and c: hundreds of millions of dollars of your clients and shareholders' money.

  5. Re:What a tepco on TEPCO Workers Remove Wrong Pipe Get Splashed With Radioactive Water · · Score: 2

    Oh, that's just because their mistakes are in the media cross-hairs. All the preventable and expensive stupid mistakes I could tell you about at my place of employment would give TEPCO a run for its money, but I've agreed to several kinds of NDAs and don't feel like getting sued and/or going to jail for divulging specifics. And I'll bet you even money no place is immune.

  6. How are any of those cheating? on Preventing Cheating At Hackathons · · Score: 1

    Pre-coding? In my line of work, pre-coding is called being prepared.

    Video demos? If the code is real, and pre-coded, who cares if the video was made yesterday. Saves on Bill Gates style embarrassments.

    Remote teammates? Um. So all code everywhere is written by people in the same room?

  7. Good for them on Toronto Family Bans All Technology In Their Home Made After 1986 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The more kids are raised using their own brains to entertain themselves rather than a gadget, the better.

  8. Re:technocracy - the end of a monetary system? on 45% of U.S. Jobs Vulnerable To Automation · · Score: 1

    Which has happened once? twice? in the 40+ year history of Unix?

  9. Re:If all the neighborhoods where green people liv on Could Technology Create Modern-Day 'Leper Colonies'? · · Score: 1

    This is true, and it cuts both ways: people are naturally apt to be risk-averse, but you can't really blame them for that and shouldn't try to dissuade them from looking out for themselves, their families, and their stuff; it's a natural instinct. Hence, the ghetto-tracking apps.

  10. Re:I think we've reached peak racist on Could Technology Create Modern-Day 'Leper Colonies'? · · Score: 1

    ... my car won't start because it's "racist",...

    Only if it's got a white paint job. If it's painted black, brown, or red, it won't start because it's participating in an act of civil disobedience.

  11. Re:get crime data and screw the race baiters on Could Technology Create Modern-Day 'Leper Colonies'? · · Score: 1

    They avoid the more established "African American" parts of town with high crime rates just like anyone else.

    A tale from a (white Russian Jewish) friend of a friend of a relative who married a black guy from somewhere in Africa (forget where exactly). Apparently the guy was the son or nephew or something of a communist-friendly dictator in said African country and had gone to school in the Soviet Union. Well, regimes change, dictators get overthrown, and the guy found his way to the US. So he had two choices: he could hang out with the local black people or the local Russians. Guess which one he picked?

  12. Re:If all the neighborhoods where green people liv on Could Technology Create Modern-Day 'Leper Colonies'? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Being able to tell the difference between human beings and ghetto trash (of any race and income level) is a vital skill. The difference between calling it racism and calling it street smarts is determined by some linear combination of malice, ignorance, and desire to troll.

  13. Re:If you can't trust the authenticity of the sign on Fake "Speed Enforced By Drones" Signs On California Freeways · · Score: 1

    You can put a radar on a plane.

  14. Re:like anything else.. on Math and Science Popular With Students Until They Realize They're Hard · · Score: 2

    I'm a bit young to have bragging rights like actually taking Feynman's class, but I did watch some of his taped lectures in college. It was like the cherry on top. I had already taken most of the standard engineering physics and math courses, and that let me follow him without getting lost. But the fact that he had the talent for making things look intuitive without getting bogged down in unnecessary detail is what made me really understand those courses.

    It's probably true that a chicken in every pot and a Feynman clone in every classroom is not a sufficient condition for better physics teaching, but a visit to the Feynman clone *after* you've taken your intro classes can only help.

  15. Re:Quanity over Quality? ~nt~ on India To Overtake US On Number of Developers By 2017 · · Score: 0

    (also, most of the comments on this thread seem pretty racist to me)

    Sigh...that didn't take long.

    My dear fellow, you need to comment out the hard-coded link in your head between disparaging comments about nations and disparaging comments about ethnicities and replace it with some logic in compliance with best practices developed in, among other places, the American software industry.

  16. Re:Let's dumb it down for everyone on Firefox 23 Makes JavaScript Obligatory · · Score: 1

    Back in my day, the web didn't have no fancy javascript. Web sites were displayed in poorly layed out, hand-coded HTML, with dancing baby GIFs and background schemes that made the text unreadable. And that's how we liked it.

  17. Re:Gentlemen on More Details Emerge On How the US Is Bugging Its European Allies · · Score: 1

    That was President Herbert Hoover, not J Edgar. Read some history.

  18. Re:Nothing does on Join COBOL's Next Generation · · Score: 2

    The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language. The determined idiot can make unmaintainable spaghetti in any language. If people can make maintainable assembly code (and for embedded applications, good embedded programmers *do* write maintainable assembly), then a good COBOL programmer can write maintainable and comprehensible COBOL programs. Things like variable naming and jump/goto/label naming discipline are a pain in the ass when you've grown up with C and Java-style scoping rules and curly braces that let you be sloppy with zero cost to legibility or maintainability, but they can be the difference between something that's usable as and something that forces a rewrite each time.

  19. Re:The Manchurian Candidate on Clearing Up Wayland FUD, Misconceptions · · Score: 1

    I haven't delved deeply either, but I've had cause and occasion to casually study the code. Compared to some things I've seen, it certainly screams Legacy Cruft in a few places, but by no means does it reek of unmaintainability.

  20. Backup plan for extended power failure? on Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years · · Score: 1

    With a gas-powered car, you can drive to the next town or next state and fill up. Maybe even the next street if the gas station has backup generators. If the "gas" station relies on the same grid, you're up the creek in a really bad way that you aren't right now.

  21. Re:Heat on Intel's Haswell Moves Voltage Regulator On-Die · · Score: 1

    I can see the logic behind shortening the length of the wire carrying 'clean' power and getting it away from all the other components (read: noise sources) on the motherboard. It also takes the thinking burden away from the chip integrator and motherboard designer (which is a non-negligible bonus for both marketing and engineering).

  22. Re:not a complete success on 'CodeSpells' Video Game Teaches Children Java Programming · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It's still funny today, when Java is slower than C, C++, Fortran, and pretty much any other fully compiled language.

  23. Re:BlackBerry users watch porn? on BlackBerry 10 Can BBM Anything You're Watching, Even Porn · · Score: 1

    Yeah...watching porn on what's 9 times out of 10 a company-provided phone seems...unlikely.

  24. Re:Didn't they get the memo? on North Korea Declares a State of War · · Score: 4, Funny

    Or, you know, try to escape to Japanese disneyland like his brother did...

  25. Re:Global warming on Cold Spring Linked To Dramatic Sea Ice Loss · · Score: 1, Interesting

    To my semi-trained eye, it looks like if you stare at the data long enough, you can convince yourself there's an upward trend in temps, you stare at it a little longer, you can convince yourself that there's some longish timescale periodicity too, all within the error bars. Looks like a bunch of noise to me, and I look for weak signals in noise for a living, so I do know what I'm talking about to a certain extent. That said, I do remember people predicting about 10 years ago that melted ice caps can act as a negative feedback mechanism for high latitude temperatures, and thus, global warming->longer/colder winters at high latitudes.