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User: ppanon

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  1. Re:The more simple you make it the less complex it on Ask Slashdot: Why Are We Still Writing Text-Based Code? · · Score: 2

    Apparently the GP only ever learned the C major scale. That's surprising for a programming-aware individual who should have at least heard of C#.

  2. Re:The more simple you make it the less complex it on Ask Slashdot: Why Are We Still Writing Text-Based Code? · · Score: 1

    You mean like APL? While it does have a fiercely devoted community, it's a fairly small community.

  3. Re:Wrong on Layoffs At Now-Private Dell May Hit Over 15,000 Staffers · · Score: 1

    You make a good argument as well. What a lawyer for a class action lawsuit would need is some indication that the executive suite, prior to the buyout, had requested/obtained some simulations/estimations of the effects from layoffs of the same magnitude on short and long term profits and revenue and found that profits would increase. Then, even if those simulations were incorrect, there would be evidence that the executive had failed in its fiduciary duty to shareholders.

  4. Re:Wrong on Layoffs At Now-Private Dell May Hit Over 15,000 Staffers · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Um it said in the title that Dell is now a privet company there are no stockholders to screw

    Guess you missed the part where he implied deliberate mismanagement to keep the stock price down when it was still public in order to keep market capitalization lower and make the leveraged buy-out possible. I'm not saying that he's right, but if he was then his characterization that it was a failure to uphold the fiduciary duty to those shareholders seems reasonable. Finding enough evidence to prove it in a court of law as part of a (past) shareholder's lawsuit would be the tricky part.

  5. Re:Worker shortage in 2014 on James Dyson: We Should Pay Students To Study Engineering · · Score: 1

    It takes that long because of the greater proportion of engineers already in the work force. They don't have the financial burden to pay off that the new graduates are faced with, but they won't be happy if the new hires get paid the same as a 10-year veteran even though that's what the new hire needs to pay off the loan that the 10-year veteran didn't need. So wage inflation has to happen across the whole class of employees, not just the new hires, otherwise people will quit and find work elsewhere to take advantage of the new wage competition.

    That means that the increase gets averaged over the whole workforce - those who have been in the workforce get a "free" pay raise and those entering it get less of salary than they need to pay off the tuition loans, which effectively translates into a pay increase inertia requiring years of new hiring requirements to balance out the existing (minus the slowly retiring) workforce. That lag can lead to nasty wage fluctuations (think damped harmonic, where the supply/demand curve and supply variation acts as the spring and the workforce wage inertia acts as the damper).

    But hey, the free market is perfect and government intervention is unnecessary, right?

  6. Re:What we need is a mechanism on FileZilla Has an Evil Twin That Steals FTP Logins · · Score: 2

    It doesn't exist because the results of your compilation would depend on the version of the compiler you used to do the compilation and what optimization flags you used (due to target object code and optimizations performed). Either you compile from source which you can first check against a known cryptographic checksum, or you run binaries that have been cryptographically signed by the developer. What you are suggesting would require unnecessary added complexity for no gain in security.

  7. Re:common carrier on Federal Court Kills Net Neutrality, Says FCC Lacks Authority. · · Score: 1

    You're moving the goalposts. Where do you think the point of ingress is? Chances are it's a carrier exchange point run by those corporations you want to designate as common carriers, and who can then no longer do anything about filtering the traffic. Oops.

  8. Re:Cool science coming... on CERN Antimatter Experiment Produces First Beam of Antihydrogen · · Score: 1

    Well, it would if the "metaphor" I had heard about how Hawking radiation works were correct, but apparently it isn't. While I won't say the explanation in the linked page makes sense to me (I probably couldn't follow the math anymore even if it was included), I must admit I had some similar concerns as Mr. Kujareevanich regarding that metaphor. If a gravitational well did result in the polarization of the gravitational dipole, then it would seem that perhaps it might affect the results. However if Hawking radiation is just an apparent effect, like blue/red-shifting or Lorentz contraction at relativistic speeds, then it presumably wouldn't be affected.

  9. Re:Cool science coming... on CERN Antimatter Experiment Produces First Beam of Antihydrogen · · Score: 1

    I have been wondering how this would affect black hole evaporation through Hawking radiation. If it invalidates it, then we might want to be extra careful in the future about risking creating quantum black holes.

  10. Re:Look to the 4th & end the State Secrets Doc on FISA Judges Oppose Intelligence Reform Proposals Aimed At Court · · Score: 1

    Um, no. What needs to happen is that there needs to be an in-depth and independent review of the effectiveness of the information gathering activity after the fact by a party other than the FISA court and security establishment. If the data that you are collecting does not in fact achieve the purported aims (apparently, despite the misleading cheer-leading by the NSA director, all the NSA data collected under FISA warrants has not actually provided any information that has been key/required in helping prevent any terrorist acts), then the "probable cause" justification process is broken and those justifications and those types of data gathering activities should no longer be allowed.

  11. Re:Options on OpenBSD Looking At Funding Shortfall In 2014 · · Score: 1

    Reason #0. They are in the USA or run by companies based in the USA. Which means that the USA government can do anything they want with National Security Letters and Theo would not be notified that the systems have been compromised. Now CSIS might do/have done the same thing, but not legally.

  12. Re:common carrier on Federal Court Kills Net Neutrality, Says FCC Lacks Authority. · · Score: 2

    When a large proportion of those spammers work out of jurisdictions that turn a blind eye to the practice (China, Russia, other Eastern European states, Nigeria) and refuse to prosecute, then your preferred approach doesn't work.

  13. Re:See what happens when leftists are in Charge? on Federal Court Kills Net Neutrality, Says FCC Lacks Authority. · · Score: 0

    Let's completely ignore that the three main proponents (including the two authors) of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 were Republicans and that, while passage of the bill was mainly bipartisan and Clinton did support it, Republicans had majorities in the House and Senate. Over 80% of the no votes in the House and Senates were Democratic Party members.

  14. Re:Ends of Moore's Law in software ? on End of Moore's Law Forcing Radical Innovation · · Score: 1

    that little HR app that only a half dozen people use gets its' own server (no proper backup/redundancy mind you, but it's own box).

    Apparently you've been under a rock for the last 5 years and completely missed the move to virtualization. Can you guess what the main business driver is? More efficient use of computing resources, power, and data centre infrstructure resulting from consolidation.

  15. Re:Don't imagine it stops there. on U.S. Waived Laws To Keep F-35 On Track With China-made Parts · · Score: 1

    No, what happened is that the Chinese used predatory pricing on rare-earth minerals to put nearly all other world production out of business and discourage exploration. Then, with control of the raw materials, they nearly shut off the tap on the raw materials to everybody else and insisted that everybody by the higher-value finished high-field magnets from them.

  16. Re:Don't imagine it stops there. on U.S. Waived Laws To Keep F-35 On Track With China-made Parts · · Score: 2

    Apparently you are blissfully unaware that China used predatory pricing on rare-earth metals to put every other non-Chinese rare-Earth mine out of business or mothballed quite a few years back, and then parlayed that into a monopoly in powerful magnet production by squeezing out every other manufacturer once they had the monopoly on the raw materials.

  17. Re:First Shot on Battlefield 4 Banned In China · · Score: 1

    In China, most people write the same language

    FTFY. While the written alphabet is consistent across China, my understanding is that the regional dialect groups (Mandarin, Wu/Shanghainese, Yue/Cantonese, etc.) can vary so much as to be effectively unintelligible to each other. While Mandarin may be the lingua franca of the national government, it isn't as widespread as English in the USA.

  18. Re:Look who asked for it.. on How Healthcare.gov Changed the Software Testing Conversation · · Score: 1

    Then they are people who understand insurance as poorly as you appear to. The healthy pay the unhealthy's medical bills because a) the risk and cost is shared by all premium payers when they are healthy (including those who get sick later) b) the unhealthy don't need the added stress of getting huge bills to impact their attempts to get better and usually can't work while they're in traction or a coma.

    You know, sort of like how in fire or flood insurance the people whose houses are standing help pay for replace the houses that got burnt down/flooded/washed away (but whose owners had paid insurance premiums). That's how insurance works!

  19. Re:Cause they didn't get irradiated? on Cobalt-60, and Lessons From a Mexican Theft · · Score: 1

    So Cobalt 60 was really Fe 56!

  20. Re:Common knowledge on For First Three Years, Consumer Hard Drives As Reliable As Enterprise Drives · · Score: 1

    I noticed this while the car was still less than 10 years old (closer to 5 actually). And even though it's now close to 17 years old, its mileage is very low for the car's age and it's been well maintained over that time. It's far from a beater.

  21. Re:yeah right on Patent Troll Bill Clears House With Huge Majority · · Score: 1

    WD-40 is probably composed of a fair number of organic and inorganic molecules. So while a mass spectrometer might tell you the proportion of component atoms in the lubricant, that's a long way from knowing the composition of all its molecular components. I mean mass spectrometers are cheaper now, but they've been available for almost a century (longer than WD-40) so if that was all that was needed somebody would surely have done it by now. Perhaps you might be able to distill/separate the various components with a distilling tower and then analyze them with X-Ray crystallography? That would get you closer but would still be a ways from reproducing the process to make it, one which has probably been adjusted and refined in the last 60 years..

  22. Re:Common knowledge on For First Three Years, Consumer Hard Drives As Reliable As Enterprise Drives · · Score: 1

    And yet over multiple trips with my Saturn SL1 between Vancouver and Seattle with a loaded car (4 passengers), I have found much better acceleration responsiveness to the application of gas at highway speeds with 89 octane vs. 87. Now maybe it's the car computer that's monitoring and interpreting the octane level as a signal that fuel economy is less of a concern and changing how it runs the engine in response to the gas pedal. But the behaviour was sufficiently noticeable and repeatable that while I use 87 octane during regular city driving, I will fill up with 89 octane on those occasions when I'm going on a long highway trip.

  23. Re:Common knowledge on For First Three Years, Consumer Hard Drives As Reliable As Enterprise Drives · · Score: 1

    Even my old 4-banger (gutless) 1997 Saturn SL1 sees a difference in pickup between 87 and 89 octane fuels when at highway speeds.

  24. Re:poop DNA trumps rape kit backlogs? on Property Managers Use DNA To Sniff Out Dog Poop Offenders · · Score: 1

    Although having intercourse with someone you don't trust doesn't seem to be a particularly bright move in the first place, but young men's reasoning is often overridden by testosterone or alcohol.

  25. Re:poop DNA trumps rape kit backlogs? on Property Managers Use DNA To Sniff Out Dog Poop Offenders · · Score: 1

    Cause if you didn't trust her word, you should have put a rubber on it.