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User: Spazmania

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  1. Re:Want to hire the best? on Do Tech Companies Ask For Way Too Much From Job Candidates? · · Score: 1

    having an enjoyable working environment is much more important than your actual salary

    Repeating for emphasis. I can never understand why a company willing to pay well in to the six figures for an employee won't budge if that prospect wants an office instead of a cube. The difference costs the company maybe $3k/year more. If I told you it'd take $3k more to get me to a signature, I'd always get it. But an office? Four windows and a door? Oh no, you can't have that.

    Except where I'm working now. They get it.

  2. Re:Conversly on Do Tech Companies Ask For Way Too Much From Job Candidates? · · Score: 1

    Any experienced programmer who doesn't have mountains of code they've written on their own time and could show you a sampling of, should raise a huge red flag for you.

    Hear hear! The best musicians spend huge amounts of personal time playing. It's what they enjoy. The best programmers are the same way. And the sysadmin who doesn't run a home network generally doesn't do a good job running your network either.

  3. Re:Office Politics in Play on Do Tech Companies Ask For Way Too Much From Job Candidates? · · Score: 1

    The ability to learn and adapt is indeed usually more important than a check-list of past paid tool skills. However, that's difficult to quantify objectively

    "I am a fast learner with or without formal training, and I have a burning desire to learn more.."

    It's near the top of my resume and in 20 years it has opened the door everywhere I'd actually want to work.

  4. Re:All it means is on Do Tech Companies Ask For Way Too Much From Job Candidates? · · Score: 2

    And truth be told, if I see an indian name and an unknown number, I let it go to voicemail. If I can't understand them and there's an email with the full description of the req they're trying to fill, I'll reply via email.

    That is so true. When the contact is for some job half way across the country at half my salary, more often than not it's Indian name. Folks calling about local work that has at least a remote chance of being interesting seem to have much more varied backgrounds.

  5. The failure of rules. on Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email At State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules · · Score: 0

    If the rules are the cause of failure (pretty much a given inside government) then you change them. It's the definition of leadership.

    As for the email rules, they're impossible. Literally impossible. No politics on government computers. No governance on personal computers. But nearly all activity at the secretary level is politics. And none if it is far from governance.

    You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. I applaud Hillary for recognizing that up front and making the sensible choice to use an email system that works well.

  6. [bypasses] secure sockets layer protections by modifying the network stack of computers that run its underlying code. Specifically, Komodia installs a self-signed root CA certificate

    Picking a nit:

    1. Installing a new CA certificate does not modify the network stack. Adding and removing CA certificates is an ordinary operation.

    2. All root certificates are self-signed. If your certificate is signed by something else, it's not a root certificate.

  7. Long con on Mars One: Final 100 Candidates Selected · · Score: 1

    This is a long con where the end result is going to be a reality TV show.

  8. Abandoned roots on Firefox Succeeded In Its Goal -- But What's Next? · · Score: 1

    Firefox abandoned its roots. It started as a "light weight" version of netscape. It is now by far the most bloated application living on my PC.

  9. Re:Science by democracy doesn't work? on Science By Democracy Doesn't Work · · Score: 1

    if something new comes up it should be impossible to have a policy for twenty years

    I 'spose if the Sun is going to explode next year we should probably act faster but in general that's right: we shouldn't enact policy whose cost has a dozen zeros behind it until the science has been generating reliable predictions for decades.

  10. Re: Science by democracy doesn't work? on Science By Democracy Doesn't Work · · Score: 1

    If there was a simulation that not only tested warming, but also provided accurate modelling about what exactly might be causing it, and most importantly, the outcomes of various policy decisions that could be taken to alleviate the issue, you might then be able to more closely compare an engineering task force with national and international politics.

    Hear hear!

  11. Re:Science by democracy doesn't work? on Science By Democracy Doesn't Work · · Score: 1

    How does one determine when science has "fully resolved" a question ?

    When the theory accounts for the evidence from all repeatable experiments and sufficient time has passed (typically a couple of decades) during which new experiments aggressively attempting to disprove the theory fail to turn up evidence which either contradicts the theory or requires the theory to be modified.

    It's impossible to not have a policy while we wait.

    We had no public policy on CO2 emissions for most of recorded history. The world has not ended.

    Proposed policy on global warming is expensive. Too expensive to get a second chance if we get it wrong the first time. The smart money says: wait until the computer models become reliable enough to simulate exactly what will and won't work. God help us if we regulate CO2 and it turns out that global warming was real but carbon soot was the main problem.

  12. Re:Science by democracy doesn't work? on Science By Democracy Doesn't Work · · Score: 0

    None. When science hasn't fully resolved a question based on the evidence, none of the competing theories should be used as a basis for public policy.

  13. Re:Science by democracy doesn't work? on Science By Democracy Doesn't Work · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, it's called consensus and no, it isn't science. Not when politicians do it. Not when scientists do it.

  14. Re:So, he is admitting that the attacks are true on Michael Mann: Swiftboating Comes To Science · · Score: 3, Insightful

    1) They have a ton of integrity.

    Scientists have as much (or as little) integrity as the next guy. Fortunately the scientific method yields tools for outing the ones who acted with little integrity. Unfortunately, scientists with little integrity tend to move the discussion into into politics before the integrity problem can catch up with them, after which science kinda goes out the window.

    Manning stands accused of the latter. Some of his emails focused on how to discredit folks who dispute his findings suggest those accusations have some merit. If you want to keep politics out of science, you simply can't engage on a political level.

    2) They're succeed by finding new things and changing the established thinking.

    No. Just no. Finding a new way to confirm an old theory is just as successful science as testing a new theory. Finding a way to refute an established theory is highly successful science which rarely happens, and finding the new theory that fits all the data -and- whose predictions survive the test of time is rare genius.

    Test of time is important. If you have to incrementally revise the theory as new data comes in, it's not a very solid theory.

    3) They use the peer review system to enforce rigorous standards.

    A theory which, sadly, has been discredited in the past decade or so.

    http://science.slashdot.org/st...

    http://science.slashdot.org/st...

  15. Re:Why to develop anything? on Devuan Progress Report Published · · Score: 1

    Well, if it's goal was improved reliability or making the sysadmin's life easier it missed by quite a bit. If it's goal was something else, then it's moving in a direction other than the reason I wanted Debian for.

  16. Re:Why to develop anything? on Devuan Progress Report Published · · Score: 1

    Red Hat uses upstart. It's as nasty if not nastier than systemd.

  17. Re:Why to develop anything? on Devuan Progress Report Published · · Score: 1

    I think of it like passing programs between processes like bash now does in the environment variables.

    DO. NOT. WANT.

  18. Re:Why to develop anything? on Devuan Progress Report Published · · Score: 2

    I picked my two: reliable and simple. That's why I picked Debian. If my priority was "fast" I'd have picked Gentoo and suffered.

    See init get complicated in the name of a faster boot gives me heartburn.

  19. Re: Their comments on trolls/trolling on Devuan Progress Report Published · · Score: 1

    Thing is, I've been using it to build sheds and I'd like to keep using it to build sheds. Don't insist I use bridge-building techniques to build a shed.

  20. Re:Backfire on Skeptics Would Like Media To Stop Calling Science Deniers 'Skeptics' · · Score: 1

    Help me out here. My search for "Realclimate model data comparisons" doesn't include anything labelled as being from GISS model E.

    You know what I'm looking for. Items 3, 4 and 5. I want to read something that's on point. Essentially, a "control" prediction that excludes human causes, an "experimental" prediction that includes human causes and a comparison of the two predictions against measurements in which the "experimental" prediction is within the measurement error and the "control" prediction is not.

  21. Re:Backfire on Skeptics Would Like Media To Stop Calling Science Deniers 'Skeptics' · · Score: 1

    Emotionally charged labels tend to obstruct honest, factual debate.

    Also I heard a neat saying once: "There are three kinds of mistruth: lies, damn lies and statistics." Statistics is an incredible valuable tool in the arsenal of science, but it's also one of the most commonly misused tools.

    Here, let me ask you an honest question. Give me a name or a link to a climate change model which meets the following criteria:

    1. The model was created at least 10 years ago.
    2. The model can be fed data about suspected human and non-human causes for global warming.
    3. When fed such data for the last 10 years twice, once including suspected human causes and once excluding them, it makes two predictions for world conditions today.
    4. The difference between those two predictions is statistically significant versus measurement error.
    5. World conditions today are consistent with the prediction made when including both suspected human and non-human causes for global warning and are not consistent with the prediction that excluded human causes.

    I'm a skeptic. Not a denier, a skeptic. When I see a model that exhibits solid predictive value year over year, I'll be a believer. Until then, what I see is a lot of scientists taking sloppy shortcuts and then trying to cover the gap with dirty politics.

    I know science. And I know politics. And the BS in TFA is pure politics.

  22. Backfire on Skeptics Would Like Media To Stop Calling Science Deniers 'Skeptics' · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This will backfire. The idiots driving this would associate dissent on climate change predictions with folks who reject the historical fact of the Holocaust, the only other place where the term "deniers" is routinely used.

    You can't have a brain in your head and seriously think that the modern climate change predictions have a comparable level of certainty to the historical fact of the holocaust. This sort of gross overreach is obvious even to mere mortals who can't readily follow the scientific arguments for or against global warming. It makes the speaker, and every other claim he makes, suspect.

    The media has done climate change scientists a great favor by labeling the folks who still challenge the predictions as "skeptics." That word carries connotations of government conspiracy and alien abductions. It's a gift.

  23. Re: C is primordial on How Relevant is C in 2014? · · Score: 1

    There are still mainframes, for example, that have to _emulate_ C's unsigned modulo arithmetic. Floating point based DSPs have to emulate C's signed integer types.

    Ancient mainframes using 1's complement arithmetic, floating point on systems without a FPU and integers on devices that don't do integer math in hardware? Got any more wacky exceptions that prove the rule?

    As for compilers instrumenting code to prevent overflows, that's about to rapidly change.

    Don't bank on it.

  24. Re: C is primordial on How Relevant is C in 2014? · · Score: 1

    They say the exception proves the rule. That you had to dig all the way to -complex numbers- to find an exception to the C-is-close-to-the-hardware rule kinda proves my point.

  25. Re: C is primordial on How Relevant is C in 2014? · · Score: 1

    So which intruction does a C compiler emit when multiplying two 64-bit numbers on a 32-bit processor?

    Turns out to be a trivial add and shift loop.

    When adding two _Complex numbers?

    I had to look that one up. It actually is core starting in C99. Yikes. Fortunately not something more than a handful of folks use, what with C not being the language of choice for scientific computing.

    When instrumenting a pointer dereference to catch a buffet overflow at runtime

    Properly behaving C compilers don't automatically add code to detect buffer overflows.