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User: Cenan

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  1. sensationalist much? on Cyber Attack From Inside India Hits Pakistan Government · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the first article:

    Norman could not provide direct attribution to the attacks, but its report did note the following: “The continued targeting of Pakistani interests and origins suggested that the attacker was of Indian origin.”

    From the PDF:

    None of the information contained in the following report is intended to implicate any individual or entity, or suggest inappropriate activity by any individual or entity mentioned.

    Prominently displayed centered on the very first page of the report after the cover.

  2. Re:The reason is pretty lame on NWS Announces Big Computer Upgrade · · Score: 1

    Of course. My reply was a half assed attempt at humor. I could just as easily point out, like so many others in this thread, that "the Europeans" used much, much less processing power (than the proposed 2k TFLOPS) to come to a much better prediction of the outcome.

    The hardware is already in place, putting more in place is just adding precision to an inferior result. 1.023 vs 1.0234762 is still shit when the correct answer is 2.

    And yes, the NWS will have had to provide good evidence they can save that money in order to justify the upgrade.

    Well, what is a human life worth then? Or a life's work? How about spending some of that money and ask "the Europeans" how they did it, then spend the rest on firing your old meteorologists and hiring new, competent ones - ones that won't ask for more hardware to cover up that they suck at their job.

  3. Re:Easy on Ask Slashdot: Wiring Home Furniture? · · Score: 1

    You are right of course - the fact that batteries are consumables are not generally advertised, so alot of costumers will feel like it is a failure of the device rather an expected outcome of use. One could suspect that this is intentional.

    What I would really like is for my laptop to have a feature that will let me tell it when to charge instead of charging indsicriminately. I mostly run mine connected to the wall, cause then i can take out the battery comeplety (a huge source of heat placed directly adjacent to a much too big CPU, go figure) and still use it during the summer heat.

  4. Re:The most needed upgrade on NWS Announces Big Computer Upgrade · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Though most of the world uses the Celsius scale, the Fahrenheit scale may be better suited to meteorology. For one thing, it is more precise and less coarse simply because each degree represents a smaller interval.

    Bullshit. There is no precision to be had from choosing a unit, the precision comes from not being an idiot and doing all your calculations in straight integers.

    More importantly, the range in temperature from 0 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit almost perfectly demarcates the extremes found in the climates of the United States and Europe; it seldom gets any hotter or colder. The convenience of a perfect 100 degree interval encompassing the temperatures in which most of us live seems a pity to lose. (The same range on the Celsius scale is a clumsier -18 to +38 degrees.)

    More bullshit. The argument is based on how you feel towards a given range, but nobody is going to do those calculations by hand. You could just as easily have a range of 0-1 and have the exact same precision as before, just more numbers after the decimal point.

    And predicting the weather is not about predicting the normal as much as predicting the extremes, which would lie outside your "perfect range".

  5. Re:The reason is pretty lame on NWS Announces Big Computer Upgrade · · Score: 2

    "Hey, a storm is coming"
    "Ok, so what do we do?"
    "Dunno, i spent the money being able to tell you that a storm is coming"

  6. Re:A few things to watch out for on Ask Slashdot: Wiring Home Furniture? · · Score: 1

    Building codes are one thing - we do all still live on the same ball of mud. Codes are variable depending on what kind of accidents a given local government has seen, but safety around electrical wiring is an absolute, it does not change much with location.

    You can still conform with building codes and do something completely retarded and potentially deadly, for a reference visit any unrenovated building built before 1950. And putting any kind of indentation in a countertop where you prepare food will turn it into a disease ridden peice of crap with time. Complex pop-up solutions just shortens that time significantly.

  7. Re:Easy on Ask Slashdot: Wiring Home Furniture? · · Score: 1

    Stop treating rechargeable batteries as eternal - they aren't and nobody promised you any different. Most of them last for a really long time but they are still just consumables. If your laptop can't hold it's breath for more than 1 hour, get a new battery.

  8. Re:Not actually a bad idea. on Bloomberg To HS Grads: Be a Plumber · · Score: 1

    Good point.

  9. Re:Not actually a bad idea. on Bloomberg To HS Grads: Be a Plumber · · Score: 1

    Point taken, you don't feel wasting 8 hours a day doing something you loathe is a waste of time, I do (8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, 8 hours for the rest. I don't want to waste a third of my life like that, but I guess that's up to you). I guess we should agree to disagree.

  10. Re: Not actually a bad idea. on Bloomberg To HS Grads: Be a Plumber · · Score: 1

    CS students program

    Yes of course they do. The distinction I make is between design and implementation. Out in the real world, the tiny programs you create as a means to an end during your CS degree are completely worthless, and anyone who does programming for a living will tell you this. There is a very big difference between knowing C++ (or whatever other language you happen to be using) syntax and being able to design and document a system.

    I'm by no means disbuting that some CS grads can program, they're just not taught very much design during the course of their education. If they're smart they pick it up from experience and realise that certain practises within programming produce far more maintainable code. But the tiny one-offs you create with each paper you turn in won't teach you this.

    This has the unfortunate consequence that CS grads think they can program, when in reality they can't. Because there is so much more to producing a working system than typing code into an editor.

  11. Re:Not actually a bad idea. on Bloomberg To HS Grads: Be a Plumber · · Score: 1

    You are absolutely right. The only yardstick worth measuring with is the "are you happy with what you do".

    On a side note: CS degrees arent supposed to be able to program, which is why they mostly can't - you need to go to a trade school for that. If you happen to bump into a CS grad who do know how to program, and not in the sense that they know C++ syntax, but can actually construct and document a system from scratch, they sure as hell didn't learn that in college.

  12. Re: Slow Pi on RPiCluster: Another Raspberry Pi Cluster, With Neat Tricks · · Score: 2

    So you can make it faster by adding more hardware or.... adding more hardware. Parallel and distributed are two very different things, and you cannot run a distributed anything on a single cluster, if you do, it would be properly named parallel. Anyways, the comparison is still valid - the RPI cluster failed to deliver; it was slower, was just as expensive as their benchmark x86 machine and probably 1000x as complex.

    You're right in what you say about algorithms, but it only holds if you already have unused cores to run the new algorithm on - the actual reason we try to derive parallelizable algorithms is because at the moment, processors with multiple cores are cheaper than mutliple processors with one core. I'm sure the researchers had fun doing this, but there is little to be gained from this paper except to conclude that if you want to build a parallel cluster, don't use RPIs.

    On a side note (not aimed at above poseter), if you build something like this and measure the power consumption, don't fucking add all those lights. This research looks like it would barely be worthy of a high school paper, and if that is the standard at Biose - oh.my.god. I mean, half the paper deals with installing packages on Linux. shut the fuck up, we know this already, do some actual research.

  13. Re:Password reuse on Password Strength Testers Work For Important Accounts · · Score: 1

    They can't know. And they shouldn't bother pondering that; what "they" need to focus on are sane password policies and proper salting. One of the conclusions of the article is that if password holders (sites you log in to) spent more time trying to secure their shit, there would be less work for end users. The only reason password strength can become a problem is if "they" get compromised and the user password database gets stolen. Fix that problem, and eveyrone can start logging in with "123" again.

  14. Re:Minor difference at best on Password Strength Testers Work For Important Accounts · · Score: 1

    Or not by accident. They can quadruple their years worth by just "leaking" a password database to the right people. Choosing the lowest bidder is not always a good idea, it lowers the corruption bar significantly.

  15. Re:Well, he's not afraid his company might fire hi on Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy · · Score: 1

    We can't be at the mercy of doctors, we have to have input into our treatment.

    I agree. That is almost spot on. I would add that we cannot be at the mercy of one single doctor. However, that is a far cry from having editorial rights to your own journal. Granted, I don't know of the case you're referring, but it sounds like the doctor wasn't competent; giving the woman in the example editorial rights to her journal does not solve the problem for the next poor sod who walks into his office. I would like to advocate that we try to solve the actual problem instead of trying to patch it to work for a single case.

  16. Re:Cool! All we have to do is create code to math. on Canada Courts, Patent Office Warns Against Trying To Patent Mathematics · · Score: 1

    Patents are created in legal jargon in order to hold up in court, not in technical jargon in order to share. Spot the difference?

    Patent law does not foster any kind of sharing or "standing on shoulders of giants", this is a lie paid for by corporations who benefit from holding patents. Patent law creates artificial scarcity which a single entity gets to exploit for however long the law lets them. In the current model, nobody but the patent holder benefits (and perhaps an army of lawyers), but the patent holder can harm an arbitrary amount of people while holding the patent. Using my no-patent model, the inventor still benefits, but cannot harm anyone.

    Being first to invent something is it's own reward, and the advantage that grants the inventor is enough. If the idea is good enough, the advantage will be massive. If the idea is but a tiny modification of someone else's work, the advantage will be almost none. This is how it should be. This will spur thinking outside the box rather than trying to reword everything to be "on a whatever-device".

  17. Re:Your suggestion to "get the **** out"... on Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy · · Score: 1

    [*words*] (how do you know it'll be absolute squalor?),[*more words*]

    I know because that was the fucking subject of the discussion. The islamic militias wanting a place to live being their motivation to go on a killing spree. What the tribes in the deep amazon does is none of my concern. What is my concern, and should be yours, is how all humans treat each other. If people wish to live in the jungle eating bananas, thats fine. If they wish to live in the jungle eating bananas while executing every other female child born, that is not fine. The distinction being that the right to live is being violated. That right is also regularly being violated in areas controlled by religious/political militias, and THAT is my focus.

  18. Re:Your suggestion to "get the **** out"... on Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy · · Score: 1

    It does not affect me. I'm just not that ego centered to be willing to accept that some people should live a life in absolute squalor before being killed by barbarians, by sheer coincidence of being born someplace different.

  19. Re:In 1490's on 97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made · · Score: 1

    Indeed. Proof is everything, the rest are just words spoken by people who have no clue either way.

  20. Re:insure? on Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy · · Score: 2

    Elective is just that. I had an active childhood and broke my nose more times than i would care to count. This shows. I could elect to have that fixed, or continue on as usual. Having it fixed would be a choice on my part, and fall into the vanity category and as such not really covered. I'm fine with that.

    The cost of health care going up has very little to do with people getting treatment, and alot more to do with the people providing the treatment and the drugs to fix stuff being profiteering gluttons. Fix that problem and the cost goes down.

  21. Re:insure? on Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy · · Score: 2

    Natural selection works when nobody but nature is selecting, natural selection stopped for the human species when sentience came about and started looking at the selection process.

    You seem to think money is a natural element of the universe. I pity you, what a dark world to live in.

  22. Re:Your suggestion to "get the **** out"... on Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy · · Score: 1

    I think you're mixing "what is" and "what could be". Ideally borders would cease existing and we would all work together for the betterment of the human species, and as a side effect perhaps the entire Earth we inhabit. I'll settle for humans first though.

    Whenever the discussion comes up about what we could/should/will/can do, someone goes and mentions economy or money as if they're natural components of the universe. Economy and money are artificial concepts invented to distinguish between have and have-not, simple as that. Do away with money and you have no incentive to do most of the shit humans do to each other. When the money (or the lack of) is not getting in the way of doing the right thing, we will start seeing improvement for everyone. Untill then, I will keep calling out the capitalists on their bullshit.

    As for our (as in the first world) motivation for doing anything in the foerign policy arena, I'll call bullshit too. We might be invading countries to keep them from bombing us, but that does not make it anymore right than what these people have been doing to us. Violence breeds violence. If a group feels that they have no venue to speak in, that noone is listening, yes violence will ensue. That does not legitimize responding in kind. Not ever. Provide a venue for people to be heard and feel like they are being heard and I will promise you that the level of violence will drop.

  23. Re:insure? on Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy · · Score: 1

    You claim universal health care is about money, I say it's about health care.

    Uhm no. I claim universal health care is a societal duty, and i don't care how it comes about. As a society we have a duty to care for our population, no matter in what state they are in. Broken legs, broken psyche, whatever.

    I do however realise that it will all eventually boil down to a question of money/no money. This will be the case until we as a species finally transcend this clusterfuck of a "free market" and actuallty abandon the paper lie that is money. Yeah, call me a communist, I don't give a shit.

  24. Re:Well, he's not afraid his company might fire hi on Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, doctors make mistakes. That does not make everybody else qualified to make corrections to medical records. That there are examples of doctors making mistakes to the detriment of their patients just means there needs to be revisions in place.

    The example you give could have been completely avoided if the woman could have had a second unbiased opinion. But it's a tall order to ask a doctor to diagnose a condition if denied the medical history of the patient. There will always be some who fall between the cracks, and the system needs to pick up on this rather than bouncing them around. Still, all this does not qualify anyone else to make corrections to medical records.

  25. Re:Your suggestion to "get the **** out"... on Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy · · Score: 1

    I wholeheartedly agree.
    Getting the fuck out was meant as a "participate in the community that we have, or ..." I really don't care where egotistical maniacs do go, or if they have a place to go. I just don't want them anywhere near the society i participate in. As John Nash discovered, the best result comes from everyone doing what is best for themselves and the group they belong to. Just because you have enough spare change on your bank account to not worry about health care or pensions, does not mean that you get the be an egotistical fucktard about it.

    As to the whole millitant extremist wanting a place to live they can run as they please, I do get that that is their motivation, I just don't see why we should allow it. I am all for not meeting their violence with yet more violence, but that does not mean we should sit back and let anyone murder away because they feel like it.
    Human rights are for everyone, especially the ones not educated enough to even know of these rights. We have a duty to protect our fellow human beings from the scum of the Earth, no matter their guise.