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User: mysidia

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  1. Re:It's the stigma on Unemployed Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks To Factory Jobs · · Score: 1

    To do that requires finding inspectors who will not take bribes and are not intimidated by threats.

    Not necessarily. Remove the assumption of compliance. Guilty until proven compliant.

    Require industry players to provide proof of compliance by 3rd party auditors, including detailed documentation, floor plans, photographs and videos showing every square inch of the facilities; including photographic and video evidence, showing sufficient exit paths, and no escape paths capable of being locked in a way that would prevent exit.

    Validate the findings of auditors via inspection; inspectors also required to gather photographic and video evidence.

    Include very large fines for non-compliance. Include very stiff penalties for both the factory, and the individual auditors on the audit team that provided fraudulent results.

    Give inspectors a large commission, in excess of any likely bribe, if fraud is uncovered as a result of their inspection.

  2. Re:It's the stigma on Unemployed Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks To Factory Jobs · · Score: 1

    In the past in the USA, american corporations had career paths where someone could start as a mail-room worker and move all the way up to CEO (working in the mail-room would have given someone insider knowledge of all the important departments, who spent the most time talking to who).

    And then e-mail was invented ed, and information assurance (security) practices, to ensure proprietary information - such as the minute dealing, was protected against disclosure to people without need to know...

  3. Re:It's the stigma on Unemployed Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks To Factory Jobs · · Score: 1

    Well the whole being locked in and dieing in fire because the owners locked the fire doors is a bit of a disincentive ala Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911

    In most countries, you don't have to worry about being locked in, due to legal requirements, requiring that office buildings provide accessible egress paths that are not blocked or locked, and with periodic random inspections.

    The exception might be IT workers, and office workers, in high-security facilities, where entrances and exits are mantraps.

    So anyways... China could easily adopt some regulation to assuage that particular concern.

  4. Re:I'm curious to see how many retailers actually on Credit Card Swipe Fees Begin Sunday In USA · · Score: 1

    never been illegal. Labelling it a cash rebate or a cash discount has been legit for a while now. Labelling a higher price for credit cards has not.

    Not illegal: in violation of contracts. Offering a discount for paying in cash was allowed but discouraged.

    Some merchants were explicitly allowed to apply a surcharge though and had special exceptions; such as paying government fees using a credit card, or paying tax preparers.

    It may be the case that some merchants had special exceptions as well.

    It was never illegal to surcharge use of credit card, but against the standard agreements/contract language that most merchants were able to get.

    If you were 'special' enough, and had sufficient bargaining power, you could secure a deal that allowed surcharging credit card payment.

  5. Re:I'm curious to see how many retailers actually on Credit Card Swipe Fees Begin Sunday In USA · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't think twice about having the clerk go, "there's a surcharge for credit", to which I'd respond, "OK, thanks anyway." and leave.

    What would you do if they didn't tell you anything? Maybe they have a 'discount' equal to the amount of the swipe fee, so you don't pay anything extra. But if you paid using cash, you would actually get the discount.

    Your receipt might say:

    Subtotal: $200.00

    Large transaction discount (3% off amount more than $10): -$5.70

    Credit card swipe fee (Mastercard's 3% transaction fee) : +$6.00

    Subtotal: $200.30

    Sales tax (12%): + $24.04

    Total: $224.34

  6. Re:Come the robot revolution on Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour · · Score: 1

    And you will be the burger.

    Naw... robots don't need to eat; and burning organisms is not an efficient fuel source. It's more like... come the robot revolution... humans will be the pest; just in the manner as humans consider insects and various rodents pests.

    Leading to robots deploying hominicide sprays. Probably made up of toxins that wipe out 99% of humans, while leaving harmless wildlife untouched.

  7. Re:Hamburger vending machines! on Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour · · Score: 1

    Given that this machine is supposed to ground the meat and have to cook it, it would mean that each burger would take at least a few minutes to produce. That's a very deep pipeline operation with a few minutes of latency.

    Not if you call ahead, or rather... launch the app, and buy the burger.... then you just come to the machine to pick up your order :)

  8. Re:The Luddite Fallacy on Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour · · Score: 1

    In many cases people who do manual jobs do so because they enjoy them and/or have an affinity for them which they would not have if they were doing some sort of indoor office role

    Everyone has to have a Plan B; at least until/unless they invent such a thing as "Job Obsolescence insurance," to cover the risk of becoming unemployable in your favorite job, due to changes in economic client. That's just the way the economy works -- anyone's kind of job might be irrelevent tomorrow, and have to vary to a slightly different role to survive, it's just part of the business risk involved in being an employee.

    Same as anyone... the more varied the job skills, experience, training, and knowledge you acquire, the better.

    And especially.... leadership skills, and management experience; which doesn't necessarily mean working in an office.

    OK, maybe not that useful in the "robot apocalypse" ; imaginary end of the economy scenario, where most of the labourers can be replaced by robots (and therefore, not need anyone to manage them, either)

  9. Re:Terrible, Terrible, Headline on Bloggers Put Scientific Method To the Test · · Score: 1

    People who don't do up their seatbelt buckles die.
    Therefore, seat belts fail to protect people.

    If researchers show people on average say they do up their seat belts but are actually fibbing, lying, or mistaken, and don't actually do up their seatbelts properly, then, yes, it does show seat belts fail to protect people.

    But more importantly: it says, you can't trust people when they say they do up a seatbealt.

    Which is where you and your analogy fall flat on the face.

    It doesn't physically effect other people (much), if you fail to put on your seatbelt, and you lie about it -- you're hurting yourself.

    If nobody follows the scientific method, or implements appropriate statistical procedures -- then they are generating garbage, that other people might accidentally rely upon.

    Showing people don't actually follow the scientific method, is pretty much as good as showing the scientific method doesn't work.

    Not the method is not valid, BUT: because people can't (or don't) actually follow the method, even when they say they do: AND, there's no method available of keeping people honest.

    At least with the proper doing-up of seatbelts, there are police officers, to monitor, and enforce it in some cases (people still often don't wear their seatbelts) -- with scientific method implementation - not only is there no enforcement, but there are practical barriers that make enforcement, or reliable fraud detection, essentially impossible.

  10. Re:A very old elephant in the room on Bloggers Put Scientific Method To the Test · · Score: 1

    "Flubbing" of results was considered kind of, you know, ordinary, and if you didn't get what was expected, well, you were expected to just kind of ignore it.

    See... research teams should have separation of duties, to avoid the temptation to cheat. The scientist does the experiment, someone else takes the measurements, someone else records the results, and enters into digital format; which quickly become immutable, digitally signed and timestamped; with noone taking or recording measurements allowed to be the people that know exactly what that measurement "is supposed to be".. finally, an independent auditor monitors, and signs off on the results.

    The peer review journals then require the scratch sheets for each trial of the experiment, as signed off by the auditors and measurement takers :)

  11. Re:Seriously? IDIOTS on Bloggers Put Scientific Method To the Test · · Score: 1

    I'm just saying these people sometimes get away with doing an extremely poor job at documentation.

    They're not the only ones... it happens in IT a whole lot, as well.

  12. Re:Terrible, Terrible, Headline on Bloggers Put Scientific Method To the Test · · Score: 0

    Right, but they are utilizing the scientific method to test the quality of published papers

    This could turn into a study on... what is the quality of published papers/ ? :)

    If studies show, that studies are meaningless -- eg if it becomes shown that very often, the scientific method has been ignored....

    Then the scientific method is effectively shot, not because it's invalid, but because it's not being followed, and it becomes no longer reasonable to believe researchers are following it

  13. Re:Terrible, Terrible, Headline on Bloggers Put Scientific Method To the Test · · Score: 2

    We have discussed here before the problem of too much content being generated and not enough people to peer review it all. Still not a failing of The Scientific Method.

    The article's headline text is a demonstration of that issue of too much content and not enough peer review :)

  14. Re:Umm? How far away would it have been? on Earth May Have Been Hit By a Gamma-Ray Burst In 775 AD · · Score: 1

    This is why we'll have to be careful once the scientists get off their lazy butts and give us hyperdrive. There you are, zipping along, and all of sudden, "chomp," you get eaten by an uncharted black hole. :)

    There isn't such a high density of black holes that the risk would be that high.

    Assuming your hyperdrive equipped vehicle still has to obey the laws of physics... the gravitational forces exerted by any celestial object, including dark matter, could be a risk.

    Specifically... the risk of crashing into solid matter that doesn't emit or reflect light.

  15. Re:So, correct me if I'm wrong... on Kim Dotcom's Mega Claims 1 Million Users Within 24 Hours · · Score: 2

    That is called deduplication and most modern SAN systems have this feature. You can have both thin-provisioning and deduplication for increased savings.

    It's true that SANs have deduplication functions, but there are a few problems with SAN deduplication -- the main one, is this typically operates on a 'volume', LUN, or disk level. A SAN can't deduplicate data stored across storage systems, so there are scalability limits.

    That is this doesn't scale very well to large numbers of volumes, with intentional duplicates for performance... and when you need to make backups of the filesystem, there is a tendency of the backup or replication target to Re-Duplicate the deduplicated data.

    An application that actually implements this functionality can achieve far better characteristics than a SAN is capable of, because the application would be aware of consumers of the data, and logical pairings.

    And at lower cost, by using non-specialized storage hardware

    There are perhaps 2 SAN vendors out there with a scalable dedup option, and they are both very expensive per GB of storage options that would not be a very tenable thing to base a free service off of.

    That is, the dedupping SAN vendors charge 10 to 20x as much per disk drive of a given capacity, than you can buy off the street, and claim efficiency, lower cost, lower power consumption because dedup means you get twice as much storage.

    (E.g. SANs are expensive, and the storage vendors want to reap profit advantages by selling dedupped storage, for more, as well... which can be as much increase in cost as dedup supposedly saves)

  16. Re:So, correct me if I'm wrong... on Kim Dotcom's Mega Claims 1 Million Users Within 24 Hours · · Score: 1

    That is a good description of data compression

    It's not exactly the same as compression, because compression is a bit more of a flexible concept. Data compression can leverage some similar concepts. In fact, if they divide files into 4K blocks, they can choose to compress separate blocks they store, as well, or make a decision to compress or not, based on the ratio of size reduction.

    Any sufficiently strong encryption algorithm produces a bitstream which is virtually indistinguishable from random.

    This is true, but it would be unusual for someone to include large encrypted files, as encryption is inconvenient and difficult for the end user as well to work with at well -- normally there would be no reason to encrypt media, software, that other users would have in common.

    This method could still be useful on DRM encrypted materials such as eBooks or DVDs, since multiple people would have the _same_ ciphertext.

    I'm not sure of what their service policies are -- it might very well be a violation of their policies to upload large encrypted files, in which case, they could recover space from unexpected resource hoggers dedup doesn't work on, by terminating the offending accounts of people uploading encrypted blobs.

  17. Re:So, correct me if I'm wrong... on Kim Dotcom's Mega Claims 1 Million Users Within 24 Hours · · Score: 2

    Depending on the backend SAN he has, you can use thin-provisioning since there will not be a demand from all users for the entirety of their storage immediately.

    He also doesn't need thin provisioning, to have a file system smaller than the capacity promises.

    It's very possible also, the storage organization is not just your files uploaded stored on a filesystem verbatim.

    Your files, might, for example be divided into 4K or 8K chunks.

    And each 'chunk' instead of each file, might be persisted to a file on a filesystem/volume somewhere, with a "chunk ID" based on a crypto hash of that chunk, placed in a directory based on its ID; different pieces might be on different volumes as required.

    There may be a database table indicating what files you have on your account, and what "chunk IDs" in what order belong to the files you uploaded.

    Chunks might be identified by checksums, so if you have two users with a very similar file, or a very similar 1K, 2K, 4K, or 8K block. The different users' files will share the exact same "chunks".

    Instead of having to store the same exact chunk multiple times.... then you increase an "in use" counter on the chunk, and have records from both separate user accounts pointing to the same "chunk"

    The result is... you could upload 50GB of data, but use zero, or very close to zero extra space on the server --- as long as all the files you uploaded, are identical or 99% the same as some file uploaded by a different user of the service.

  18. Re:Teething Problems on Kim Dotcom's Mega Claims 1 Million Users Within 24 Hours · · Score: 1

    You're also in trouble if you mistype your e-mail address.. you'll have to register all over again.... Personally I use a password manager to generate and save a secure strong password, anyways, so I don't type it in the first place.... :)

  19. Re:Large company trying to be "fair"? on Former FCC Boss: Data Caps Not About Network Congestion · · Score: 1

    I'm not concerned about determining when, myself. My assertion was only that it was possible.

    If you can't even describe how it would be possible for someone to determine; then you may assume that it is impossible to determine.

    And if it's not possible to accurately measure whether a corporation is evil or not, then it's irrelevent, and the distinction doesn't really exist :)

  20. Re:Exactly - this is an experience problem. on Ask Slashdot: How Do I Get My Spouse To Start Gaming With Me? · · Score: 2

    1) You started when you were very young. Very young is when most people pick up new interests

    Yep... your chances are probably better at getting the kids involved in gaming with you, if they are of sufficient age to play. However... they may also quickly become better at the games, and think you're no fun to play with, because they win too easily :)

  21. Pick accessible games on Ask Slashdot: How Do I Get My Spouse To Start Gaming With Me? · · Score: 1

    Unique games, that you both will be about equally good at, assuming neither of you played the game before. In other words: play in a game you haven't played very much, so you will not be appearing to have a great advantage or be the untouchable game-expert, so in fact, your spouse has a chance of being the better player at the game early, even if you do your best.

    Things that resemble electronic versions of traditional games; such as Chess, Monopoly, Risk, board games. Turn-based games that are highly strategic, and require understanding of the rules, the specific game, or mathematics, to have an advantage.

    These provide you less advantage, due to your experience with games that allow players to level high dexterity attained playing previous real-time/ shoot em up games to obtain an advantage.

    It's certainly no fun playing a game you are relatively unfamiliar with against an expert player, who has been exposed to games of that sort for years.

    So pick a genre you are less familiar with, or more uncomfortable with :)

  22. Re:Unethical on Scientist Seeks 'Adventurous Human Woman' For Neanderthal Baby · · Score: 1

    As for intelligence, Romney got 47% in the popular vote. Probably can't remember that far back, can you, fatty? That's assuming you even understand what the fuck I'm talking about.

    You obviously don't have a fscking clue about the ways scientists commonly define intelligence; as your statement is totally irrelevent, and Romney would of course pass as intelligent, as would a 1st grader, or a human baby of certain age pass as intelligent. There are some basic tests for certain aspects of intelligence, but the ability to learn human language would be the first and most important one. An organism that can learn human spoken language has intelligence.

    If an organism is capable of learning human spoken language, written language, and identify itself (self-awareness) -- for example, if the organism can look at itself in a mirror and recognize itself, and show itself as having a theory of mind (eg ability to recognize or identify beliefs, desires, pretend, knowledge of itself and others), then it is sentient and intelligent, and a person.

    If it can do those things, and it's been denied the resources required - such as social exposure to other humans, or materials to learn, then that's not non-intelligence, but abuse.

    What a load of emotive flag-waving platitudinous shite. Desire for freedom isn't a prerequisite - how the fuck do you test for that? With a libertometer?

    Desire for freedom is very easy to measure -- as soon as an organism has shown to have a desire or attempt to get something or do something, or that it is shown conditioning or training would be required to prevent the organism doing something or attempting to do something, and that desire or effort has been shown to have been obstructed , then that organism was shown to have desired freedom.

    Most animals, including pets have a desire for freedom of movement. They express behaviors consistent with a desire not to be caged.

    Humans desire other freedoms, such as freedom of thought, freedom of expression. These desires can also be demonstrated, even if measuring level of desire is not possible.

  23. Re:Uhmmmm on Scientist Seeks 'Adventurous Human Woman' For Neanderthal Baby · · Score: 1

    All that means is that they won't become the norm, but they'll always be there - a group of people burdened with this defect for a fully avoidable reason.

    OK.. so you've in essence also made the argument for genetic testing of embryos as soon as pregnancy is detected, and mandatory early abortion of babies that have genetic defects, as their conditions are avoidable - by not allowing these humans to be produced :)

  24. Re:Randomized passwords are the best on Bad Grammar Make Bestest Password, Research Say · · Score: 1

    None of your phone numbers are changed every 30/60/90 days, while some of your passwords are.

    My recommendation for such passwords, is to memorize a "base" password; and define a rule to increment the base password, so all you need to remember is the original password, and which number you are at, and do a mental transformation; this is far more secure than writing down the password, or picking easy to guess passwords.

    eg

    Password 0 helloworld0

    Password 1 ifmmpxpsme1

    Password 2 jgnnqyqtnf2

    Password 3 khoorzruog3

    Password 4 lippsasvph4

    Password 5 mjqqtbtwqi5

    Password 6 nkrrucuxrj6

    Password 7 olssvdvysk7

    Password 8 pmttwewwtl8

    Password 9 qnuuxfxxum9

  25. Re:Article is very light on details on Bad Grammar Make Bestest Password, Research Say · · Score: 2

    It would be better to have no grammar structure at all in passwords, good or bad. Select a random assortment of words, not words that can be strung together using conventional grammar rules, or even distortions of conventional grammar rules.

    And transform any words in such a way, that no word used is a legitimate word.

    3hav-ayekatkitt-ees