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User: mc6809e

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  1. Re: GIst of the problem is ... on IT Job Hiring Slumps · · Score: 1

    I think his 50% tax burden number comes from including Federal income and payroll taxes, State taxes, and local taxes.

    That's probably correct only for highly paid professionals that get most of their income by selling their skills. Anyone with income that comes from wealth isn't paying anywhere near that.

    The tax code in the US at all levels is incredible stupid.

    But the 50% number isn't connected too terribly much with the lack of hiring, though. If you ask a business people why they aren't hiring many will tell you that they just don't have enough time to both run their business and worry about all the extra bureaucratic hassles that come with employing someone -- that might include paying some taxes, but it also includes liability and regulatory concerns.

    Employing a new worker is like walking through a minefield. You might have seen job advertisements asking only for those that are currently employed. This is an attempt to avoid all those disasters that come with hiring the wrong person.

  2. Re: But is it reaslistic? on Islamic State "Laptop of Doom" Hints At Plots Including Bubonic Plague · · Score: 2

    The only Bacteria that are scary are anti-biotic resistant ones, all the rest can be cured with a dose of anti-biotic.

    Don't be so dismissive.

    I realize the plague is so dark ages and that we have antibiotics, but from 1990 until 2010 the overall mortality rate was 11%.

    People still die even with antibiotics.

  3. Re: But is it reaslistic? on Islamic State "Laptop of Doom" Hints At Plots Including Bubonic Plague · · Score: 5, Informative

    The plague exists in the wild in many western states of the USA.

    Colorado just had four cases in the past few months.

  4. A willingness to fight on Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Men in general seem to have less tolerance for what they perceive as error and a greater willingness to fight to correct error.

    That's not the say that men are more often correct than are women. They just seem more eager to do battle, even if it is from behind a keyboard.

    Anyone that's been involved in an edit war of wikipedia knows that the winner is often isn't the one with the best grasp of the facts, but it's the one least willing to give up the fight.

     

  5. It works the other way around, too on Companies That Don't Understand Engineers Don't Respect Engineers · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Many engineers don't understand that business people are engineers of a sort, too.

    What we all should do is realize that we're all part of a team that can't work without the participation of everyone. Mutual respect is key.

    Many skills are needed if a firm is to survive.

  6. Re:Switzerland on For Fast Internet in the US, Virginia Tops the Charts · · Score: 1

    In Switzerland the slowest speeds you commonly get are about 15 Mbits/s...

    And yet the report cited shows that only 45% have access to speeds above 10Mbps and 23% of access to speeds above 15Mbps.

    Five US states have more people above 10Mbps than Switzerland.

    And one of those states by itself, New Jersey, has almost a million more people.

  7. Re:And yet here I am on For Fast Internet in the US, Virginia Tops the Charts · · Score: 1

    No 4g available? I'm using a Verizon 4g access point from a horse farm in the middle of nowhere and Speakeasy's speed test gives me 10.46Mbps down/7.53Mbps up.

  8. Re:What? on Cable Companies: We're Afraid Netflix Will Demand Payment From ISPs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yeah, i don't see how their supposed 'netflix is going to extort us' scare is supposed to work. Everything I remember about how the internet works pretty much invalidates the idea.

    I think they're looking at how cable companies have to pay content providers to broadcast their content.

    Disney, ESPN, CNN, etc all charge the cable company for their content. If the cable company doesn't pay, then their customers don't get the channels.

    Will this happen with websites or Netflix? It doesn't seem possible, yet it's hard to know just where all this is going.

    Consider facebook. What would happen if suddenly facebook demanded an ISP pay them for access by the ISP's customers? Who would the customers blame? Would they simply give up on facebook or would they hound their ISP to pay up?

  9. Re:let me correct that for you. on Experiment Shows People Exposed To East German Socialism Cheat More · · Score: 5, Insightful

    there was no socialism in east-germany. there was none in east-europe. that was fascism with a tiny bit of communism-appearence thrown in. socialism is found in scandinavia, belgium, netherlands, france, and the former western-germany.

    Most Western European countries are mixed economies, mostly capitalist, with some socialism, and a welfare state.

    East Germany and the Soviet Union really bought into the idea of Socialism: the state owned everything. Private property was outlawed. You could go to jail for making a profit.

    The East Germans were so committed to the idea that the state owned everything that they believed they had a right to build an enormous wall to keep the governments property (people) from escaping to the West.

  10. Very clever on 'Rosetta Flash' Attack Leverages JSONP Callbacks To Steal Credentials · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Reminds me a little of some work done by Terje Mathisen, an expert assembly language programmer. Not exactly that same as the exploit, but probably interesting to a few slashdotters. I'll let him describe it:

    "The most complicated code I have ever written is/was a piece of executable text, in order to be able to send binary data over very early text-only email systems:

    "Minimum possible amount of self-modification (a single two-byte backwards branch), a first-level bootstrap that fits in two 64-byte lines including a Copyright notice and which survives the most common forms of reformatting, including replacing the CRLF line terminator by any zero, one or two byte sequence. This piece of code picks up the next few lines, combining pairs of characters into arbitrary byte values before flushing the prefetch cache by branching into the newly decoded second-level bootstrap. (Everything uses only the ~70 different ascii codes which are blessed by the MIME standard as never requiring encoding or escape sequences.)

    "This second level consists of a _very_ compact BASE64 decode which takes the remainder of the input and re-generates the original binary which it can either execute in place or write to disk.

  11. Re:Administrators on Teaching College Is No Longer a Middle Class Job · · Score: 2

    In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.

    Don't forget those in the construction industry. Like administrators, they contribute where it counts: in the voting booth where they help elect those that will continue to increase spending on that abstraction "education" rather than on actual educators.

  12. Re:For a sense of scale on Will 7nm and 5nm CPU Process Tech Really Happen? · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are other advantages to shrinking components. Higher clock rates become possible.

    You'd think so, but the problem is global interconnect. Not gates. It was all the way back at the 250nm node when interconnect and gate delay were about the same.

    At the 28nm node, wire delay is responsible for something like 80% of the time it takes for signals to work their way through a circuit.

    And it some cases inverters are actually used to help signals propagate more quickly down long wires. In other words, long wires are so slow compared to gates that adding gates can speed things up!

  13. Re:For a sense of scale on Will 7nm and 5nm CPU Process Tech Really Happen? · · Score: 5, Informative

    We're already at the point where 22nm components are more expensive per transistor than those at 28nm.

    Previous shrinks lowered the cost of each transistor. It doesn't look like it's going to happen after 28nm.

  14. Re:some level of fraud or deception on Wireless Industry Lobbying Hard to Keep Net Neutrality Out · · Score: 1

    I believe many ISPs are actively sabotaging customer's connections to some of the internet's content

    They don't have to. The protocols we use are more than capable of screwing with things.

    Consider TCP: the protocol is BY DESIGN meant to exponentially increase the amount of data dumped on a link until it overloads and begins dropping packets. TCP then throttles for a little while and then soon goes back to bashing the network with packets until it breaks again.

  15. Re:You make it... on Teacher Tenure Laws Ruled Unconstitutional In California · · Score: 1

    Oh, it's a bad thing, depending on which way you look at it. For union busters this means you can finally sacrifice the weak and infirm on the altar of efficiency.

    Wait. Are you talking about the children or the teachers?

  16. Don't worry--the crime rate is sure to go up again on America 'Has Become a War Zone' · · Score: 1

    Well, maybe.

    Many of the worst and violent crimes are committed by men age 16-24.

    Now look at this.

    Notice that nice peak in the crime rate around 1992? Many of those crimes were committed by people born in the 60s -- a turbulent, uncertain time, and the 70s -- a rotten decade with a corrupt or weak presidents, increasing unemployment, inflation, and plenty of other rottenness.

    I don't think it's too much of a stretch to believe that that sort of environment helps turn some children into violent criminals.

    We have in some ways similar situation today. While some groups seem to be enjoying the recovery (baby-boomers, especially) many others are struggling. Young people -- those forming families right now -- have been left behind.

    And I expect children being born into that world are having a tough time -- and in 16-24 years, we'll start to see the consequences.

  17. But it gives the driver the wrong impression on New Car Can Lean Into Curves, Literally · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Drivers depend on feedback from the car to help them make necessary adjustments.

    If a curve isn't banked enough, the car shouldn't fool the driver into thinking that it is banked enough.

    That feeling one gets when the car leans towards the outside of the curve is telling the driver to slow down!

  18. Re:Where does 7 feet of water come from? on Rising Sea Level Could Put East Coast Nuclear Plants At Risk · · Score: 1

    Water like other materials expands when it gets warmer.

    Just a nit-pick, but water's maximum density is actually at about 4C.

    That means as it cools below 4C, it begins to expand again. If it didn't, ice wouldn't float!

  19. Re:Eric Burger asks, how did it come to this? on As NASA Seeks Next Mission, Russia Holds the Trump Card · · Score: 1, Insightful

    And that little fact is almost entirely due to Congress' inability to think past pork and the next re election cycle.

    So much of the budget is off-limits (social security and medicare) that the only areas left vulnerable to cutting are things like NASA.

    The USA has locked itself into forced spending in some areas and it's squeezing other areas.

  20. Re:AT&T land line on Cable TV Prices Rising At Four Times the Inflation Rate · · Score: 1

    You probably live in a big city with actual choices. In my small town, I have ONE CHOICE for cable TV, and ONE CHOICE for internet, unless you count satellite or wireless options.

    And why shouldn't we count satellite and wireless?

    I use Fios for internet, TheDish for TV, and I have a cell phone tether plan when I want to use my laptop on the road.

    I agree that satellite internet access is probably a mistake unless you have no choice, but a 4G access point or tethered cell phone is really impressive for something that's wireless.

    I routinely got 10Mbps and sub 100ms ping times while staying on a horse farm in the middle of no where.

    Explore your options and force providers to compete.

  21. Re:inevitable on Cable TV Prices Rising At Four Times the Inflation Rate · · Score: 2

    Capitalism and the markets demand exponential growth in a finite world,

    No they don't. They're just somewhat efficient collective resource allocation systems.

    Exponential growth appears to be a requirement because populations grow exponentially.

    If an economy can't keep up with the exponential growth of population, then there is less produced per person.

  22. Re:more money - less quality on Cable TV Prices Rising At Four Times the Inflation Rate · · Score: 2

    He tell's me that ESPN gets about $30/customer in an all or nothing deal.

    Sorry. That's wrong.

    The $30 figure is the amount each actual viewer of ESPN would have to pay if they were forced to pay for it themselves, but ESPN doesn't allow that.

  23. Re:more money - less quality on Cable TV Prices Rising At Four Times the Inflation Rate · · Score: 5, Informative

    The quantity of programming has increased with the prices

    ......yet the quality of programming decreases......

    so (quality/quantity) * price is constant?

    I have a friend at BrightHouse Networks.

    According to him (and I suppose he could be lying), it's the price that the content holders are asking that's driving up prices, especially ESPN.

    He tell's me that ESPN gets about $30/customer in an all or nothing deal.

  24. Re:Stop Parroting Cardiography on From FCC Head Wheeler, a Yellow Light For Internet Fast Lanes · · Score: 1

    Also, most health care providers are already paying vast sums for VPN services, this stuff doesn't hit the public internet.

    Uh, the 'V' in VPN stands for virtual. It's not a real PN and very well could be sharing the same fiber and wire and routers as the public internet.

    It isn't uncommon for VPN providers to give a guaranteed amount of bandwidth to a user on a router and to sell the surplus bandwidth for use by the public internet.

    In this scenario the VPN user has a 'fast lane' up to the amount of bandwidth that's been guaranteed. When it's not used, the extra bandwidth is given over to the public internet.

  25. Re:Congressional fix? on How the FCC Plans To Save the Internet By Destroying It · · Score: 1

    It seems to me the lobbying forces on the part of the content providers, Netflix et al., would be pretty formidableâ"unless they think the price is worth it to suppress upstart competition. Which is it?
    I think they're getting to the point where they're willing to pay for prioritization just to guarantee quality.

    A big problem is that we have a transmission protocol (TCP) that is a well deployed but incredibly stupid protocol that that intentionally floods the network with packets until it breaks, then backs off for a little while, then tries to break the network again, always trying to consume every little extra bit of buffer space and bandwidth that might be available in competition with every other server that's doing the same thing. It's constant war with attacks and retreats.

    There are a least two approaches used to cope with this. One is to add bandwidth. The trouble is that TCP will greedily consume any additional bandwidth that's available and you're back to the original problem.

    The second is to buy your own little slice of bandwidth and isolate your stream from all the battles going on between the other streams. This solves the problem for you but creates a kind of bandwidth aparthied. Your traffic is finally safe, but there's less bandwidth available for everyone else.

    The media streamers would prefer guarantees so that their customers get the quality they pay for. Adding bandwidth doesn't provide any guarantee. Packet prioritization at the router (almost) does. We're getting to the point where Netflix, etc are willing to pay for prioritization that gives a guarantee.