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User: RabidReindeer

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  1. Re:Ask me how I can tell you're a Democrat on Should We Ignore the South Carolina Election Hacking Story? (securityledger.com) · · Score: 1

    Actually, local polls tend to be very vigilant. While we make all the fuss about national candidates, the same elections usually also concern everyone down to dogcatcher and ordinances about how many chickens you can own.

    It would be hard for someone in Beijing to accurately fake such voting to provide a complete ballot while skewing national figures. While we make a big deal of where the polls went wrong, when the polls go straight into the Twilight Zone, people start hand-counting. Checks and balances also run up and down the tree when localities suspect that regional counts are off. We have both official agencies and news agencies at multiple levels forming a web to protect and defend our country's most precious resource. And don't go on about "Fake News". News agencies on all/b? sides watch this stuff, so even if one group closed their eyes, others would scream the louder for it. As it is, most of the screaming is coming from politicians who can't stand that maybe not as many people love them as they want to believe.

    Election fraud is real, but estimates are that it's barely a blip overall. It tends to get caught, and usually invalidated. Some would even argue that more fraud is committed but preventing authorized people from voting than from dead people or illegal immigrants voting.

    The real fraud, alas, is what the people we elect do once in office.

  2. Re:Shorting Amazon today on Amazon Is Getting Too Big and the Government Is Talking About It (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1

    This isn't paranoia - it's Big Business since maybe 1950 or earlier. Companies grow. Companies merge. Layoffs ensue, Bonuses are paid. Companies divest. Rinse, repeat.

    There's no Dark Conspiracy here, at least unless you're a rabid Communist. It's not productive, but the people who get paid to facilitate M&A and divestiture get a nice chunk of change every time companies go through this cycle and that's all that really matters to them.

    Some would say it's not True Capitalism when the buying and selling of corporations is more important than using capital as a means of producing and selling actual products, but there are plenty who'll say that whatever makes you money is Capitalism. Just as the stock market was originally developed for the simple transfer of capital assets, but has since developed a significant side in abstract instruments. Some of which - like mortgage-backed securities - have enough clout to bring about a Great Recession.

    Amazon is neither more nor less likely to play the game than any other company. After all, "Don't be Evil" isn't their motto.

  3. Re:Who is John Galt? on Amazon Is Getting Too Big and the Government Is Talking About It (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1

    Correction. Not 15 minutes. 45 minutes. 15 minutes would be a respectable chapter. 45 is more like a small book.

  4. Re:Shorting Amazon today on Amazon Is Getting Too Big and the Government Is Talking About It (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1

    You mean that mega-companies don't like to merge to form even larger companies? Because if there isn't at least one pending mega-merger being worked on in the airline, telecom, or consumables industries right now, we're in an unusual state of affairs.

    Or did you mean that merger announcements don't usually boost stock prices or trigger layoffs due to consolidation?

    Or maybe it's that the top-level execs don't get big rewards, because after all, it's what they're paid to do just like the guy on the assembly line producing the widgets that the newly-merged company sells. Assuming it's not in one of the now-redundant plants that will be closing.

    Or maybe you mean that Main Street hasn't been devastated by the big chain stores who can actually dictate prices to many of their suppliers?

    Because none of that is imaginary unless history is imaginary.

  5. Re:Who is John Galt? on Amazon Is Getting Too Big and the Government Is Talking About It (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1

    I can read much faster than I can talk. I still can't read that speech in 30 minutes or less. In fact, I did something I'd never done before, which is skipped over it after about 15 minutes or so.

    In addition to being overly long-winded, like I said, you'd have to be a drooling idiot not to have gotten the point by that point in the book. She actually moved her credibility backwards by hammering it so hard.

    At least I kept reading, though. I imagine that a lot of people threw the book against the wall and gave up.

  6. Three meetings a day would make me worry, if I managed you. For developers, my experience is rarely more than one intra-departmental meeting a week. The only weekly meeting I regularly attended was the one where we reviewed what would be acceptable to go live that week. Nor was it uncommon for people to phone into that one.

    Meetings are infamously a waste of time and they are one area where quality is infinitely preferable to quantity.

    I exchanged information and ideas with people on 3 different continents today. No one's complaining. They're all repeat customers, in fact.

  7. I wonder how much "push the needle" means appearing busier than you are. I've worked for people like that. They'd literally sit around pushing icons on their desktop when they couldn't grab someone else's phone or hover over a worker. It not only annoyed the workers, customers would beg to be left alone as well in one of the worst cases. The person in question was universally acknowledged an expert in the field, but disliked for being incredibly intrusive. A literal busybody.

    Unless you are interacting with some massive piece of machinery that's unsuitable for home installation, there's precious little that actually needs you to be in a certain place at a certain time. Yes, maybe staring people down or displaying your bone-crushing handshake appeals to you, but an effective manager doesn't really need that - having control over subordinates' remuneration and job future is generally more than enough to keep most minions toiling.

    Of course, you could be one of those fortunate "managers" who have all the responsibility but none of the power, but that rarely lasts. Or you could be the kind of person who annoys your staff so much that the only time they'll do anything is when you're directly wielding the whip. Or, I suppose that you could be so lacking in motivation yourself that the only way you can make yourself work is to see fellow-sufferers allegedly working.

    But for most other people these days, geography is secondary.

  8. Re:serving at Her Majesty's pleasure on Former Astronaut Julie Payette To Be Canada's Next Governor General (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 1

    Well, in the present-day USA, you're expected to swear personal loyalty and curtsey to someone who just happens to have the right blood in his veins.

  9. Re:Shorting Amazon today on Amazon Is Getting Too Big and the Government Is Talking About It (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1

    Two companies that size are just as likely to announce a merger, followed by share price increases and layoffs. And massive bonuses in the C-suite.

    In the mean time, ask all those mom-and-pop businesses on Main Street how healthy competion is - when the competitor is a 900-lb gorilla and has the leverage to negotiate extra-favorable bulk pricing from its suppliers.

  10. Re:Who is John Galt? on Amazon Is Getting Too Big and the Government Is Talking About It (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1

    "One share, one vote. The CEO has 50,000 shares and the board has a grant of another 20,000 that's virtually guaranteed even if he trashes the company. You have 100 and a bill for a kidney transplant. What could be more democratic than that?"

  11. Re:Who is John Galt? on Amazon Is Getting Too Big and the Government Is Talking About It (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1, Insightful

    There was quite a fight over who invented the telephone. When you get to television, it gets even murkier. And then again, surely you've seen those old films about all the different people trying to invent the airplane.

    Rand's real failing (other than that she wrote a "30-minute" speech that can't even be read in 30 minutes and insulted the reader by assuming that he/she was too dim to have gotten the point by then) was the assumption that all creative people are conservative-types, when so many in real life are outspoken liberals.

    But I enjoy the irony that the these ultra-capitalists ultimately win by essentially unionizing and going on strike.

  12. Re:$250K is the definition of the evil 1% on Seattle City Council Unanimously Approves Income Tax For the Rich (geekwire.com) · · Score: 2

    Income is "property"? I thought it was the state next door that had legal cannabis.

    Sounds like there's a whole slew of existing laws that counter this new one, but equating a cash flow with static assets makes the "corporations are people" concept seem downright pedestrian. At least corporations do some of the same things that people do, even if the State of Texas has yet to administer lethal injections to one.

  13. Re: Bye bye, Middle East on World's Cheapest Energy Source Will Be Renewables Within Three Years (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    Why doubt when you can google? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    I like this quote. It indicates that concentrating the Sun's energy on an industrial scale is hardly a new idea:

    A legend has it that Archimedes used a "burning glass" to concentrate sunlight on the invading Roman fleet and repel them from Syracuse. In 1973 a Greek scientist, Dr. Ioannis Sakkas, curious about whether Archimedes could really have destroyed the Roman fleet in 212 BC, lined up nearly 60 Greek sailors, each holding an oblong mirror tipped to catch the sun's rays and direct them at a tar-covered plywood silhouette 49 m (160 ft) away. The ship caught fire after a few minutes; however, historians continue to doubt the Archimedes story.

    I suspect that any "repulsing" that was done - if any - was more like Romans turning away from hot blinding light, but the fact that a mere 60 sailors could ignite even a rigged dummy without any accelerants beyond those naturally found in a wooden ship is an indication of real power. Imagine if there had been 300 of them.

    In the modern day, as the rest of the article indicates, quite a lot is being done and the associated math is provided.

    Solar Smelters International has their own Facebook page. And, as I said, you can build your own: http://www.instructables.com/i...

    All the rest is simply a matter of scale. Commercial factories often have thousands of square feet of roof space. A typical location in the USA can receive about 5KWh/meter/day power. That's PER day, meaning yes, rain, clouds and night-time included. And because we're talking direct heat-to-heat concentration, the efficiency is a lot higher than photovoltaics,.

    So the question is: how skeptical are you?

  14. Re: Bye bye, Middle East on World's Cheapest Energy Source Will Be Renewables Within Three Years (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    Indeed. I still wonder how you can melt enormous amounts of steel with solar or wimd energy, or how you can make big silicon crystals with it. The energy density you need for that is so huge.

    Go to YouTube and look for the video where the guy smelts quarters using nothing but the sun, a support frame, and the Fresnel lens pulled from an old TV.

    Now think about what would happen if you had a factory-sized array of solar concentrators. Large concentrator arrays are already being used today.

  15. Re:Well, collect on the deposits... on Umbrella-sharing Startup Loses Nearly All of Its 300,000 Umbrellas In a Matter of Weeks (shanghaiist.com) · · Score: 1

    I'd bet that it's not so much explicit theft, but go to someone's house and you may find a closet full of unreturned umbrellas.

    A bicycle is something that's easier to leave at the rack when you get to your destination. An umbrella is something you'll typically take all the way to the door. And you might expect to take with you when you leave, but oh, you forgot - it's stopped raining. Kind of like with ball-point pens, only more cumbersome.

    Possibly the best solution is to simply make disposable umbrellas. Although Redbox had a good idea on DVD's. Fees accumulate up to a fixed point and after that, no need to return the DVD - it's yours now.

  16. Trump has actually been good for the press. Starting with Reagan, the press has been mostly subservient to the White House. Even more so since the Iraq War, since in order to be "embedded", you had to be in the Administration's good graces.

    By declaring war on those who report him in less than flattering terms, Trump has re-kindled the role of the press as critic.

  17. Re:Not News for Nerds on Chicago To Make Future Plans a Graduation Requirement (thehill.com) · · Score: 1

    And if Democrats weren't willing to adopt Republican concepts on occasion, we wouldn't have Obamacare.

    Florida's Republican legislature wanted all welfare recipients to be drug-tested so our tax dollars wouldn't be "wasted". But the legislators also receive our tax dollars, and while stoned poor people may lie around doing nothing all day, stoned legislators are likely to pass laws!

  18. Re:Not News for Nerds on Chicago To Make Future Plans a Graduation Requirement (thehill.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'd say that this lines up perfectly with the current trend of withholding benefits to people unless they work for them.

    If a graduate doesn't have a plan to "hit the ground running", then he/she is more likely to be a drain on the public coffers and we wouldn't want to see our hard-earned tax dollars wasted by some muzzy-minded HS graduate would we? Come to think of it, why don't we demand a drug test too? Our local Republican legislature is really big on thing like this.

    Speaking from real life, however, I can say that having a goal and actually being able to move towards that goal at age 18 aren't the same thing. I'm afraid that neither educational, home or community environments left me with any clue on how to advance to the next stage. I just muddled through until eventually I managed to sort of fall into a track that led ultimately to a career as a happy taxpayer.

  19. Re:Allwinner. Nope. on Raspberry Pi's Smaller, Cheaper Rival: NanoPi Neo Plus2 Weighs in at $25 (zdnet.com) · · Score: 2

    In other words, there are additions and/or modifications to the source code used to generate the kernel that are not made public. Meaning that you cannot yourself generate a functional kernel for the unit using the standard open-source kernel processes. You therefore cannot customize the kernel for your special needs and you don't really have any way to know what possible nefarious activities it's up to.

  20. Re:No one is forced my ass on Forced Arbitration Isn't 'Forced' Because No One Has To Buy Service, Says AT&T (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    On the other hand the lawyers doing these suits get paychecks of $10M or more. And where do you think this $10M comes from? It is being added to the price of the product.

    If you paid a Low Price [TM] for a product, and that product was so defective that the producer was held liable for $10M, then your Low Price [TM] wasn't the real price to begin with. Unless, of course, you like buying damaged goods.

    Of course, many class-action lawsuits are about people being made to pay artificially inflated prices in some form or another (either at the register or for things like inequitable service termination fees). Ideally, the award would be sufficient to at least rebate the extra money you paid, plus the legal costs. In reality, it seems like the process of actually claiming award money is difficult to impossible, unless you are in the habit of keeping 10-year-old financial records in detail.

    That's annoying, but not as annoying as knowing that a company the size of AT&T probably spends that much coffee service alone and can readily write such penalties off as part of the cost of doing crooked business.

    The popularity of class-action lawsuits is that while small claims might be individually more satisfying, companies the size of AT&T retain major legal resources whose full-time job is to make such nuisances go away. Most small claimants cannot muster counter-resources of comparable magnitude. When giants and ants negotiate, rarely does the ant win.

  21. Re: Sounds like somone I know on New Research Explodes Myths About Ada Lovelace (ox.ac.uk) · · Score: 1

    You mean often done as a fad, but sometimes medically necessary?

    Exactly. Leeches have been making a comeback. Sometimes bloodletting can be beneficial. Some people can be adversely affected by gluten.

    And many people just frivolously hop on the bandwagon and ruin it for those who need it.

  22. Re:Mumble mumble on The US Considers A Remote Identification System For Drones (engadget.com) · · Score: 1

    ACARS for Drones.

  23. Re:energy storage on California Has So Much Solar Power That Other States Are Paid To Take It (mic.com) · · Score: 1

    There are many ways but none is perfect...

    We don't need perfect. We just need effective. At the moment, we're still very much in the Stone Age when it comes to storing power in bulk.

    However, it's exactly situations like California that cause progress to be made. There's an incentive (don't waste/pay for removal of) excess power and an opportunity (figure out how to store excess power). The incentive means that California is likely to create a supply of money for to address this problem, the opportunity means that the supply of creative people willing to address the problem is going to increase. Where two such supplies intersect, the results are often tangential and all sorts of unforeseen benefits may arise - even new industries created.

    It certainly beats sitting around and sniping "sure, you've got energy now, but what about when the Sun Goes Down? What then, eh?"

  24. Re:yet it still makes sense on Seattle Minimum Wage Study Has Serious Flaws (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 1

    One of the reasons we have research is to separate what everybody "knows" from what actually is.

    Because reality has a certain perversity, and reality when people are involved even more so.

  25. Re:The New Formula on The White House Now Has Zero Science Advisors (cbsnews.com) · · Score: 1

    More like a sadly accurate depiction. This is the latest milepost on the road to mediaevalism.

    A Republican congressman who sits on the science committee of the House of Representatives has dismissed evolution, the Big Bang theory and embryology as "lies straight from the pit of hell".

    The Guardian, reporting on Congressman Paul Broun 4 years ago. Emphasis mine.

    It's always been a Conservative point of pride in the USA to say that "Well, I'm not one of them pointy-headed Liberal Intellectual Elites, I'm just plain folks", but Trump, who prefers to be one of the Financial Elites instead and only "plain folks" when he's selling something, has slammed the government into reverse gear. Promoting coal mining when even the miners and mine-owners want to move to more modern industries. Appointing opponents of government programs to head those programs. Putting his personal force behind the quashing of any facts that he doesn't like and replacing them with Alternative facts that please more. And now this.

    China will continue to advance. So will India, Russia, Europe, and the rest of the world. And we'll just sit back counting our quarterly dividend checks until one day even rural Afghanistan is more technologically and scientifically advanced than we are. And because we believe in Personal Responsibility, we'll find someone else to hold personally responsible because boo-hoo, every one picks on us 'cause we're #1.

    And the ultimate irony will come when even our military advantages are all gone because the science that provided the science that keeps our ability to go slap around countries we don't like will dead, while everyone else kept going.