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User: mlookaba

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Comments · 69

  1. Re:Yay self-driving cars! on Will Facial Recognition in China Lead To Total Surveillance? (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 1

    "fuck that, I *would* rather walk than step into one of those four-wheeled nightmare machines) so you'll literally have ZERO control over the machine"

    Have you ever ridden a bus or flown? What sort of control did you have there?

  2. "Tens of thousands, perhaps millions" on Google Glitch Took Thousands of Chromebooks Offline (geekwire.com) · · Score: 1

    Hyperbole much?

  3. "Several of our patients described feeling 'reset' after the treatment and often used computer analogies"

    I just know there must be a formal logical fallacy related to expanding anecdotal evidence to cover the entire range. I'll leave it to the logic experts to point out which one.

  4. Re:Evergreen State on In America, Most Republicans Think Colleges Are Bad for the Country (chronicle.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm adjunct faculty for a University in the Midwest

    The school newspaper is a sorry propaganda rag. No stories are printed unless they include racism, white privilege, LGBTQZ or some other pet project. It's fine to let students have their own view, but the (lower division) students that I see appear to be shaped more by this agenda than they are shaping it.

  5. I love the tactile feedback of a great mechanical keyboard. At home and at work, when I'm typing, people know it. My poor office mate wears headphones most of the time, but he tells me "I can tell when you're inspired, because the noise level goes up significantly".

  6. Age of Consent on Oregon Raises the Smoking Age (fastcompany.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    States that require someone be 21 years of age to consent to engaging in risky smoking behavior will also ban those under 21 from enlisting in the military, right?

    Young people do lots of risky things. Let's be consistent.

  7. Re:Your right to point your camera on Federal Appeals Court: You Have a Constitutional Right to Film Police Officers in Public (slate.com) · · Score: 0

    Also remember that an officer is dealing with difficult circumstances. If the person filming becomes a distraction in the execution of their job, they are well within their rights to stop it, and should. The benefit of the doubt should be given to the officer.

    If we want to discuss good decision making, let's talk about why they were called in the first place. I'd guess it wasn't because the subjects were peacefully enjoying a nice evening without bothering anyone.

  8. Re:Perfect opportunity for abuse on Hundreds of Walmart Employees Say They've Been Punished For Taking Sick Days (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    "The bottom line is that there are very few nice, generous employers anymore"

    The margins for doing business in many retail spaces have been going down for quite some time.

    I'm certainly no expert in employee relations. I worked in IT for telemarketing company for several years. Draconian rules much like this were put in place there because employees regularly abused the system due to alcohol/drug addictions, poor decisions, and the stress of the job. Basically, lots of people couldn't bear to come in to work, so they'd call in sick. It made it impossible to tell the real issues from the imagined. It was very sad.

    The hard truth was that it was just as cheap (and sometimes cheaper) to train someone new for unskilled labor as it was to deal with absences by existing personnel.

    Of course those people who did a really outstanding job didn't have to deal with that issue. It's always been up to the employee to make sure they are valuable enough that the company doesn't want to work without them.

  9. Re:Java 9? meh... on Oracle May Have Stopped Funding and Developing Java EE (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2

    Lambdas and method references, which I thought would be a nice-to-have, has turned it into a completely new language, streams are great, the multi-threading support is not too shabby and the new time API was loooong overdue.

    This

    There is a reason that scripting languages aren't normally used for large applications. After the initial "wow that was super simple to write", you get to the phase where debugging takes forever, and maintenance is a pain in the ass. Maintenance is always the major share of software cost, and the amount of time it takes to write the initial code should be a secondary consideration (IMHO). Anyone who thinks a strongly typed language is just a pain in the ass probably hasn't done much long-term maintenance on a large system.

    Streams are awesome. Everyone who codes Java needs to spend more time using them. The time API is greak (but everyone with a clue was already using joda time anyway).

  10. Alarming? Perhaps not. on Top US Undergraduate Computer Science Programs Skip Cybersecurity Classes (darkreading.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "The alarming study also reveals that only one (University of Alabama) out of the 121 schools required three or more cybersecurity classes to graduate."

    This is an excellent example of tailoring a news story to fit a goal. One university (Alabama) requires three security classes to graduate, so that was picked as the benchmark, and obviously all other schools would fall short. Nothing newsworthy was imparted by that little bit of information.

    Computer security certainly is an issue, but it won't be solved by college classes, for the same reason that time/date and character encoding issues will persist until the end of time. Sorry guys.

  11. Re:Better question on Slashdot Asks: Do You Support Nuclear Energy? (gallup.com) · · Score: 1

    Sorry "load to generation".

  12. Re:Better question on Slashdot Asks: Do You Support Nuclear Energy? (gallup.com) · · Score: 1

    "Renewables are not dispatchable for the most part. Nuclear certainly can be"

    The term dispatchable is usually used in the context of adjusting load to demand in real time. Nuclear is NOT that in any way. It's useful for base load only.

  13. Re:There was little to be gained by continuing to on Looking Back At Apollo 17, and Why We Stopped Going To the Moon (examiner.com) · · Score: 1

    People who say they never became somewhat routine may be looking back through time-tinted lenses. They never became quite as routine as the space shuttle though. During the 80s-90s, they shot off so frequently that often they'd get just a 5 second blurb on the nightly news, or not even that if something more important was going on.

    There are obviously benefits to manned spaceflight with regard to public awareness. Whether those benefits outweight the per diem science cost might be up for debate. Publicity equals funding. As we've seen with the Mars rovers and New Horizons, it doesn't always take an astronaut to do the trick.

  14. Reaching a 1.4% Decline in 2019? on Cable Providers Still Have No Answer For Netflix As Cord-cutting Accelerates (bgr.com) · · Score: 2

    Obviously the business model needs to be changed eventually, but this number doesn't seem like anything to be terribly concerned about in the short term. Especially since those who aren't willing/able to change will probably endure more price hikes. See: AT&T.

  15. Science Requires Effort on Stop Taking All the Fun Out of Science · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unless we want to re-invent the wheel over and over, it's necessary that people have a basic understanding of the work that has been done in the past.

    The problem isn't how hard it is to memorize facts. The human brain is capable of memorizing a lot of facts. The problem is that (US specifically) kids are just too lazy to do it. They have the ability, but not the desire. (Source: My wife is a high school science teacher of 30 years).

    Let's address the real issue and stop trying to give participation trophies.

  16. Agreements must be realistic on Analysis: China-US Hacking Accord Is Tall On Rhetoric, Short On Substance · · Score: 1

    Asking a nation sign a pact not to spy/hack is silly. Obviously they'll do it anway. That goes for ANY nation.

    So options are: (1) create an agreement that bans hacking and watch it be ignored in practice, or (2) write an agreement that doesn't require things that can't be lived up to.

    Of course it would be nice if everyone would stop being mean and just get along together and coexist so we wouldn't have a need for this at all. Could happen.

  17. Debugging Gone Wrong on Lessons From Your Toughest Software Bugs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Bug 1 (my fault) : Took over working on a financial application that took an identifier and enriched them with all sorts of useful data. The original programmer had left, and nobody at the company knew anything about how it worked. Soon after, we were troubleshooting an issue reported by a client that the output data wasn't consistent between runs. I grabbed a list of all the unique security IDs I could find (about 100k) and pushed them through a couple of times just to try and replicate the issue. HOWEVER... it turns out the application was actually using the Bloomberg "By Security" interface under the hood. That was a service where you drop a list of IDs onto Bloomberg's FTP server, and they would respond with data... for a fee of $1 per security. The client got an unexpected bill of nearly $200k that month, and I had the most awkward talk ever with my boss. Fortunately, Bloomberg forgave the charges, and it turns out they were actually responsible for the inconsistent data - which was fixed on their end shortly thereafter.

    Bug 2 (not my fault) : A client/server application is returning odd responses to a particular query. Developer (we'll call him "Jason") inserts a switch into the code that dumps this query out to a hardcoded folder on the server. The code then gets checked into production WITH THE SWITCH TURNED ON. It went undetected for nearly a year because the query wasn't terribly high volume. But slowly and steadily, the query files built up over time. Our IT had lots of money to play with, so server space was not an issue. Unfortunately, the number of files was. Server performance went steadily downward every so often, until finally this query would make it crash every time. When we eventually tracked down the cause, there were millions of files sitting in the same folder of every single server in the group. It took nearly three days just to get the OSs to delete the files without falling over.

  18. Re:Coding is not the solution ... on Arkansas Is Now the First State To Require That High Schools Teach Coding · · Score: 1

    "... when the problem is corporate greed that supports CEOs and shareholders."

    We should pass a law immediately that limits the rate of return on investments.

    Surely that could only have a positive impact on our culture, right?

  19. Re:Best Script Ever? on Blade Runner 2 Script Done, Harrison Ford Says "the Best Ever" · · Score: 1

    Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a great movie. Just sayin.

  20. Re:WELL DUH! on When We Don't Like the Solution, We Deny the Problem · · Score: 1

    I am so glad to be an engineer, where the answers can be discussed in absolute terms.

    If I had to work in an environment like "Next Top Designer" or whatever, where your job depends on mostly opinion, I would leap out a window in no time.

  21. Re:Dear Slashdot, on Ask Slashdot: Choosing a Data Warehouse Server System? · · Score: 1

    Are you one of those people that think developers should do everything themselves without asking for assistance? That shit leads to really, really bad code.

    It may not be fashionable in your circles, but human communication is, and will always be, a basic element of engineering.

  22. Re:The real crime here on 33 Months In Prison For Recording a Movie In a Theater · · Score: 1

    "Just like we don't spank kids anymore because it's pointless and counterproductive, we should also stop "spanking" non-violent offenders but put them to good use instead."

    The fundamental flaw with that logic is the assumption that the offender is remorseful, and wants to be put to good use. While it is certainly true in some cases, it's almost certainly NOT true in others. Figuring out which is really difficult, because it turns out that people tend to lie when they get caught.

  23. Re:The real crime here on 33 Months In Prison For Recording a Movie In a Theater · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're arguing about something unrelated to my comment. My point is that sometimes the physical "violence" of being incarcerated is justified for non-physical crimes. That's all.

  24. Re:The real crime here on 33 Months In Prison For Recording a Movie In a Theater · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the real crime is punishing a non-violent civil offender with violence (i.e. forced into a cage)

    Would you feel the same way if a financial advisor intentionally stole all the money your parents had for retirement? That wouldn't be a physically violent act, but would seem to have consequences that merit punishment other than a fine.

  25. Sure, give that a try on Anti-Surveillance Mask Lets You Pass As Someone Else · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wearing a mask in public is already considered "probable cause" for detain and search. While I agree with the reasons, this product will go nowhere except Halloween parties.