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User: cornjones

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Comments · 519

  1. Re:Yes on Ask Slashdot: Why Won't Companies Upgrade Old Software? · · Score: 1

    The major problem with that is that you may avoid problems and expenses now, but you're setting yourself up for greater problems and more expenses later. What happens when IE 6 gets exploited and it's not GOING to be fixed? Now you have a critical flaw that can't be patched and you need to either accept the risk of exploit or do a crash upgrade, which will be MUCH more expensive and problem-riddled than a properly run upgrade. Leaving you high and dry. Preventative maintenance is much cheaper than repair in most cases.

    This is important. Stable, planned costs are much preferable to a call to spend X gazillion dollars last second b/c all of the sudden there is a fire.

  2. reprimand? on Using YouTube For File Storage · · Score: 1

    I wonder if he will have to pay for the (already terrilbly) slashdotted vt.edu servers that have just melted between serving a wiki entry and video posted there.

  3. Re:under age drinking? on Beer Drone Delivery Service For South African Music Festival · · Score: 1

    Great idea, but its likely to only stimulate the development of interceptor drones out to get one keg up on the other drones.

    Why isn't this an annual robotics contest yet?

    from TFA, it is.

  4. Re:3 Million Sigantures?! on EU To Ban Neonicotinoid Insecticides · · Score: 2

    You are going to want to be careful w/ this. The people using this treatment w/ severe allergies were given microscopic doses of peanut, measured in a lab. This wasn't some guy at home just cutting up a peanut. Depends on your level of reaction, i suppose.

  5. Re:Kind of innevitable and entirely reasonable on Canada Revenue Agency To Tax BitCoin Transactions · · Score: 3, Funny

    [A]... government that piles its country's resources in to terrorism prevention, whilst ignoring road safety.

    Oh c'mon... a cursory glance at the number of casualties from terrorism vs road accidents would show that to be just plain dumb.

    at least use a more plausible example, geez!

  6. Re:Windows8 can be tamed, but why should you have on Windows 8 Killing PC Sales · · Score: 1

    Having search boxes on menus and windows is just a crutch that demonstrates the design sucks. The point is to see what you're looking for and interact with it in a graphically intuitive way. Switching back and forth from keyboard and mouse (or touch) is clunky, slow, and stupid.

    I don't agree with this at all. if I am at a keyboard it is way faster to hit start, type a few characters and quick search right to the program i want. think vi. if I am on a touch screen, the big buttons make sense w/ my clunky fingers. the start -> search on win7 works more or less teh same way (though not as well), i guess this is only a problem if you are using your computer like it was still xp and hunting and stabbing through menus to run things.

    I agree w/ the GP, i don't see what the problem is. I have been running a win8 vm for corp vpn access for some time and find it a bit improved version of win7. As soon as you run a program, you are back to your standard desktop so I don't get why we all have jumped on the IT SUXORS bandwagon.

  7. Re:It's Been Done Elsewhere! on Could New York City Cut Emissions 90% By 2050? · · Score: 1

    That was my first thought as well but, on second thought, you are dumping this heat into the environment anyway. is there a important difference between polluting the air vs the sea?

  8. Re:The way it begins on Spy Drones Used To Hunt Down Christopher Dorner · · Score: 4, Insightful

    YOu don't even have to weaponize them for this to be scary (not that they won't). "Look how useful, and much safer than helicopters.", "These are so cheap, we can keep them up all day", "More in the air means more criminals caught", "We could have caught him quicker if we recorded all of this"

  9. Weight of the world on Putting Biotech Threats In Context · · Score: 1

    I do like a good thriller novel and they don't really keep me up at night (except the reading part). Mostly b/c i have no involvement in the protection of most of these things. Reading the summary above makes me realize again the weight on any executive office. I can assume somebody is taking care of it. The president/prime minister/whatever realizes this is another thing he is responsible for stopping. No wonder they get grey so fast.

  10. Re:The reason behind the attacks on UK Anonymous Hacktivists Get Jail Time · · Score: 1

    gah, the money wasn't going to assange anyway. Paypal, mastercard, visa, etc stopped taking money for wikileaks. now, while assange may have started wikileaks, he is not wikileaks.

    The circus around assange and the rape case seems odd, hopefully he will get a fair trial. if he is guilty he should pay. still nothing to do with wikileaks.

    wikileaks provides, imho, a public good. I found it terrifying how quickly all the major payment players got into line to block funding to wikileaks. Action against that was warranted. Some of us donated money another way, some did less legal things and some of those are paying for it. the punishment seems excessive, i see this as likely bought justice.

    I guess this does come back to assange after all, these guys had about as much chance of getting a fair trial.

  11. Re:Nice, but that raises a new question. on Amazon AutoRip — 14 Years Late · · Score: 1

    I thiink this is a good point that isn't put forward enough. sad, that i have no mod points

  12. Re:Can't America get its acts together ? on Congressman Introduces Bill To Ban Minting of Trillion-Dollar Coin · · Score: 1

    Isn't the argument for entitlements that keeping the poor fed is in your best interests?

    Providing food and other support keeps the poor from desperation and gives them a _chance_ of building themselves out of poverty. Many don't or can't find the way but some can and you benefit for every person that becomes a more productive member of your society.

    Though, this all depends on what tribe you call yours. Your comment "me, and mine" makes me think that you define that tribe very narrowly, perhaps just your own family. Even so, do you really have nobody you care about that has needed government help at some time or another? What about state provided education, infrastructure, etc?

  13. Re:Names on Curiosity Scrubs a Mars Rock Clean · · Score: 1

    gah, and i just used all my mod points.

    still chuckling...

  14. Re:Same tired argument from government bureaucrats on Going Off the Fiscal Cliff Could Mean Missing the Next Hurricane Sandy · · Score: 1

    i saw the forbes link but i was putting it down as partisan or at least vested interest. a couple places show that tax revenues go up every year (w/ some 6 exception years) which casts doubt on the forbes data. this seems to say that http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/supply-side_spin.html. These guys have a really crappy site (so they must be academics) but they say "what evidence there is suggests there to be a correlation between lower taxes and LOWER revenues, not HIGHER revenues as suggested by supply-siders. There may well be valid arguments in favor of tax cuts. But higher tax revenues does not appear to be one of them." They also seem to show supporting data based on percentages rather than straight numbers for gdp which seems to be more valid, imho. http://www.econdataus.com/taxcuts.html

  15. Re:Here's some ideas on Going Off the Fiscal Cliff Could Mean Missing the Next Hurricane Sandy · · Score: 1

    sold. I do see some value in the military spending (1 and 2) but if you give me 4-6 I can come in on 1 and 2.

    that was easy. what else should we solve? how about something really hard like organ waiting list priorities?

  16. Re:Same tired argument from government bureaucrats on Going Off the Fiscal Cliff Could Mean Missing the Next Hurricane Sandy · · Score: 3, Informative

    results of your search are very mixed. the saddest thing i found when going through the google results is that I could tell what the article was going to say based on the source, ie all seemed partisan. Do you have any economic papers or non mass media sources that back up your analysis? This seemed to be the best source (on page 4 of hte results). But it seems to say the bush tax cuts were unsuccessful in their goals.
    http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/bush-tax-cuts/index.cfm

  17. Re:Why do they need finger print scanning? on UK Students Protest Biometric Scanner Move · · Score: 1

    Right, so you took 5 years to pay back for an education that will benefit you for some 50 years of life. seems like a no brainer.

    Besides, you don't seriously think it only costs 9k/student to run a university, do you? Think of how many people you interact with, teachers and staff, grounds, facilities. I ran across this infographic on Univ of Alaska. Presumably their heating bills (and maybe staff retention) are higher than most but I would expect this to be indicative of any institution. http://www.uafsunstar.com/archives/10184. Given roughly 35k students at that institution, that comes to about 24k / student / year.

    another good article along the same lines is here; http://www.topuniversities.com/studying-abroad/advice/how-much-does-it-really-cost-study-us

    Truthfully, i don't understand what the griping about the 9k/year rates is about. this is taken in the form of a loan from teh government which doesn't need to be paid back until you have a good job. Basically, the society is making a bet that each student will be successful. If the student is successful, they have to pay back that loan. If the student isn't successful, they don't pay it back and the state eats the cost. this seems completely reasonable for the state to take the risk and for the student to pay back if it works.

  18. Re:good luck with that on Dell Gives Android the Boot, Boots Up More Windows 8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I used to be proud of over 1 year uptimes until i realized 2 things:
    1. you aren't patching enough
    2. when the reboot happens and it turns out your initialization script for one of your servers wasn't tested thoughly enough (b/c you never rebooted) you have a big problem. having configured it 6 months ago (timeline from when I learned my lesson) and half remembering which configs are which is going to lead to more downtime. You should really reboot after major (re)configurations to make sure your server comes back into the fold effectively... obviously, this should be during a controlled maintenance window but preventative maintenance still counts as maintenance

  19. Re:VMs on Ask Slashdot: Little Boxes Around the Edge of the Data Center? · · Score: 1

    who hasn't automated their patching yet? being able to move OS's to other hosts (or datacenters) plus the drastic decrease in time to provision and general hardware abstraction is invaluable.

  20. that is for the cheap plan on The UK's 5-Minute 4G Data Cap · · Score: 1

    according to their site, http://ee.co.uk/plans#section-phones, the 500mb option is on the cheapest plan. for 36gbp you get 5gb. The previous highest i could find when shopping around early in the year was 2gb from vodafone.

    While I would prefer an unlimited plan, this doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, or am i missing something?

  21. Re:Mobile bandwidth on The UK's 5-Minute 4G Data Cap · · Score: 1

    It's not gov't involved. 'Tariff' in this context is simply the price the carriers are charging. I probably includes the taxes (VAT) but it is simply the price on the plan.

  22. Re:That explains a lot on When the Hiring Boss Is an Algorithm · · Score: 0

    maybe mainland you do but in the UK, that isn't the case... I would say that a quarter of the help desks for national UK companies are based in the UK (completely anecdotally)

  23. Re:Huh? on Nuclear Powered LEDs For Space Farming · · Score: 1

    Not sure where you got that I was anti progress. I think the led crops idea is cool, i think the centrifuge idea is dumb. Perhaps our main disagreement is in scale. If we are only feeding 6 people, sure no problem, we could probably even build for 20. But once we start talking about 100+ people, a number I would very much like to see us pass, we are going to need to take as much of the complexity as we can (and no more) out of the system.

    As far as materials, absent some miracle nano tubing based space elevator, lifting this crap off earth is both expensive and, especially when you start talking more environmentally sensitive items, dangerous. I can't dismiss the costs as easily as you seem to, i would look for a different engineering solution than 'wasting' all of that weight (and gross materials) on centrifuges.

  24. Re:Huh? on Nuclear Powered LEDs For Space Farming · · Score: 1

    Hmm.... so many problems, where to begin...
    1. 50 square meters of vegetation per person. HOw are you going to build a structure large enough to do all your planting?
    2. I see the snark remarks about getting your centrifuge spinning in a vacuum but you are providing oxygen and food. how are you going to get oxygen and food in and out with out appreciable loss of energy? (and gardeners, fertilizer, seeds. wait, where is the fertilizer coming from? capturing the astro port a potties will help but you will need a good deal more than that.)
    3. You are talking about building huge lithium batteries. How are you getting that much lithium off the planet? I do like the heat battery idea mentioned in a few posts down, throw in some mirrors to concentrate and you have a battery of sorts without requiring a lot of material.
    4. Materials is a huge issue. Anything we can build out of rock we need to bring (at least until we have fabrication set up). That is hugely expensive.

  25. Re:When I was a kid we thought America was free on Iranian Players Blocked From World of Warcraft Due To Trade Sanctions · · Score: 1

    true, i get he impression that most of my mother-in-laws direct fears were hold overs from her mothers experiences. But i also get the feeling that there was serious chilling effect from the stalinist polices that was just starting to thaw in the 80s (when people started admitting they were not part of the communist party in mixed company). During my mother in laws time it was more about lines and scarcity.

    Also, to say it is in any way equivalent to what is going on in the us is what i was arguing against. Even now (though It feels like putin is working on reviving the good old days) US is a far cry from where russia is. The recent example of pussy riot for example but more chilling, imho, is the arrest/discrediting of 3 political opponents that I know of, and I don't follow this at all.