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User: Tracy+Reed

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  1. Re:Maybe he thought that "Unlock" would only unloc on Poor Pilot Training Blamed For Virgin Galactic Crash · · Score: 1

    Nobody likes to "get behind the airplane". I execute checklists as soon as practical and get things set up for the next phase of flight as soon as possible so we're ready. Exceptions being things in the class of the feather on the ship in question: Flaps, landing gear, mostly airspeed and aerodynamics dependent items.

    - A commercial pilot

  2. Big mistake on Washington May Count CS As Foreign Language For College Admission · · Score: 1

    As someone who has learned both spoken languages and programming languages to fluency (whatever that might mean in this case) I can tell you that allowing CS to replace the requirement for 2 years of a spoken foreign language is a huge mistake. As if we don't have enough narrow minded jingoistic Americans running about scarcely aware of the cultures outside our borders. If you want a good IT job learn both. It is entirely possible. I took two years of both in high school, no problem. You may have to give up your goof-off elective for a couple semesters but it is certainly doable in most schools.

  3. I was SO hoping it would be Cryptolocker... on International Space Station Infected With Malware Carried By Russian Astronauts · · Score: 1

    'Houston, we have a problem...What's bitcoin?"

  4. I start reading other's code with... on Ask Slashdot: How To Start Reading Other's Code? · · Score: 1

    less

  5. Re:Our Children's Children's Children Will Save Us on Decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Plant May Take Decades · · Score: 1

    ...only once the rods of cooled sufficiently (a few years). Until then they must stay in the pools.

  6. Re: Our Children's Children's Children Will Save U on Decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Plant May Take Decades · · Score: 1

    The radiator in the car requires a pump and, of course, a radiator. I think evaporative cooling (the current method) is the best way to go. If you seal it and pump it you must have the pump working and airflow over the radiator at all times. It is more complicated.

  7. Re:Our Children's Children's Children Will Save Us on Decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Plant May Take Decades · · Score: 1

    Are you talking about San Onofre here? I live within tens of miles of it. The fuel is currently NOT removed. In fact there are 4 decades worth of spent fuel sitting in pools at the site. And it will remain there indefinitely until we figure out another place to store it OR pull our heads out of our asses and reprocess and recycle this fuel. Letting such a valuable commodity sit there is just silly.

    Even though I live nearby the thing I am disappointed they are giving up on it. Looks like we're in for another summer of rolling blackouts in SoCal.

  8. Do what they did with GPG on DoD Descends On DEFCAD · · Score: 1

    Compress the file then print it out in easily OCR'able format (QR codes, perhaps), then physically carry it out of the country.

    "You can't stop the signal, Mal."

  9. Custom ear molds on Making Earbuds That Fit (Video) · · Score: 1

    My job requires me to spend a lot of time with stuff in my ears: Headsets, earbuds for music, bluetooth for phone calls... They would always fall out or not isolate well. Then I found out about custom ear molds. You go to an audiologist (same guy who makes hearing aids) and they put this putty like stuff in your ear which hardens after a couple minutes and takes an impression of the ear canal and area just outside your ear. Then you send that impression off to a place that makes custom ear molds and you tell them what device you are going to be attaching it to.

    I highly recommend Avery Sound: http://www.averysound.com/.

    I have no financial interest in them, I'm just a very sastisfied customer. I have their custom ear molds on my Etymotic ear buds for music, on my Clarity Aloft aviation headset, and on my Jawbone Prime bluetooth headset. Perfect fit, great isolation, and have never once fallen out of my ear due to the way they lock-in by following every curve of the ear.

    My only complaints about them might be that I have accidentally pulled the earmolds off my Etymotic earbuds a few times while listening to music because the low surface area of the part of the earbud that sticks into the earmold doesn't leave much to grab onto. But my Jawbone and Aloft are stuck on there very solidly. The Etymotic earmold is also probably the least well fitting of the three although it still fits very good. It's just that if I swallow hard or chew it breaks the airtight seal with the outside (which is what gives the awesome noise isolation coming in and music isolation going out) which causes a popping noise. A very minor thing, really. But that's how good these things are.

    I'll never use standard non-molded earbuds again.

  10. IS your code bad? on Ask Slashdot: How To React To Coworker Who Says My Code Is Bad? · · Score: 1

    I have noticed that whenever I see people approached with comments about the quality of their code (by myself or others) they often say things like "You just don't understand what this code is supposed to be doing."

    That is always a red-flag to me. If your code is good the person should be able to tell what the code is doing.

    What are this person's specific objections to your code?

    There are no absolutes or hard rules and much is subjective and language dependent but as general rules of thumb:

    Does your organization have a style guide? Does your code follow it?

    Does your code have comments? I like to see at least one comment per functional block of code (function, loop, branch, new level of indent, whatever, depending on language).

    Are the lengths of your function limited to no more than a page of text, preferably half a page?

    Do your line lengths not exceed 80 columns?

    Do you make some effort at making the code visually nice to look at? Is it formatted so like elements line up for easy comparison of lines? I'm a big fan of lining up = and parens etc. to make the code look orderly. It makes it easy to spot differences or errors. It sounds shallow but I also find that when someone has done this it means they care.

    Without seeing a sample of your code to tell you if it IS bad there's no way we can advise you. If all you want is a polite way to tell the little twerp to shut up and mind his own business that won't get you fired I'm afraid I don't have much to offer.

  11. Re:Are we any smarter than we were 2000 years ago? on Google Brings the Dead Sea Scrolls To the Digital Age · · Score: 2

    God wants peace

    God wants war

    God wants famine

    God wants chain stores

    What God wants God gets

    God wants sedition

    God wants sex

    God wants freedom

    God wants semtex

    What God wants God gets

    God help us all

  12. Re:Quick find all the people that care on Bitcoin Mining Reward About To Halve · · Score: 1

    Mining isn't the only way to get bitcoins.

  13. ROP & The Halting Problem on Frankenstein Code Stitches Code Bodies Together To Hide Malware · · Score: 2

    This sounds like Return Oriented Programming, used in some exploits to thwart countermeasures. But it is a long way from stitching together code to do trivial things all the way to making code which replicates, has a payload, AND can stitch together code to do all Of this. The Halting Problem makes me wonder if it is even theoretically possible.

  14. Homeopathy on Beware the Nocebo Effect · · Score: 1

    > In one remarkable case, a participant in an antidepressant drug trial was given placebo tablets — and then swallowed 26 of them in a suicide attempt.

    This reminds me of the James Randi talk on homeopathy: Part of the theory of homeopathy is that the more dilute the solution is the stronger it is. Randi told the hypothetical story of someone who forgot to take his "medicine" thus causing an overdose and DIED.

  15. Re:LaTeX on 12 Ways LibreOffice Writer Tops MS Word · · Score: 1

    Amateur programmers discuss syntax. Professional programmers discuss semantics.

    Amateur generals discuss tactics. Professional generals discuss logistics.

    I bet there are a lot of these...

  16. Freenet, TOR, etc on How To Share a Cake Over the Internet · · Score: 1

    I wonder if this algorithm would have useful applications in such networks to make them share precious bandwidth resources efficiently or avoid other kinds of "tragedy of the commons" issues?

  17. So that's what causes... on Warp Drives May Come With a Killer Downside · · Score: 1

    gamma ray bursts!

  18. Re:22 light years on New Exoplanet Is Best Yet Candidate For Supporting Life · · Score: 1

    Unreachable by you, perhaps. Still reachable by plenty. It only needs to be reachable by 1 to take pics of the little green men in the living room and send them back.

  19. Event Horizon.... on Astronomers Planning To Image Milky Way's Central Black Hole · · Score: 1

    That movie gave my gf (at the time) nightmares for a week...

    I hope this telescope is more successful than the ship of the movie!

  20. Re:And you say Chinese can't innovate on Inside the Great Firewall of China's Tor Blocking · · Score: 1

    Or they paid some round-eye to implement this for them. They certainly have the resources.

  21. Don't provide a "suppression list" of addresses! on Carbonite Privacy Breach Leads To Spam · · Score: 1

    Only provide a list of HASHES of email addresses you don't want to send to. And don't store a list of addresses to suppress yourself. Store a list of hashes. It is the only way to guarantee those people will never be emailed again. I've worked with companies who had emailing operations for their customers and on at least two occasions they accidentally emailed the "do not email" list. Had they been only storing hashes this would have been impossible.

  22. Re:It's a poor differentiator on Ask Slashdot: Is Reverse DNS a Worthy Standard For Fighting Spam? · · Score: 1

    A lot of spam comes from botnet'd boxes which were never intended to be sending mail. Those machines often do not have a reverse DNS configured because it did not matter and no mail should be coming from them. Spammers do not have control over the reverse DNS for these machines so filtering on reverse DNS is still a good way to add to the spam score of an email.

  23. There's always room for... on Scientists Derive Gelatin From Human Tissue · · Score: 1

    Human gelatin!

  24. The settlement did its job?!?! on Internet Explorer Antitrust Case Set To Expire · · Score: 2

    "Although Netscape ultimately didn't benefit, the settlement seems to have done its job"

    Sure, so much competition was restored to the browser market by the settlement that Mozilla/Firefox had to be built FOR FREE by thousands of people and then given away FOR FREE for TEN YEARS to get where we are now!

  25. Re:Ok...But let's not blame the mouse. on Word Processors — One Writer's Further Retreat · · Score: 1

    How do you navigate text paragraph by paragraph in MS Word? Short of wasting massive time by holding down the up or down arrow key, of course. I suspect that is what he meant by requiring a mouse.