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User: tkotz

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  1. If starting your own company someday is your measure of success, and you don't care what you do, you should probably go into food services.

  2. Re:What happened before the ice??? on Humans Are Causing the Earth To Wobble More Than It Should, NASA Finds (bgr.com) · · Score: 1

    The ideal state of the universe was the span from August 12, 1970 to July 3, 1972. Don't ask why, you wouldn't understand.

    Does it have something to do with the release of the Planet of the Apes sequels?

    Because a pre-Star Wars universe sounds pretty far from ideal.

  3. Re:Between this and the copyright/link tax shit on EU To Give Internet Firms 1 Hour To Remove Extremist Content (go.com) · · Score: 1

    EU voters over 49 are encouraged to vote in favor of free speech as well.

  4. Re:Another, But It Will Work This time, scenario? on Swiss Village Votes for Free Money. Now It Just Needs the Cash (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Just because something works doesn't mean you'll like what it does ;)

  5. Re:Another, But It Will Work This time, scenario? on Swiss Village Votes for Free Money. Now It Just Needs the Cash (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 2

    Socialism or communism can at least work in theory as there is an economic flow between the individuals and government. Maybe with reduced freedoms or rampant inflation, but there is a money cycle.
    This is just begging. They state the government can't support it, so it is just a city wide crowdfunding scheme. I'd say scam , but they are at least open about it. It's unsustainable and they obviously have no intention of sustaining it. It really is a testament to something that almost half the voters, voted against just taking handouts from other people.

  6. Re:Where have I heard that before on Trump To Target Foreign Meddling In US Elections With Sanctions Order (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    So are you saying that it shouldn't be a crime for foreign organizations to interfere with elections?
    Thus the Mueller probe, based on similar existing laws, is by extension an unethical waste?
    Or is the autocracy supposed to be favorable like "It is good that they have these autocratic laws in place so that Trump can be convicted of something he would get away with in a more laissez faire democracy"
    Or "Anti-democratic laws are bad unless they happen to catch my enemies then great"?

  7. Re:Well we'd better do something on Four-Day Working Week For All is a Realistic Goal This Century, UK Trade Unions Say (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    If we lose 50% of current jobs to automation that doesn't mean there will only be enough work for 1/2 as many people. New Jobs come into existence all the time. More importantly some occupations get shifted priority as the increase in societies productivity increase the resources that can be spent on previously less important jobs. Maybe something like hiring people to clean up litter in city parks, government regulation compliance officers, elder care of an increasingly order population, it seems like YouTube is paying more movie reviewers than worked at every newspaper combined. Or most likely of all a job that I can't even think of now.
    And remember the US is currently experiencing a labor shortage, it is a great time to be looking for a new job. But as the population starts to level off some of the working population may not be able to retire not so much because we don't have the financial resources to pay them, but we don't have the productivity to not encourage them to keep working.
    The short term effect of the fear of automation is more interesting. It is very difficult to find new truck drivers. It is a specialty skill set that everyone says is the next thing to be fazed out so no one is entering it. This results in things like two NJ towns that didn't get their fireworks for Independence Day, because the company couldn't find a driver.

  8. Re:it has no purpose that is already met on Linux Distro Elive Emerges Alive After 8-Year Hibernation (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    If the goal is low power, an under-clocked modern CPU may be a better option to an older CPU.

  9. Though technically possible. Win 98 on an original Pentium would NOT have been a pleasant experience. I remember people installing it and booting up to show they could then immediately going back to actually keep the machine usable. And I'm assuming office 97 is in the suite of programs. Oh the pain. An original Pentium was a great DOS machine, but just stop there.
    I think modern OSes are a lot more conservative on the minimum requirements as people expect a certain level of usability.
    On a "i686" class machine, I'd assume this distro would out pace windows 98 in any side by side test being that in the late 90's I preferred Debian to Windows 98 and every version of Debian seems to eek out a little more performance on a given piece of hardware. Especially with modern approaches to old crushers like boot time, multitasking and virtual memory management.
    And then you would have to to come to terms with the modern web.

    Side note: Win 98 SE is probably my favorite version of windows.

  10. Re: All security = an implementation. on Blockchains Are Not Safe For Voting, Concludes NAP Report (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    How coercion works:
    "Bring proof you voted W and I'll give you X"
    "Bring proof you voted Y or I'll break your Z"

    To prevent coercion you have to let them vote without giving them proof they voted in any particular way. The voter is not considered trustworthy in the anti-coercion case. They are by definition acting under duress.

  11. Re:All security = an implementation. on Blockchains Are Not Safe For Voting, Concludes NAP Report (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    How do they know the commission is non-partisan? Where do they find people interested in government enough to care that voting is done properly, but don't care about the outcome? I think a culture of berating people who mentioned that they may be have bias or have the power to alter the vote so they don't mention it publicly is not non-partisan. It encourages repressed partisanship and grants power to people who don't care about the cultural norms.

    The advantage of multi-partisan committees is you know everyone's bias up front. Someone could lie about their affiliation, but being that they are approved by their party that really is playing the long con and arguably the parties' own fault. If the losing parties agrees that they lost it is a really good way to be certain the winner won. It's why in elections when one is losing conceding the seat, rather than tallying every vote is considered a classy thing to do.

    --
    "What makes a good man go neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?" --Zapp Brannigan

  12. I know Chinese, Russian and Indian companies all make CPUs if you trust those government's intelligence services more. And lots of FABs make licensed ARM chips.
    I assume you are running all OSS as any US made closed source software would probably be a bigger potential leak than the CPU.
    The question is: Who do you trust and what does the lack of trust cost ?

  13. Re:Yep, said it before and I'll say it again on Bernie Sanders Introduces 'Stop BEZOS' Bill To Tax Amazon For Underpaying Workers (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Is this an argument for or against SNAP, Section 8 housing, medicaid?
    There is really no way around this unless you happen to be a carpenter/chemist/doctor/farmer with universally recognized sovereignty. Otherwise you answer to someone, a "they" as it were. I'd argue you are fairly free as long as you have some ability to select who the "they" you have to deal with is, and you can negotiate on fairly even footing. If this law decreases the employability of people on these programs then it arguable makes them less free as their pool of "they" is reduced to only the government. A theoretical person on food stamps and medicaid who was working to afford rent in neighborhood of their choosing might find they don't have that option anymore, but it is always tough to determine secondary impacts. Also it seems like companies shouldn't be able to profit off the government like that. On the other other hand it may make jobs that no one would be willing to take/pay for economically viable.

  14. You are technically correct.

    Unfortunately people driven by racist arguments probably aren't going to be slowed by the difference between shades and color. Unless maybe they are color theorists in which case they probably at least suspected this already.

    Thinking about this makes it seem fairly obvious, melanin is a fairly dark pigment and thus different concentrations can really only change the shade.

  15. I think we have different definitions of modesty on Facebook, Twitter Execs Admit Failures, Warn of 'Overwhelming' Threat To Elections (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 1

    I read their points as:
    1) We are so important that Americans could not help but be influenced by our might.
    2) Now that we are actually working on the problem our superior intellect will solve the problem easily.
    2a) Subsidies and hand outs welcome, we are brilliant but underfunded.

  16. Re:Fastmail on Is Your Email Address Holding You Back? (wsj.com) · · Score: 1

    Mail aliasing is a really great way to filter out based on who you gave your email to.
    I don't know if you are familiar with "plus addressing", but it is available in postfix and let's you quickly create aliases on the fly. and you don't even have to use the plus sign if you think to many people are on to that with gmail offering it.
    http://www.postfix.org/postcon...

  17. Re:Fastmail on Is Your Email Address Holding You Back? (wsj.com) · · Score: 1

    Once you get your collection of tools installed and integrated in can run pretty smoothly with very little maintenance outside of upgrades. I run a debian instance on a VPS hosted by linode.
    My stack includes:
    Sogo, Dovecot, Postfix, apache, amavis, clamav, spamassassin, sieve, ldap, postgresql, gosa, tripwire, fail2ban, logcheck, tiger, certbot

    Some things I might do differently if I was starting now is:
    Owncloud for user data and contact management
    MariahDB for some the the tools that were more difficult to get to work with postgresql
    LDAP alternatives, it would be great if there was something that was a little easier to manage that let you have integrated passwd and ldap users.
    OpenID

    My previous setup used citadel which seems cool with lots of integrated services, but was very flakey for me though I used it for years.
    Before that I ran a similar stack but with squirrelmail instead of sogo for webmail, but debian dropped the package and citidel looked very compelling.

    I'm on again of again with XMPP and SIP services, but that may be beyound your current scope.

  18. Re:They're dangerous! on Strong Wind Topples a Wind Turbine in Japan (digitaltrends.com) · · Score: 1

    Yep, That's how industrial accidents are counted. OSHA and the other organizations involved take this very seriously. If an industry fails to properly mark and secure a location the company in specific and the industry in general is gong to get marks against which can lead to legal problems for them.
    It would be more difficult to actually do this at a nuclear plant as they are very secured. Most industrial sites, particularly ones with access to fissile materials, have pretty strong security. A portion of the reason for industrial security is to prevent accidents like this. It's why construction sites often have security to guard empty holes. They are not nearly as concerned with people stealing relatively cheap building materials as they are being held responsible for an expensive personal injury claim. Or more altruistically they are more concerned about the welfare of passerbys.
    This does highlight an actual potential weakness of Wind power. It requires a very distributed highly visible infrastructure which makes it harder to secure. I'm sure they will come up with a remediation strategy, Maybe just create a fear campaign about the dangers of climbing turbine towers. Sort of like they've done in the past for High Voltage lines and water towers. Maybe they will even use previous experience to get out in front of this before it becomes significant. People are already seem primed for "victim blaming" so that should help them out. Or maybe we'll get to a point where every wind turbine will have to be manned by an employee like a light house keeper who just sits there and tells people not to climb the tower.

  19. Makes Sense on Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO · · Score: 1

    Now both the company and the product are about removing the person at the helm.

  20. Re:Seems reasonable on Baseball Players Want Robots To Be Their Umps (technologyreview.com) · · Score: 1

    It doesn't need to be perfect. It should primarily be consistent. And we aren't talking about the players we are talking about the officiating. The fact that the strike zone is an imaginary box in the mind of the empire is possibly the most ridiculous thing in base ball. Imagine if basket ball did away with hoops and had referees that just told players if then made the basket or not. Or football did away with goal posts. Or back in baseball remove batter boxes or bases, I mean they umpire knows where it is. I think this is one of the things that cricket has on baseball it is a lot harder to debate when balls strike the wicket. Even stickball has a better system with a square painted behind the batter. I think it would be really cool if we had a way to project where the strike zone is in space in front of the batter.

  21. There are many reasons for it to exist, but I think a fundamental argument for it's existence is the developers wanted to make it. If a creator makes something because they want to that is mostly reason enough. Is the time they spend doing other activities also a waste of development time? If they read a good book or even a bad book are they sinning against society by not working on this theoretical ground breaking new piece of software you posit? Are all of use hanging out on slashdot wasting time that could be spent building something better? That base argument is a little puritanical.
    The reason it gets mention here is it is interesting to other people, maybe because it is useful to them, maybe because they want to tear it down and that creates drama which creates clicks.
    The reasoning that making something that is a copy of something is a waste of time we wouldn't have a lot of things. Linux, Dos, Windows, Yodels, Post cereal, Casio calculators, generic drugs, timex watches, flavour Aid, Dodge cars, GCC. Innovation usually starts as copying and then accentuate the features and improvements of the developer copying the original. It would make competition almost

  22. Public Ledger? on Venmo Refuses To Say Why Transactions Are Public By Default (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    There is something to be said for potential fraud prevention of having a public ledger.

    It probably can help keep them out of hot water from potential misuse.

    Admittedly if this was the interest, they probably would not make it optional.

  23. Re:square cash on Venmo Refuses To Say Why Transactions Are Public By Default (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    A silver standard does make a lot more sense than a gold standard. Gold is just too rare, possibly a key contributor to the great depression was the lack of money supply for the expanding economy after the switch to the gold standard removed silver money.

    The history of a ~25g silver trade coin is actually kind of interesting. From the German thaler thru the Spanish peso (piece of 8), the Japanese yen, Chinese yuan, to the US dollar. It is a really interesting common trade currency. The fact that the size of the current US dime, quarter and 50 cent piece are all based off of it is kind of cool and shows how much the early US was influenced by the dominance of Spanish culture. At today's silver price (499.94/kg), it would put the coin's value around US$12.50 which would be a useful day to day spendable denomination. Though maybe a little heavy for larger expenditures. So I'll stick with fiat currencies issued by stable governments.

  24. I think all compounds below a certain arbitrarily high molecular mass is a lot larger of a search space than you think. And if you want to try any possible experiment you really need one large machine more than a bunch of smaller machines however a matrix of smaller machine could fill in holes in the knowledge base for limited number of reactors. the number of possible reactions input combinations is 2^N where N is the number of known compounds, which will go up as the reactions uncover new compounds. It is estimated that we have already discovered 50 million different chemicals. So you are looking at a search space on the order of all possible 16-bit color 1920x1080 HD images, or brute forcing a 50 million bit crypto-key. and this is assuming all procedures are take equal amounts of all ingredients and mix them together at STP. You could greatly reduce the number of required input chemicals by only requiring each element to be represented once, but then you need to be able to conduct a lot more complicated procedures to synthesize intermediary chemicals.

    Also large molecules (like DNA, proteins and nanotubes) offer a lot of real world function and arbitrary complexity needed for more control over chemistry.

    This is a cool technology I just don't think it is realistically possible to cover "the entire possible set of reactions" the search space is just too big, and there will always be ways to take take what you've learned from the search to expand the search space.

  25. Re:Seems meaningless or foolish on Ireland Becomes World's First Country To Divest From Fossil Fuels (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    There are two ways that free market types (libertarians) would oppose government savings (particularly in the form of corporate investment):

    1) Cronyism (perceived or real) - though maybe not as obvious this is a government subsidy. By increasing demand for a certain companies stock they are increasing the share price of that stock artificially increasing it. Libertarian ideals may hold corporations as important, but they also hold separation of government and corporate interests important to prevent corruption, real or perceived. No government may be the ideal, but government that doesn't interfere with the economic balance point is more immediately important.

    2) Velocity of money - Maybe you remember this one from your macroeconomics class. I didn't think it would ever come up, but here we are. Any government savings reduces the amount of money in circulation. The government obviously needs to have some money on hand, but if it hoards it that is money that could be reducing taxes getting more money into the hands of the people to pump the economy. Now you might figure that the government might want to put the brakes on the economy and government savings is a way to do that. Modern economic philosophy is that it is better to start to pay down debts accrued during economic downturns, raise interest rates or reserve requirements to slow it down and encourage the economy to save. Savings by investment is not great for slowing down the economy as the money is actually still in circulation it just is forced thru a mandated inefficient path. Operating in a debt mode rather than a savings mode to prevent problem 1. Though again the libertarian ideal is government should have neither large debts or savings, but debt is less prone to cronyism as the government doesn't choose who benefits from their debt they can just take it on at the cheapest offered rate.

    *There is also I'm sure somewhere the belief that if the governments don't have savings they are more likely to topple into the government-less utopia of anarchist libertarian dreams, but that is unrealistic as if it got that bad I don't think there is a government that wouldn't just seize all assets on their way out creating just a property rights nightmare that would really disrupt any libertarian's day.