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User: Penguinisto

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Comments · 5,947

  1. Re:At one of the poles? on The Brainteaser Elon Musk Asks New SpaceX Engineers · · Score: 1

    The distances are irrelevant truth be told, as long as the first and last legs of the trip are equal.

  2. Re:North Pole on The Brainteaser Elon Musk Asks New SpaceX Engineers · · Score: 1

    Ice is a legitimate part of the a surface of the Earth and the math works out.

    How is that failure?

  3. Re:On the surface of the earth on The Brainteaser Elon Musk Asks New SpaceX Engineers · · Score: 2

    To be fair, Ice *is* a surface.

  4. Re:North Pole on The Brainteaser Elon Musk Asks New SpaceX Engineers · · Score: 3, Informative

    The answer is indeed the North Pole, and that brain teaser has been around for what, eons now?

    I think I'd quickly answer it, then ask him one that I made up and tested long before that final interview.

  5. Re:The real question on Grand Theft Auto V Keeps Raking In Money · · Score: 2

    What does Richard Stallman think about GTA 5?

    As soon as he finishes the mod that turns all the prostitutes and cops with effigies of Bill Gates, we'll find out. ;)

  6. Re:Or they're just proxying their connections on Canadian Piracy Rates Plummet As Industry Points To New Copyright Notice System · · Score: 1

    Dude - I thought that was the primary reason for going to a LAN party back in the day...

  7. Re:Or they're just proxying their connections on Canadian Piracy Rates Plummet As Industry Points To New Copyright Notice System · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You do know the internet started as a government funded initiative right?

    If anything, the powerful interests are losing control... not gaining it.

    I disagree, and one need look no further than Facebook. Most of the political distraction/messaging being passed around positively reeks of being astroturfed by competing mega-interests. Also, consider that the proletariat is too easily distracted, ignorant, and tribal, so getting them to ask the wrong questions means you never have to worry about the answers.

    The control is still there and stronger than ever - just that they're now using new methods to do it.

  8. Re:Or they're just proxying their connections on Canadian Piracy Rates Plummet As Industry Points To New Copyright Notice System · · Score: 1

    Agreed.

    I also find it interesting that they discount the growth of Pandora, Spotify, etc... and the fact that you can more easily pass around music via a digital version of sneakernet these days (long ago it was blank cassettes and hanging out at a buddy's house. Now it's "what's your dropbox addy? I can snag 'em that way." Then again, I know for fact that for quite awhile the smarter kids --and not just a few adults-- were passing around USB hard drives / geek-sticks full of music to each other as well...)

  9. Re:Minimum Wage on Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour · · Score: 1

    If the payroll increases 30% while sales remain flat, either someone is saving money(hard to do for minimum wagers) or you have inflation.

    This is of course assuming that debt isn't being paid off at a slightly faster rate, savings aren't being accumulated in a rainy-day fund, college savings account or 401k, etc. Oh, and the businesses that raise costs in order to compensate for higher wages will probably hoover up the rest.

    End state? little-to-no improvement, and everything remains more or less status quo... just with a bit of inflation kicked-in.

  10. Re:Minimum Wage on Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour · · Score: 1

    I kept the email servers running all year last year. Tell me how much I increased the company's revenue by doing that. Please show your work.

    I suspect the revenue savings/increase is the difference between keeping you employed there and, say, renting Office 360 (and yes, they'll happily provide enterprise-scale mail for a corporation, for a price.) No real work required to come to that conclusion.

  11. Re:ENOUGH with the politics! on Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour · · Score: 1

    (And it's goddamn expensive just to live in California).

    ...and that's part of your problem, right there... Cali ain't cheap to live in.

    Also, consider that the jobs you've listed (geek shop technician, web dev, small business IT, etc) are low-paying almost by design.

    A bit of advice, and I promise it's being delivered kindly: Don't rely on your degree to get you anywhere. Instead, find out which jobs pay worth a damn, then get the skills and experience needed to pursue those positions.

  12. Re:"Tech Support"? on Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour · · Score: 1

    Question: *when* and *where* was this?

    I mean, my very first junior sysadmin job paid around $15/hr - but that was in Arkansas, during the early 1990's. The former was legendary for low cost-of-living/low-wages, and the latter accounts for inflation betwixt then and now.

    Pretty sure that nowadays, in any decently tech-savvy city, you're not going to find a job in tech that pays less than $15/hr... well, unless you're an intern who got a shit assignment.

  13. Re:None. on Ask Slashdot: What Tech Skills Do HS Students Need To Know Now? · · Score: 1

    Kids certainly won't read them, and most wouldn't know what to do with them... c'mon, we're talking teenagers here.

  14. Re:None. on Ask Slashdot: What Tech Skills Do HS Students Need To Know Now? · · Score: 1

    Things have been changing for awhile: when I was in high school, we wrote code in C and FORTRAN, and even dabbled a bit with the old Hollerith code (think "punchcards"). On the plus side, we had Apple ][ e's and a very early version of (I think?) Word Perfect... it's was *all* CLI though, so it's not like we had much in the way of graphics.

  15. Re:None. on Ask Slashdot: What Tech Skills Do HS Students Need To Know Now? · · Score: 2

    Agreed.

    I would much prefer that a few long-discarded courses come back from the dead. Logic and Rhetoric stand out primarily among them; the former to help create better devs and sysadmins, the latter to help them better communicate needs and ideas to the PHB crowd. A little bit of philosophy couldn't hurt either, since anything to force kids to develop and use their own sense of creativity is rather vital IMHO.

  16. Re:Is it on the main download page? on Trojanized, Info-Stealing PuTTY Version Lurking Online · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...what sibling said. Anything can be trojanized, and it's turtles all the way down if you're proposing that by simply using a different application (or suite/kernel/VM/whatever thereof).

    In all seriousness, PuTTY is a quick and dirty way of getting a working SSH shell on a Windows box. For the greybeards (like myself), it's also a quick and kick-ass means of plugging an old laptop into a serial port on the back of a Sun/HPUX/IBM-PPC box.

    It's a self-contained executable that you can keep on a geek stick. No dependencies, no lengthy installation bullshit like Cygwin, no muss, no fuss. It just works.

    In fact, I still keep a copy on my phone just in case, in spite of the fact that I typically use a MacBook Pro nowadays (OSX has a working *nix shell that I can open Terminal with and SSH from all day long, tab the hell out of, have customized nine ways from Sunday for local Git coloring, pre-hooks, branch awareness, etc). That said, I use PuTTY when I find myself stuck with a 'doze box (usually when having to show a 'doze user something on a *nix box from his machine), or when I find myself in a datacenter with only a shitty old laptop and no other useful means of getting some RS-232 love (because let's face it, HyperTerminal sucks donkey balls).

  17. Re:not the real question on Chris Roberts Is the Least Important Part of the Airplane Hacking Story · · Score: 3, Informative

    This, right here.

    Seriously - entertainment and flight controls on subnets that are reachable from each other? What the hell was the engineering team drinking/snorting/smoking/shooting that day?

    I'm thinking that due to the lack of an emergency TCTO* , and lack of any corroborating evidence (seriously, you'd think a pilot would notify *somebody* if his airplane did something way out of the ordinary like that, even if to report bad wind turbulence/shear/whatever as a warning to ATC and other pilots in the same path)?

    Yeah... not so sure the FBI's assertion holds that much water. Awaiting more evidence and/or corroboration on that one.

    * Time Compliance Technical Order - at least that's what the USAF used to call it. Dunno what they call it nowadays in the civilian world.

  18. Re:Well that was an incoherent metaphor on Book Review: The Terrorists of Iraq · · Score: 4, Informative

    Of course, to be fair it likely didn't help that the current administration decided to yank nearly all US troops out of the country before the job was done, either.

    No matter your feelings or opinions on how the war began or was handled during the Bush administration, you cannot deny that finishing it properly should have been a top priority no matter who started it. Consider, if the allies had withdrawn from Germany that soon after WWII, the Nazis (or a derivative group thereof) would have arisen once more, and Germany would likely still be a mess today. Instead, post-WWII the allies (for better or worse) kept occupation for years on end, slowly passing control, then autonomy, then self-defense, etc to the post-war German government ( well, governments, as we did have two of them for the longest time thanks to the USSR.)

    Why this wasn't done properly in Iraq is a serious head-scratcher, especially given that Iraq was indeed an artificial country (thanks, England!), and doubly so because of the regional culture plus pre-existing secular tensions. It would have been a long, expensive road, but it was certainly at least doable.

    Incidentally, it probably didn't help that Syria went straight to hell in recent years, either - or that Iran has been working like hell behind the scenes to keep things unstable. But to be honest, those only serve as stronger arguments for keeping treasure and troops committed towards reconstruction in Iraq (and maybe a bit of that towards keeping Iran's little activities clamped down as hard as possible).

    Long story short: anyone who tries to place the blame for the mess on any one person or political party is an idiot. There's plenty of blame to go around on this one...

  19. Re:No self driving trains? on Feds Order Amtrak To Turn On System That Would've Prevented Crash · · Score: 1

    Wait - you assume that government contract payouts are the "full price", when in reality they are often inflated no matter how you try to construct the bidding process (...because Uncle Sugar can pay it, that's why).

  20. Re:No self driving trains? on Feds Order Amtrak To Turn On System That Would've Prevented Crash · · Score: 1

    You're confusing something: there is a difference between poverty due to bad circumstance (or due to poor choices), and poverty due to higher artificial barriers raised by government edict (even if unintentional.)

  21. Re:No self driving trains? on Feds Order Amtrak To Turn On System That Would've Prevented Crash · · Score: 1

    Transportation costs are typically less then 1% of finished consumer goods.

    Err, wrong metric. Waaay wrong metric.

    gas + car payment + mandatory insurance + maintenance (e.g. tires, oil change, brakes, rare-but-occasional repairs) is a *lot* more than 1% of a typical lower-class person's budget. Hell, I own my vehicles, make a six-figure salary, and *my* monthly transportation costs are still over 1% of my post-tax income.

    Even if the impoverished dude walked to the train station and took that to work, he'd still shell out over $60/mo. for a MAX pass here in Portland, and he would have to take home well over $6k/mo post-tax (~$90k/yr or so) before transportation represented only 1% of his budget.

  22. Re:No self driving trains? on Feds Order Amtrak To Turn On System That Would've Prevented Crash · · Score: 1

    True today. Reflecting the better mileage cars get. Gas taxes should go up.

    Problem is, you'd end up screwing over the poor - that is, all the people who cannot afford a Prius or similar hybrid/electric vehicle. It would also jack up the price of nearly anything that is transported over the roads... again hitting the poor the hardest of all.

  23. Re:No self driving trains? on Feds Order Amtrak To Turn On System That Would've Prevented Crash · · Score: 1

    It's only a fair comparison if Uber were paying the full unsubsidized cost of roads. Fuel taxes and registration fees pay only a portion of road costs, and there are hidden subsidies in the oil that fuels most cars,

    Good point, but there is a corner case: transit buses wouldn't pay those costs in your algorithm either, and yet they operate at a loss as well.

    Overall though, Uber's drivers and their subsequent tax-paying activity do bear the costs, even if the company itself does not.

  24. Re:Disbar. on Prenda's Old Copyright Trolls Are Suing People Again · · Score: 1

    One would hope this would be the case, but the BSA has been operating under similar conditions for decades now...

    Well, similar-enough, anyway. The BSA would use the same mechanisms - demand that a victim company submit to an expensive audit/"true-up" session, and would then start litigation if ignored or refused.

  25. Re:No self driving trains? on Feds Order Amtrak To Turn On System That Would've Prevented Crash · · Score: 1