Slashdot Mirror


User: Penguinisto

Penguinisto's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
5,947
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 5,947

  1. Re: But what if the moon blows up without warning on StarTalk TV Show With Neil DeGrasse Tyson Starts Monday · · Score: 1

    ...and you'll see the story duplicated at least three times over the next 6 months...

  2. Re:This story too vague on FBI Accuses Researcher of Hacking Plane, Seizes Equipment · · Score: 1

    If they had actual evidence as they claimed, he'd be in jail right now and facing arraignment.

    Dear reader: let that one sink in for a moment...

  3. Re:YES the must be dicks on FBI Accuses Researcher of Hacking Plane, Seizes Equipment · · Score: 1

    He said "should I..." not "I am...", or even "I will..."

    QED: There is no criminal negligence, since he's not done anything or even threatened to (save for sufficiently large and fear-fueled values of "should")

  4. Re:I thought we were trying to end sexism? on LAUSD OKs Girls-Only STEM School, Plans Boys-Only English Language Arts School · · Score: 2, Insightful

    By activist you mean corporate lobbyists. They are the ones pushing this computer programming b.s.

    A combination of both, methinks. However, you have to look beyond who is doing it, and instead ask why they're doing it.

    The activists do it because it shoves their agendae along. They get to put their name in the papers, and more importantly, they get to feel good about themselves while they do it.

    The (tech) corporate interests on the other hand, they do it for two reasons: First, they think that by doing so, they get a bigger labor market down the road - thus driving down costs. Second, they get to pretend that they're doing something 'important', while at the same time buying themselves a big, fat rhetorical shield against accusations of $evil from the SJW crowd.

    Meanwhile, the rest of us wind up with girls being shoved into learning something they may well turn out hating, and boys sitting in an "language arts" class thinking "WTF?" Both groups will have people in them that end up loving what they've discovered, but I suspect that the majority will have wasted their time.

    But you know, both CEO and activist alike in LA can bask in the applause and adulation. Of course, for the LA County taxpayers, well, they're used to the PMITA treatment they get from their local government (to the point of sheer masochism, even) so maybe they won't feel this one as much...

  5. Re:They're called trees. on Breakthrough In Artificial Photosynthesis Captures CO2 In Acetate · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Trees. Quit cutting them down. Plant more. Problem solved.

    Strangely enough, at least in North America, we've planted more trees than we've cut down, and have done so for around what, 100 years now? ( By way of example, here in Oregon, loggers are required by law to plant anywhere from 3-5new trees** for each one they cut down, and they have to survive for at least a year after planting.)

    Mind you, this doesn't speak for the third world (where firewood for heat and cooking is an actual thing, farming is a growth industry, not to mention the exotic hardwood cutting), and definitely doesn't speak for Europe and Asia (where the former has few forests left, and the latter is largely ignored and therefore unregulated for the most part).

    ** the number depends on soil quality, slope, and other factors, but it's at least 3.

  6. Re:Wow. Just wow. on LA Schools Seeking Refund Over Botched iPad Plan · · Score: 1

    Nonononono!

    Sing it with me, campers: KHAN-bahn...

  7. Re:Deflection on LA Schools Seeking Refund Over Botched iPad Plan · · Score: 2

    Desperation, methinks. There's been one high-level, err, 'resignation' from this already (because Pearson basically screwed the pooch and yet no one can peg them for blame thanks to the contract), and lots of other executives are nervously eying the newspapers and school board minutes of late...

  8. Re: Deflection on LA Schools Seeking Refund Over Botched iPad Plan · · Score: 1

    Have you ever worked in a school system? "Now" usually means any point in time between the very nanosecond this word hits your retina, up to 18 months later.

  9. Re:Socialism! on Seattle CEO Cuts $1 Million Salary To $70K, Raises Employee Salaries · · Score: 1

    Aside from the obvious ones (defense and gov't contractors), *most* businesses were promoting it.

    Oh, and it just so happens that even today, private companies like SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, and etc are still doing exactly that (well, they're shooting for Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, etc etc...)

  10. Re:Long View on Seattle CEO Cuts $1 Million Salary To $70K, Raises Employee Salaries · · Score: 1

    Man, I wish like hell that I had mod points today.

    Your point has somewhat close parallels outside of the hypothetical. I'll try to illustrate it:

    Down here in Portland, I've lost count of the number of recently-laid-off (or simply looking) employees of Intel or Nike who have spent 15-20 years there, building up a massive salary for doing basically junior-level sysadmin stuff. When they angle for the DevOps or sysadmin jobs outside of their comfort zone, jobs that that pay commensurate to experience but demand the experience and/or creativity? It goes badly. More often than not they flop spectacularly in the interview, having calcified their skillset to a specific set of procedures on specific hardware/software combos.

    In other words, there are people who made huge salaries in huge companies for expressing junior-level work but possessing world-class office politics.

    In TFA's case, it's even worse, because the poor saps don't even get the benefit of having to develop the political skills.

    All that said, on the plus side (for the company), the employees are going to damned sure be loyal, because they won't have a choice... as you've aptly pointed out, where the hell else are they going to go that pays that well for so little? (well, inflation could explode or something, but still...)

  11. Re:Decent on Seattle CEO Cuts $1 Million Salary To $70K, Raises Employee Salaries · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Well, that depends... has he also cut any bonuses he may get? How much does he already have stashed away? Is the company public, or going public? If so, how much stock does he own? Is he contemplating an entry into politics and is doing it to put a nice coat of polish on his populism creds?

    By the way: For the longest time, Steve Jobs had an annual salary of $1.00 as CEO of Apple. Of course, his stock holdings in the company gave him more money annually than the GDP of many small countries, but...

    Anyrate, while this is admirable and such, the sceptic in me wants to know more abut how he can afford to do that (because $70k/yr in Seattle ain't really all that much money), and why.

  12. Re:*ahem* on Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Found In Windows HTTP Stack · · Score: 0

    Nope, but you're comparing apples to electric chairs, and here's why:

    "kHTTPd handles only static (file based) web-pages, and passes all requests for non-static information to a regular userspace-webserver such as Apache or Zeus."

    ...from the kHTTPd site page, right up front.

    IIRC, The 'doze version tries to handle and serve *all* requests, for *anything* httpd-related (because, as an above poster had aptly mentioned, Windows IPC basically blows goats.)

  13. Re:What? Why discriminate? on 'We the People' Petition To Revoke Scientology's Tax Exempt Status · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I was agreeing with the thread until this point.

    Here's the problem with your statement:

    "prime real estate" got that way over a very long time. In the downtown parts of pretty much every major city, those churches were built long ago, when the land was essentially considered unsuitable for anything else (for commerce, farming, industry etc). Many of these places have, over time, become part church, part museum, part heritage - for both its congregation *and* the city it sits in.

    Bringing down crushing property taxes on such places would eventually force any religion out of a downtown area, as it almost does for private residents now. It's bad enough that most downtown areas have pushed out anything except for ultra-wealthy corporate and private interests... if it weren't for tax exemption, the museums, churches, libraries, and most other public edifices would have been driven out of the city long ago. Now you want to start eroding that? Sure, you may say it would stop there, but fact is, it won't... someone else will find another reason to start relocating museums out to the 'burbs in order to free up uber-profitable land, then someone else entirely will start whining that big-assed libraries full of paper books on "prime real estate" are totally unnecessary in this digital age, so maybe we should just, you know...

    For every "palatial manor" your proposal would dismantle, at least 2-3 small rectory houses, convents/monasteries, strip-mall-churches, *schools*, etc would be forced on the auction block, or funds would be diverted from actual charitable efforts just to pay the property tax bill (money is fungible that way). Note that I haven't even come near bringing up all the religious-run hospitals in the nation and the impact on them (there's a whole lot more than you think - enough that their absence would cripple healthcare rather harshly nation-wide.)

    TL;DR - This thing is a bit more complex than you might realize, given the blanket statement. Find a better way

  14. Re:title is wrong on Chess Grandmaster Used iPhone To Cheat During Tournament · · Score: 1

    How much more proof do they need? They found an iPhone with a chess computer running under his account hidden in the bathroom he ran to after every move. Even in a court of law, which this isn't, that's a pretty solid case.

    ...just thinking; if he held out for a few more months, he could've bought that iWatch thingy and saved all the trips to the crapper...

    (now how well he could've hidden that, who knows?)

  15. Re:Line Count is Misleading on MIT's Picture Language Lets Computers Recognize Faces Through Inference · · Score: 1

    Pretty much.

    I immediately thought of Quake1/2 as a parallel... the executable itself is relatively tiny (1-2MB or so, IIRC?), but the libraries it calls weigh in at hundreds of MB at least. Add in maps, image files, sound files, and meshes on top of that, and suddenly you have something that weighed in at the size of a nearly-full burned CD.

  16. Re:We have already figured most of this out. on Can Civilization Reboot Without Fossil Fuels? · · Score: 4, Informative

    This, right here.

    Asphalt gets worn down by rain and sunlight (yes, UV radiation.) Plants and ice force cracks into it. temperatures make it shrink and grow, causing mini tidal actions of a sort that eventually breaks it down. Landslides, erosion, and slow-motion soil subsidence will cover or tear off bits of it in all but the most level of terrains. Trees and wind will cover it in dirt until plants take root in that dirt and do the rest. Out here in the Pacific Northwest, moss and lichens will, if not treated, cover the road in a carpet and allow seeds to take root in it.

    You'd be amazed how fast a modern-built road goes to hell. I think only the Romans were able to build a road that lasted for any real length of time with little-to-no maintenance, but only because they really over-engineered the things (on the plus side, even today a couple of millennia later some stretches are still used and routinely ignored maintenance-wise).

    Put it this way: The Chinese have a saying that a new road is good for ten years, but bad for the next ten thousand. ;)

  17. Re:False Dichotomy on Can Civilization Reboot Without Fossil Fuels? · · Score: 1

    I disagree on the whole AGW thing, but I do agree with your main premise. A rebuilding civilization actually has a lot of options that a fresh-from-zero one does not. First off, it can scavenge vast amounts of already-processed petroleum in order to make do until they can find a substitute. Seriously, the stuff is all around us, from axle grease and lubricants found sitting in every vehicle on the planet (including junkyards), to existing-but-unused reservoirs sitting around idle in abandoned refineries and petroleum distribution companies scattered throughout.

    The other big advantage is that a lot of the basic science and engineering would still exist in some for or other, so long as people are still literate enough to read what's been written down. We already have an example of this... the so-called 'Dark Ages'. Rome (okay, Constantinople) was pretty much powerless outside of its ever-shrinking sphere of influence, yet churches and monasteries throughout Europe kept the classical sciences and knowledge alive, one quill pen at a time (which also explains why even many modern sciences such as biology still use vestiges of Latin throughout their discipline, even today.)

    As long as there is a sufficiently large human population to keep literacy and at least some basic engineering and chemistry alive, I sincerely doubt that we would reach a stage where civilization would rebuild and no one knew WTF petroleum was. Sure it'd be tough to get in some places, but in others it would likely still be relatively easy to extract (though likely not as widely used; for example plastics and gasoline would likely be a no-go, but oil/lubricants certainly would be doable.)

  18. Re:Taxes in NY on New York State Spent Millions On Program For Startups That Created 76 Jobs · · Score: 1

    Sadly, I wish I had mod points for that one, in spite of my usual policy of not upmodding ACs when I do have said points.

    To the point: Between housing costs, transportation (not to mention the murder of fuel and/or commute times/costs), *and* the high taxes that NY usually carries?

    No effing thank you. I'll move to Silly Valley first, and only then if death were the only other option.

  19. Re:Too early for criticism. on New York State Spent Millions On Program For Startups That Created 76 Jobs · · Score: 1

    I don't know about the sample period, but the program itself has had to have been running for well over a year or two by now, considering that the advertisements for it on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc have been running for at least that long.

  20. Re:Payola on Reason: How To Break the Internet (in a Bad Way) · · Score: 1

    Hate to say it, but Payola is still alive and well.

    This time, instead of money, the record corporations 'donate' free trips, prizes, cash awards to be given as prizes, etc etc - the radio station in turn gives this stuff away in contests to listeners.

  21. Re:So - the fact that others are doing it makes it on Google, Apple and Microsoft Squirm As Global Tax Schemes Scrutinized · · Score: 1

    It's very simple - they can just look up the sales tax rate for where they're shipping to. Just f*cking google for it.

    You're not done yet. You now get to keep track of it all, make sure you have receipts for all of the payments to all relevant taxing authorities, be sure all the applications for state/county/local tax ID numbers are filled out and kept track of, keep track of *all* tax law and rate changes, everywhere (else you get slapped with a fine or worse from some offended principality), file *all* tax forms for all affected principalities either monthly, quarterly or annually (depending), some locales may require additional licensing and/or registration... ... all for a two-person mom-and-pop Internet shop.

    Yeah - your assertion is, for lack of a more-descriptive term, bullshit.

    Have you actually ever run a business?

  22. Re:So - the fact that others are doing it makes it on Google, Apple and Microsoft Squirm As Global Tax Schemes Scrutinized · · Score: 1

    You left out the possibility that the million-dollar earner may have bills totaling a lot more than $500k, which means your taxes would leave him or her in the hole.

    Example? Musicians. They may make a million bucks a year (most don't), but their travel/tour expenses plus studio time, plus whatever they owe to the folks who sold/rented them all the gear (buses, instruments, etc), plus marketing (agents, etc)... may well leave them with far less than $9K a year after you get done taxing them at 50%.

    Are you still certain that you want that 50% tax based on just gross income?

  23. Re:wildfires? on Obama Says Climate Change Is Harming Americans' Health · · Score: 1

    If climate change is causing damage, it will also require spending public money to fix and adapt, and probably more because it means there's less time to take the proper action. By that argument, the burden of evidence is on those who advocate nothing is happening.

    By that logic, I hereby demand that the Blorks from the stealth planet Snicklefritz are invading human minds from their transmission stations in the Oort Cloud. Only $really_exensive_solution will solve the problem, and only I and my select group of cohorts can implement it.

    You have 6 months to provide evidence that I am wrong, or pay up.

  24. Re:OH NO! on Obama Says Climate Change Is Harming Americans' Health · · Score: 1

    I purpose a new EULA for all newborns. They must acknowledge that being born will be hazardous to their health. I just haven't worked out the recourse if they refuse to acknowledge it. I'm pretty sure they can't go back where they came from.

    ...and yet most men spend their entire adult lives trying to do just that.

    (wait for it...)

  25. Re:wildfires? on Obama Says Climate Change Is Harming Americans' Health · · Score: 4, Informative

    Tree rings, for starters. There are species of trees that have lived that long, at least one of which happens to be in California (look up the Bristlecone Pine - there are two verified trees that have lived well beyond 5,000 years and counting). It wouldn't be too much to take a core sample and do some checking. Relatively thin rings mean drought years, fat ones mean wet years.