Slashdot Mirror


User: bill_mcgonigle

bill_mcgonigle's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
18,097
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 18,097

  1. Re:Pfsense on Ask Slashdot: Which Router Firmware For Bandwidth Management? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In your haste to get FP, you missed the requirements in TFS.

    I use pfSense extensively, but its bandwidth controls are not easy to use, and nobody would recommend deploying it on ARM in 2014.

  2. Re:Nonsense on Ask Slashdot: System Administrator Vs Change Advisory Board · · Score: 1

    and with the greater long term job security that working as part of a larger company provides

    Aye, there's the rub. It works out until it doesn't. Wouldn't this guy be ripped if the put up with two years of this crap to just get outsourced anyway?

    Because that's what they're saying here. They don't trust him to do his job. Maybe that's fair, maybe it's not, but it's something a professional in his line of work can handle and they're saying "no". They wouldn't ask a surgeon to file paperwork on each cut he intended to make, because they feel the surgeon is competent to make the best decisions in the time alotted. Him, clearly not (I'm assuming this is standard work, not 10-9's / life safety).

    So, they're going to fire this guy anyway at some point. He might as well find employment with an outsourcing company that gets paid by the value and minimizes their time expense, which it sounds like the environment he's more comfortable being in.

    You can live to work or work to live - it's not worth being in a sucky job when there are so many opportunities to get or create a different means of employment.

  3. Re:Procedural Rules? on Lavabit Loses Contempt Appeal · · Score: 1

    Procedural rules trump right and wrong.

    What's that meme going around say? Something like, "Everything Hitler did was legal - everything Schindler did was illegal."

    aside: you. You who is just jumping up and down to invoke Godwin's Law. Wiki it.
     

  4. Re:Are you kidding on Study Finds US Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy · · Score: 1

    I have no interests in controlling women's reproductive lives, but as a Catholic I believe life begins at conception, and abortion is murder.

    I don't disagree with you, but what matters in public policy is actions, not sentiment.

    The operative question is whether you believe society is better off by imprisoning mothers who get abortions.

    It's possible to both believe it's murder and to believe that imprisonment/prosecution is not the correct response. Don't be fooled into the "insult/vengeance" paradigm that we're told by civil religions to be essential. I'm pretty sure you'll find the opposite recommendations in the Gospels.

    And, BTW, this is why "the issue" cannot be resolved by our current system of governance - it's located directly at the insult/vengeance nexus. Until we can get past legislating revenge the "two sides" will never find any common ground.

  5. Baloney on Google Looked Into Space Elevator, Hoverboards, and Teleportation · · Score: 1

    I cannot believe the summary. Thousands of Slashdotters here already knew that elevator cables need to be super strong and that carbon nanotubes are the only calculated material that can do it and that spinning long nanotubes is a technological problem.

    The Google research team did not discover these things - they're smart guys, they already knew this.

    So, venturing further into the story will be a waste of time. If Googlers did spend time on space elevators, then they probably did learn some new things. But they may well be keeping that knowledge in the "deep freeze"r for when they can make some money at it.

  6. Re:Polution tax on Pollution In China Could Be Driving Freak Weather In US · · Score: 1

    Hey! That's a good idea. Put a 500% tariff on everything that's not made here. Who care who makes it?

    Brazil does this. Since Nikes cost $300 a pair, the local manufacturers can get away with charging $165 for a pair of sneakers. That's just under a week's median wages.

    All these policies do is keep the people poor. It's a non-zero-sum game with losses on all sides.

  7. Re:Get this over with on Mt. Gox Ordered Into Liquidation · · Score: 2

    Money laundering, theft, gross negligence. I'm sure there's plenty more.

    Let's assume the premise. You want the US to now arrest people for crimes committed in Japan?

    Team America World Police was satire.

  8. Re:The Canadian Exodus.... on Retired SCOTUS Justice Wants To 'Fix' the Second Amendment · · Score: 5, Informative

    Everyone should be armed.

    This is how Switzerland does it. They haven't been in a foreign war in two hundred years. Even Hitler decided not to try it.

    Their crime rate is very low and they actually have a civil defense plan that doesn't involve people hiding in closets and hoping somebody shows up to save them. Plus, obviously they don't need to incur all the costs of foreign wars, so they can run data centers, banking platforms, and ski resorts instead.

  9. Re:Get rid of income Tax on Intuit, Maker of Turbotax, Lobbies Against Simplified Tax Filings · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you want to talk overall economic health, taxation does not really impact it since all those tax dollars just go strait back into the economy anyway.

    Please remove this falsehood from your economic system. If you take productive money and piss it away on boondoggle projects instead of useful purposes then it's a complete loss for the economy. The entire premise of capitalism is that money that gets invested into useful purposes (production equipment, invention, entropy-reducing services) multiplies the value of that money over time. All spending is not created equal (so far from it)! Hanging fiber optics on poles and getting drunk are not equally beneficial!

    it tends to skew who pays and who does not

    Everybody pays. The producers add their tax burden to the cost of goods. The study from Harvard econ. sets the price of goods as 22% higher (average) than they would otherwise be without the income tax. When that single mother is buying a $3 loaf of bread for her kids' school lunch, more than fifty cents of that is going straight to pay the income taxes of the people in the supply chain. That's why it's the most regressive tax possible. People can only pretend that it's progressive if they completely ignore second order effects and beyond.

  10. Re:Author is stupid? on This 1981 BYTE Magazine Cover Explains Why We're So Bad At Tech Predictions · · Score: 1

    I'm thinking the author has zero clue as to what he is talking about in tech

    It said right in the summary that he wrote this for TIME magazine. Don't pretend like you didn't get fair warning!

  11. Re:And they've already stopped on OpenBSD Team Cleaning Up OpenSSL · · Score: 4, Interesting

    $30,949 is how much the OpenBSD Foundation received in donations in 2013. That has to get fixed as their expenses were $54,914 and only a one-time transfer from an old account covered the deficit.

    The community that depends on OpenSSH, OpenNTPD and the like needs to figure out how to support these projects.

    Personally I'd like to see the Foundation offer targeted donations to specific projects with a percentage (~20% perhaps) going into the general operations fund. I bet there are a bunch of people who would throw a hundred bucks at OpenSSH but would be concerned that a general donation would go to some odd thing Theo is doing (whether that be fair or not).

    And if "Fixing OpenSSL" were one of the donation options, then hold on to your hats - I think we're all in agreement on this. We do know that the folks currently working on the projects are paid by others but if the Foundation can get enough money to offset expenses then it could actually do some development work and possibly finally take care of some sorely-neglected tasks on a few of these codebases.

  12. Re:And they've already stopped on Mozilla Appoints Former Marketing Head Interim CEO · · Score: 0

    They cancelled this policy [nytimes.com] almost immediately after it was brought to light.

    Here's the thing: the data mining apparatus and amount of data entry required to get to this point must be enormous. Finding all of the information required to get to the point of issuing seizures of refunds would require complete integration of all SSI payment history, all tax payment history, family histories, movement pattern tracking, etc.

    There might even be a tie in to NSA/"not-TIA" to enable this, since the scope is so large. They probably started putting out bids for the work shortly after the law changed in 2008 and have only recently yielded results.

    It's not going to be turned off just like that.

  13. Re:And they've already stopped on IRS Can Now Seize Your Tax Refund To Pay a Relative's Debt · · Score: 1

    They cancelled this policy [nytimes.com] almost immediately after it was brought to light.

    Here's the thing: the data mining apparatus and amount of data entry required to get to this point must be enormous. Finding all of the information required to get to the point of issuing seizures of refunds would require complete integration of all SSI payment history, all tax payment history, family histories, movement pattern tracking, etc.

    There might even be a tie in to NSA/"not-TIA" to enable this, since the scope is so large. They probably started putting out bids for the work shortly after the law changed in 2008 and have only recently yielded results.

    It's not going to be turned off just like that.

  14. Re:Light Pollution on First Glow-In-the-Dark Road Debuts In Netherlands · · Score: 1

    this adds to light pollution

    Assuming street lights are removed, does the upward light from these strips exceed the reflected light from the streetlights?

  15. Re:Useless on First Glow-In-the-Dark Road Debuts In Netherlands · · Score: 1

    your car is not oriented so as to illuminate it.

    That's a good point - I tend to rely on my navigation device to get some forewarning of the curve and slope of the road ahead just because on a dark and winding road there's no way to see very far ahead.

    Then again, glowing roads won't work to entirely replace this when the road winds around a hill or mountain. But more passive safety devices are still a good idea if they can help a little bit. It seems like rumble strips - they don't do anything for most people most of the time, but they do a great job for a few people every once in a while.

  16. Re:Hero ? on GM Names Names, Suspends Two Engineers Over Ignition-Switch Safety · · Score: 2

    a whole lot of work had to be done to revise the tooling

    Ah, so we need to name the machinists too! Charge the whole lot with a conspiracy to embarrass management!

    Somehow Harry Tuttle is probably involved.

  17. Re:It's time we own up to this one on NSA Allegedly Exploited Heartbleed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This was a failure in the Open Source process.

    Indeed. People have been saying for years that the OpenSSL code leaves much to be desired but nobody dares fix it because it might break something (needed: comprehensive unit tests).

    There's been a bug filed for years saying that the code won't build with the system malloc, which in turn prevents code analysis tools from finding use-after-free conditions. The need here is less clear - leadership of the project has not made such a thing a priority. It's not clear that funding was the sole gating factor - commit by commit the code stopped working with the system malloc and nobody knew or cared.

    Sure, a pile of money would help pick up the pieces, but lack of testing, continuous integration, blame culture, etc. might well have prevented it in the first place.

    We still have sites like Sourceforge that are solving 1997 problems, like offering download space and mailing lists when what we need today is to be able to have continuous integration systems, the ability to deploy a vm with a complex project already configured and running for somebody to hack on, etc.

  18. Re:It's not a license to speed on Can You Buy a License To Speed In California? · · Score: 1

    This creates the appearance that, if you do not buy the membership, you'll be stopped and shown absolutely no mercy

    we give these people a monopoly on violence and expect what, exactly, Andy Taylor and Barney Fife?

  19. Re:Not so fast, cowboy ... on Can the ObamaCare Enrollment Numbers Be Believed? · · Score: 1

    but the failure of challenges to overturn them highly implies constitutionality.

    Naw, fewer than 1% of challenges are overturned on Constitutional grounds and many fewer laws than that are challenged. There's no chance 99.9+% of laws passed are in compliance with Madison's Constitution - it's just that the battle is highly asymmetrical in resource allocation.

  20. Re:Not so fast, cowboy ... on Can the ObamaCare Enrollment Numbers Be Believed? · · Score: 4, Informative

    There was a legal challenge to the ACA already, and it was defeated in court. In other words: your views on the constitutionality of the ACA aren't shared by the current Supreme Court, and therefore they are pretty much irrelevant

    You seem to not understand how the Supreme Court works. That's OK, it's arcane.

    The particular ACA challenge you refer to was over the Constitutionality of the ACA as a fine. The Court said, "it's not a fine, it's a tax, and FedGov can levy taxes." The challenge was defeated.

    Now other lawyers are back before the Court arguing that taxes must originate in the House, per the Constitution, while ACA is a Senate bill (with gut-and-replace not being a valid technique to avoid germaneness via-a-vis the Origination Clause). The Court will rule on that narrow point and then the next challenge will be heard.

    SCOTUS will never come out and say, "All aspects of ACA are Constitutional".

  21. Re:meh on Double Take: Condoleezza Rice As Dropbox's Newest Board Member · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That being said, I assumed dropbox already was infiltrated by the NSA.

    And now it's confirmed. Freaking astute move by the board members with gag orders and National Security Letters if you ask me.

  22. Re:congrats on A 2560x1440 VR Headset That's Mobile · · Score: 1

    Heck, I'm considering buying one of these 'VR' headsets for use for business purposes. If you've ever taken an 8-hour bus or train ride and tried to use a small laptop screen the whole way, it can be frustrating.

    This thing has twice as many eye views as I need (future patent: slightly cross your eyes and interleave double resolution by shifting each pixel off by one for each eye), but the resolution is good enough.

    My real preference would be for a bluetooth keyboard and to run my desktop off a cell phone form factor. Good thing the buses and trains have AC mains now.

  23. Re:The Re-Hate Campaign on Mozilla CEO Firestorm Likely Violated California Law · · Score: 1

    I haven't heard any other excuses from anybody

    We've had a few threads going here about the principled objection to State-regulated marriage.. Here's one. If you want to search we also had a discussion about the polyamorous folks who will probably never have their marriages permitted.

    As far as I've been able to find, Eich has never stated why he was opposed, even now. Which is fine, that's his business.

    By the sheer odds, it's more likely that he's a bible-thumper than a strategically-donating uber-libertarian trying to build coalitions to dismantle State management of loving relationships. It's also worth noting that by the odds he didn't invent JavaScript too, so who knows.

    It does sound like by California law, you can't offer a CEO the job of housekeeper and then claim to have not fired him (apologies in advance for veering back on topic).

  24. Re:No on Some Mozilla Employees Demand New CEO Step Down · · Score: 1

    Which is, in actuality, entirely compatible with Prop 8, which had nothing to do with the act of getting married but with whether the state would recognize that marriage and consequently grant special privileges because of it (such as beneficial tax rates).

    But that's actually a well-discussed libertarian strategy - the gay rights folks are excellent political activists and if they were denied marriage flatly by the State then they may see their way clear to end State-regulated marriage. The Poly activists are expecially interested in this approach because they think they are far too small a minority to ever have their rights respected.

    I'm neither agreeing with it nor disagreeing with it, nor suggesting we have any idea what Eich was thinking.

  25. Re:RHEL / CentOS / Fedora updates now available on OpenSSL Bug Allows Attackers To Read Memory In 64k Chunks · · Score: 1

    yum clean metadata

    if you're not seeing the updates.