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User: benjamindees

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  1. We can admit that the articles were pretty much always crap. The difference is that, back in the day, someone in the comments section would have pointed out that removing the headphone jack is about ApplePay competing with Square and, in the future, other payment competitors like Bitcoin. If it weren't for a lot of your supposedly highly-intelligent peers deciding to jump into yet another walled garden, maybe /. wouldn't have changed quite as much over the years.

  2. Re:Small Government Mandate on Help a Journalist With An NFC Chip Implant Violate His Own Privacy and Security · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Actually, Rand was almost exactly in the middle of the generation that paid for Social Security twice. The first benefits began in 1940. The first generation of retirees were paid directly out of the treasury. The actual SS taxes that Rand paid went into the "trust fund," which was later loaned out to other government agencies, to pay for war mostly.

  3. Re:Not Evolution on NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin of Life · · Score: 1
  4. Re:Bitocin? on Researchers Find Problems With Rules of Bitcoin · · Score: 1

    Eliminates parasites.

  5. Re:What is the advantage of a Bitcoin bank? on Mt. Gox Shuts Down: Collapse Should Come As No Surprise · · Score: 1

    MtGox was not really a bank. It was a trading platform. Keeping Bitcoins on deposit there would allow you to place limit orders.

  6. Re:Can someone explain this theft? on Mt. Gox Shuts Down: Collapse Should Come As No Surprise · · Score: 1

    With emphasis on the "unbelievable," as in "probably complete bullshit." MtGox has been under investigation for a year now, selectively limiting accounts and withdrawals. Karpeles has said himself that the Bitcoins aren't lost, but "temporarily unavailable." There is likely more going on behind the scenes.

  7. Organizational Breakdown on Your 60-Hour Work Week Is Not a Badge of Honor · · Score: 1

    I have worked 60+ hour weeks only one time in my life. Before I joined this company, two of the three employees separately contacted me to warn that the boss was, in their words, "crazy." Unfortunately, I didn't believe them. I hadn't had any experience with crazy bosses up until that point in my career. The only other employee quit around the same time.

    I lasted four months. The pay was good. And the job would not have been that difficult. It didn't even require more people. But the organization had definitely completely broken down. Everyone did five different jobs, everything from electronics repair to customer service to data processing to moving equipment. This was by design, apparently, in order to make the company more "agile."

    I spent a lot of time automating simple data processing tasks, and working on improving physical processes that took a lot of time for no real benefit. But I couldn't make improvements quickly enough. Almost the entire time, the "crazy" boss was literally looking over my shoulder, telling me how to do every little thing in whatever particular way he thought was best. Even though I had been a Unix consultant for nearly a decade, he took it as his personal mission to teach me the wonders of Excel as a universal programming tool. Ugh.

    I was actually relieved to eventually be fired, after working two weeks straight, including travel and weekends and 10-11 hour days, simply for taking a day off. One of the other employees left at the same time. The last thing I did was to fix an absolutely crippling issue that I had noticed on the first day on the job, but never had the time to properly investigate. They had re-programmed a bunch of wireless routers with the same MAC address. Brilliant.

    Last I heard, they had hired a dozen people shortly after I left. Probably all Excel experts.

  8. It's too late. It was a political decision, and one that that had to be made well in advance. The decision was made a long time ago. Plans were put in place that can't be undone. Industries were bailed-out that shouldn't have been bailed-out. Things were blown up that can't be un-blown-up. Recession and renewables were chosen over nuclear. There is an agenda. Renewables fit it. Nuclear doesn't. The choice was made to push ahead with wind and photovoltaics for those who can afford it, hoping it can scale up quickly enough, leaving the masses in squalor for the time being. Perhaps longer. It's going to be incredibly disruptive, in the US especially. But there's not much that can be done at this point. Nuclear is no longer an option. The only remaining option is the choice between putting the rest of the carbon in the air, risking the environment, or stunting the economy for a period of some decades. I imagine it will come down to a compromise, some mixture of the two that leads to the same death toll either way. There is a popular delusion that subsidized healthcare can mitigate this. But it's pretty much a zero-sum game. Only hard choices remain.

  9. Re:Past use by date? on Jon 'Maddog' Hall On Project Cauã: a Server In Every Highrise · · Score: 1

    I had the same idea 8 years ago. I was going to put a server in every office building, and offer internet access and tech support to small businesses. It was past its prime then too.

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

    The free market won't solve anything because there is no free market.

  11. Re:Probably Won't Help Much on MIT's Charm School For Geeks Turns 20 · · Score: 1

    Mappers and packers.

  12. Re:What a waste of time on MIT's Charm School For Geeks Turns 20 · · Score: 1

    This is pretty much what I clicked on this story in order to say. Charm school should instead concentrate on how to interact with psychopaths. It is a much more general skillset than simply knowing which utensil to put in which hand at dinner.

  13. Re:If he is surprised about cutting food, he is du on MIT's Charm School For Geeks Turns 20 · · Score: 2

    Perhaps he is just unconcerned with the minutia involved in fields in which he is not an expert, kind of like the loose syntax displayed in your post (extraneous comma, maybe, s/that/who/, mixed construction.) No one thinks that you're "dumb" because of this.

    Maybe he's overweight, and would rather consume his food cold in order to burn more calories.

    Maybe he has some degree of Autism, which hinders his ability to distinguish between the taste of cold steak and warm steak.

    It is possible to ride your bike to work without being Lance Armstrong. In an ideal world, no one would have to choose between being admitted to MIT and knowing exactly how to cut a steak at a formal dinner. But this ain't it.

  14. Re:Salesman Inventors and Snowed Investors on Crowd Funding For Crank Physics · · Score: 1

    The investors aren't "snowed". They just happen to be operating in a system which is also generally believe to be unconstrained by the 0th/1st/2nd Laws of Thermodynamics. Some of them have realized this lately, and are attempting to backpedal themselves out of it.

  15. City-State on NYPD To Identify 'Deranged' Gunmen Through Internet Chatter · · Score: 1

    It occurs to me that, with the imminent implosion of the Federal Reserve system, it makes sense for New York to expand into new ways of exerting political influence on the rest of the countryside.

    No doubt these "deranged gunmen" will be just happen to be more children of tax-avoiding executives or financial-fraud-tracking scientists.

  16. Is Obesity Contagious? on Specific Gut Bacteria May Account For Much Obesity · · Score: 1

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BRFSS_obesity_1985-2006.gif

    Look at how it takes hold in Mississippi, then spreads out from there to "infect" other states.

  17. Re:Instead of getting upset... on Outrage At Microsoft Offshoring Tax In the UK, Google Caught Avoiding US Taxes · · Score: 1

    So, stop paying taxes, then. Surely you can come up with a more productive way of rectifying this imbalance than by acting like a crab in a bucket.

  18. Re:compete instead of complain on Outrage At Microsoft Offshoring Tax In the UK, Google Caught Avoiding US Taxes · · Score: 3

    Didn't you hear? Keeping your own money is stealing now.

  19. Yawn on Nationwide Google Fiber Deployment Would Cost $140 Billion · · Score: 2

    I'm probably the only person on /. who thinks that the internet is kind of boring lately, and it would be better to focus on getting everyone access to affordable broadband instead of really-really-ridiculously-fast internet for a handful of geeks.

  20. Re:Except Komatsu is a Japanese company. on In the World of Big Stuff, the US Still Rules · · Score: 2

    Others have better managers *of skilled workers* because they tend to pay decent wages and take a hands-off approach. But America has better managers of crap workers, because they tend to hire too many and utilize a lot of redundancies.

    I've been saying for a while now that we should close the trade deficit by exporting American middle-managers to China.

  21. Netflix on Senate Committee Approves Stricter Email Privacy · · Score: 2

    the bill also reduces the protections of the Video Privacy Protection Act in order to allow Netflix et al to sell your viewing history.

    Just who does Netflix think they are, anyways? The internet is not, like, a big truck that they can just use to spy on everyone.

  22. "rogue" biotechnology on Cambridge University To Open "Terminator Center" To Study Threat From AI · · Score: 2

    It sounds more like the purpose of this center is to downplay the threat of normal, every-day biotechnology by ignoring it.

  23. Re:Just another way to bash someone's success on Could Testing Block Psychopaths From Senior Management? · · Score: 1

    Actually one of the main properties of the welfare state a la Europe is that is not sociopathic,

    In the short term.

  24. Re:Algae needs light on Google's Server Cooling Plan Produces 4ft Alligator · · Score: 1

    I'm curious what kind of fish they have that they think will actually remove algae. Fish with little diapers maybe.

  25. Re:No it isn't on Wireless Power Over Distance: Just a Parlor Trick? · · Score: 1

    Absolute power. Not percentage of transmitted power.