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User: greg1104

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  1. Re:Next the gov't decides YOU have too much money. on 'Paying Taxes Is a Lot Better Than Phony Corporate Courage, Apple' (theintercept.com) · · Score: 2

    This is not a new topic. For a bite sized intro, try starting with a look at how transfer pricing has been increasingly regulated over the years.

  2. Re:Next the gov't decides YOU have too much money. on 'Paying Taxes Is a Lot Better Than Phony Corporate Courage, Apple' (theintercept.com) · · Score: 2, Informative

    If Apple paid their taxes the IRS wouldn't have to shake me down for cash.

  3. Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop on KDE Turns 19 · · Score: 1

    As someone who lived through the early years of Linux (I started using It back around 1998)

    Those two facts are mutually exclusive. In 1998 you were already standing on someone's lawn.

  4. Re: "Is this what we wanted?" on Apple Music and the Terrible Return of DRM · · Score: 1

    You can't fully describe the longevity of a piece of music until it stops being played by any significant number of people. The Beatles records from 1965 have lasted fifty years and counting. Someone talking about 40 year old records might have bought Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" in 1975. At some future point, when people have stopped listening to that music in large numbers, only then can we really compare them to something like Mozart.

    But if you listening to music whose relevancy has already passed by in a year or three, that's by definition disposable jingle music. And to many people that also makes it garbage. It's rather ridiculous to compare that to any music that's already lasted decades. A century from now, maybe the Beatles will be a forgotten little band, while people still listen to Mozart. But you'd have to be completely deaf to pop culture and popular musical history to claim bands like the Beatles or Floyd are listened to today only because people have happy memories from when they first heard them.

  5. Re:A giant pile of crap on Once a Forgotten Child, OpenSSL's Future Now Looks Bright · · Score: 1

    No one who looked at the code has ever considered the programmers behind it "gods". The PostgreSQL developers for example have been complaining about it for years, including a major look at alternatives in 2011 because we hated the code's API and its license so much. However, that crappy API serves as a form of lock-in, making it harder to migrate to other libraries than it should be.

  6. Re:Poker is a lot more complex... on Humans Dominating Poker Super Computer · · Score: 2

    Card counting is a betting strategy that's mainly about when to play or not. Computing odds is not card counting, even though that sometimes involves counting the number of cards that satisfy some condition.

  7. Re:systemd sux on Debian 8 Jessie Released · · Score: 1

    So set up a distro maintained by straight white males, for straight white males.

    Done!.

  8. Re: Count cards on In New AI Benchmark, Computer Takes On Four Top Professional Poker Players · · Score: 2

    That site doesn't understand what card counting is. When you count cards, it changes how much you bet on a hand you haven't seen yet. You increase your bet (or enter the game altogether) only when the player odds are higher than normal.

    Counting "outs", the number of cards in the desk that will improve your hand, is not what's called card counting in casino games.

  9. Re:AI has great chances on In New AI Benchmark, Computer Takes On Four Top Professional Poker Players · · Score: 1

    People getting emotional isn't always an advantage for the computer; it's part of the complexity of playing against them. Some people will rampage where their aggressiveness ramps up after losing a hand due to luck (a bad beat). Some will bet less aggressively because they're stinging from the loss and worried about their stake. You can't just model the human opponent's patterns and expect them to be consistent.

  10. Re:You cannot do that on Futures Trader Arrested For Causing 2010 'Flash Crash' · · Score: 1

    RCG would offer him say 100:1 margin, so he'd make positions as large as $100 million, and if at any point his unrealized P&L grew to close to his $1 million they would call his position and he'd be busted out.

    I'd like to live in this wonderful fantasy land where all positions can be closed out at any time with a controlled loss. I'm sure that would work out great even in the most crazy and obviously theoretical example, like maybe a flash crash where prices might even change faster than a complicated position valuation method could track.

    The last time I got a margin call was after a gap up in an equities short position, so no opportunity to trade a controlled close at all. But it was fine--my bet shorting SCOX was guaranteed money, only question was how long until the stock went to $0.

  11. Re:So? on Futures Trader Arrested For Causing 2010 'Flash Crash' · · Score: 1

    And what if it turns out that the financial falsification was a rumor set off by a market manipulator to force the OP to execute his trade at an unfavorable price.

    At a big firm, then they'd take that front running profit and put part of the proceeds toward lobbyists, campaign contributions, and the salaries of the former SEC officials who now work for them (after a few years of doing them favors). And then they'd budget for the hookers and blow. Sheesh, do you not know how Wall Street works at all?

  12. Re:wikipedia is self-correcting on How Many Hoaxes Are On Wikipedia? No One Knows · · Score: 1

    There's a sampling bias issue if you fairly compare the site to a print encyclopedia. Encyclopedia editors have a job where they write about everything. On average, they'll have little personal connection to the articles they write. That's even part of the job description--the less biased you are, the more your writing will be judged as positive by that industry.

    The universe of Wikipedia editors is self-selected. The people going to the trouble of editing.things is strongly correlated with people who have a personal interest in that subject. That's practically the recipe for getting more biased opinions than neutral ones.

  13. Re:...Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007... on How Many Hoaxes Are On Wikipedia? No One Knows · · Score: 1

    If you can break something down into simple elements and that works out, the thing wasn't really complex after all. Claiming otherwise is fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of complexity.

  14. Re:...Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007... on How Many Hoaxes Are On Wikipedia? No One Knows · · Score: 1

    Every time I try to make major improvements to articles on something I'm expert in, those edits are reverted as being original work. If it's something I actually care about, what I have to do is create a blog entry that covers the topic. Then I put the text I originally wanted into Wikipedia, citing myself. That makes it all fine.

    For bonus fun, after going through this you then change the original blog entry to say something different.

  15. Re:math on Cracking Passwords With Statistics · · Score: 1

    You seem to think the word "like" means "mathematically equivalent". It doesn't. Please move along to some other pedantry trolling.

  16. Re:For work I use really bad passwords on Cracking Passwords With Statistics · · Score: 1

    There's only a million words in English and only a million six digit numbers, so the combination of real word + number has only a trillion possibilities.

    This is why I use 7 numbers in my password, Jenny8675309.

  17. Re:Linux support? on Intel Launches SSD 750 Series Consumer NVMe PCI Express SSD At Under $1 Per GiB · · Score: 1

    You're assuming one slot, but they actually sell multiple slot monstrosities that are aggregated together as a single drive. Here's a similar one to what I tested benchmarked at 5.8GB/s on reads.

  18. Re:Nice try on Sony Buys, Shuts Down OnLive · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This was not like Skype, where it was actually successful and the engineers got screwed anyway - that's quite rare.

    That a startup succeeds is quite rare. Just considering those cases though, I don't think ones where the employees also get screwed are rare at all. The groundwork for that is usually in place from day 1, with how shares in the company are split into classes.

    For me it's been 100%: all three of the successful startups I've been involved with, all purchased by another company, did that transaction in a way that valued the common stock in employee options I owned at nothing. All the books were cooked until the company founders and, more importantly, the funding investors were paid all of the proceeds. And just to rub some extra salt in the wound there, the second also removed my name from the patent they were granted near the end of the process, to grease concerns that I'd expect more from the sale than nothing and could cause trouble with its licensing. (I signed those rights away in my employee contract, and all I really wanted was the little patent plaque)

    The third laid me off, forced me to exercise my options to keep them, then valued the common stock at zero during the sale. That one's bonus fuck used some going out of business loopholes to cancel my COBRA policy with zero advance notice the week after the sale, as if they'd gone bankrupt and couldn't afford to administer the policy anymore. The company was sold for millions to Cisco; the engineers who built its technology lost their health insurance.

    I've come to see these anecdotes as a pattern by design. Startups are not structured to make the employees happy if the company succeeds. They're setup so the majority share holder(s) get what they want. And there's a lot of rich assholes who will screw over anyone they can in that chain.

  19. Re:A great deal of your life? on Ask Slashdot: Living Without Social Media In 2015? · · Score: 1

    LinkedIn used to have InMaps, which drew graphs of how all your networks were connected. It used some graph theory to cluster the people who knew each other together.

    At a conference I got a printout of that drawing on large format paper. It not only clustered every school and social scene I've participated in, it even figured out who introduced me to the new ones when that happened. They stuck out as the middle point between the clusters.

    Right now Facebook keeps guessing where I work, and it's cycling through each company I have a number of friends employed at. it's impossible for Facebook to figure it out, but the guesses are very good. It's still not as scary as when I look at a picture and it guesses the identity of everyone who isn't tagged in the picture.

  20. Re:My problem with SSDs on Intel Launches SSD 750 Series Consumer NVMe PCI Express SSD At Under $1 Per GiB · · Score: 3, Informative

    Handling power off issues is a different problem. What the GP was referring to is how drives will fail spectacularly in the face of anything seen as corruption. You can see some examples in some longevity failure tests.

    The problem in those cases was wearout, but the way that happens is scary. Let's say there's a bug in the firmware that causes a write to fail for no good reason. It's quite likely that the drive will kick into a mode where it doesn't trust itself anymore. And the way that will play out on most SSDs, the drive will shut itself down at the firmware level, so it isn't even picked up by the BIOS on boot anymore. What people would expect is getting read-only behavior there; instead they will find everything gone. And unlike most catastrophic spinning drive failures, you could easily hit the same bug that wipes out your data on both halves of a RAID-1 pair at the same time.

  21. Re:Linux support? on Intel Launches SSD 750 Series Consumer NVMe PCI Express SSD At Under $1 Per GiB · · Score: 3, Informative

    Those improvements are not necessary to reach the full speed of this drive, at 440K IOPS. In my own tests I've even seen a FusionIO drive hit 8GB/s under the old RHEL6 2.6.32 kernel. This new drive is at an amazing price/performance spot, but it's not exploring the upper limits of where the Linux kernel is shooting at.

  22. Re: How many read/writes? on Intel Launches SSD 750 Series Consumer NVMe PCI Express SSD At Under $1 Per GiB · · Score: 1

    A few of my Mitsui Gold and Kodak Gold (similar formulation) burns from 1995 and 1996 went bad in the last few years. Expensive media from back then (when it all was expensive), written to at low speed, did seem to last better than the mass-produced media of later years. I also have two cheap Ritek disks burned closer to 2006 that lasted less than 5 years.

  23. Re:Complete fail on Apple Extends Its Trade-In Program · · Score: 1

    Don't be silly, Apple doesn't have piles of cash in Cupertino. They move the money to other countries where they can avoid US taxation.

  24. Re:That's a really good riddle on Amazon Requires Non-Compete Agreements.. For Warehouse Workers · · Score: 1

    Just send him to Libertarian Island with Peter Thiel, and then they can all be killed by pirates once they're outside of US jurisdiction.

  25. Re:That's a really good riddle on Amazon Requires Non-Compete Agreements.. For Warehouse Workers · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can anyone identify a product or service that Amazon doesn't sell or provide?

    Union representation.