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User: frank_adrian314159

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  1. Re:One-sided education on Why America's Obsession With STEM Education Is Dangerous · · Score: 1

    Fundamentalism/conservatism is usually based on someone needing simple moralistic models upon which to base his or her life. Even in engineering there are places where people who never question beyond simple models of the world can still thrive. I've seen several conservative co-workers and even those here on Slashdot who value a simplistic economic model that discards costs of externalities. In fact, they value it so much they'll decry climate science models for having "too many parameters" that "need to be tweaked" and discounting the findings of that model, even though it is the best that modern science has and we gather more evidence each day that this model mirrors reality. I've also seen plenty of personal evidence that scientists and engineers can be narrowly rationalistic, as well, allowing plenty of room for religion. In fact, because engineering models are usually simplifications of the real world, people who like simple models are often drawn to it.

  2. Re:Way too many humanities majors on Why America's Obsession With STEM Education Is Dangerous · · Score: 1

    But yet their product sells and yours doesn't. Oh the irony. Or is it some other odd literary technique. I forget. In either case, carry on... I enjoy a good nerd fight.

  3. Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS on Sign Up At irs.gov Before Crooks Do It For You · · Score: 1

    Taxes are all about values - otherwise a simple VAT works (including VAT on financial transactions - not only because liquidity has value, but multiple trades also introduce overhead - and income transfers, because otherwise you're making valuations on types of exchanges). Since I'm sure Libertarians would hate this solution (because it would mean beaucoup taxes from financial institutions, less from almost everyone else), this example shows that trying to divorce the algorithm from values leads to stupid no matter how you slice it.

    The notion of taxes in itself is a value statement that says "We will make everyone who can afford it help to fund a government that, we believe, helps to preserve our society." Or, in slogan: Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

  4. Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS on Sign Up At irs.gov Before Crooks Do It For You · · Score: 1

    Since when did Libertarians worry about problems of the poor? Well, other than where they align with the problems of the wealthy (albeit to a ridiculously lesser degree), of course...

  5. Re:and secure passwords are disallowed on Sign Up At irs.gov Before Crooks Do It For You · · Score: 1

    I wish I had mod points.

    A better way to look at it is that big organizations become have worse IT because they contract work out, compounding their own unique badness with whatever unique badness the contractor has. The solution is as you say - have enough budget for in-house staff (contractors will almost always cost more) and develop your own systems. And, yes, I know this can lead to large projects taking a LOOOOOONNNNGGGGG time. The alternative is to have a contractor take a LOOOONNNGGGG time and be of shitty quality to boot.

  6. Re:Sign up? on Sign Up At irs.gov Before Crooks Do It For You · · Score: 1

    I couldn't find a valid user name. I tried every permutation with/without punctuation, numbers, upper-/lowercase, etc. each with at least 12 characters. Nothing took.

    I even looked through the Javascript looking for clues. I found a validation in one of the javascript file (the first one mentioned on the page) and then augmented/overridden in another (last one on the page). But beyond that, I did not care to waste time.

    You're right - basic programming incompetence.

  7. Re:Hooray!!! on Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Near Launching Presidential Bid · · Score: 1

    Why yes! Because the alternative of 4 years of Wall Street runamuck, destruction of anything that a normal person might fall back on in times of hardship, and foreign military involvements would be so much better. Get it straight - at least the D's don't have the clowns trying to run their circus.

  8. Re:Perhaps that's not what they meant to prove? on At the Track With Formula E, the First e-Racing Series · · Score: 2

    All sporting contests have arbitrary limits. Why ten pins in bowling instead of 9? Why is an American football field 100 yards long instead of 120? Soccer field sizes can vary, but within limits. In general, the rules make the sport. And rules change over time. Both football and baseball have updated rules to make the games more appealing to audiences and improve safety. F-1 and NASCAR have equipment limitations which change to keep up with technology. In this case, the rule you decry is only to add spectator involvement, something that is now possible with today's technology and seen as highly desirable by the folks fronting the money to promote this sport. Stop complaining about what makes a sport a sport, as opposed to a bunch of people getting together to do something random.

  9. Re: Not everyone on NSA: We Mulled Ending Phone Program Before Edward Snowden Leaks · · Score: 2

    But as long as they're under outside pressure to end the program, it becomes a matter of face to defend it.

    If governmental employees think that "saving face" is more important than doing the right thing, they shouldn't be governmental employees any more.

  10. Hooray!!! on Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Near Launching Presidential Bid · · Score: 4, Funny

    The R's are filling up the clown car again. Will THE Donald be next? Or will Sarah Palin try to climb in hatchback before he and Teddy Cruz can lock it? Maybe Jebediah will announce! Then the banksters can masturbate their piles of money over all of them and they will coast to victory!

  11. Re:*sigh* on Iowa's Governor Terry Branstad Thinks He Doesn't Use E-mail · · Score: 1

    Well, I agree, but we all know Lizzie will never get bankers' money and so it's H's turn. It will be an interesting election.

  12. Re: He's good. on Prison Inmate Emails His Own Release Instructions To the Prison · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... which will boost inflation and reduce the value of everyone's money.

    which will boost inflation and reduce the value of everyone's money so little that you wouldn't even notice. FTFY. Rich people might have enough money affected that it might be a minor inconvenience to them, which is why they, their news organizations, and their useful idiots in politics think this needs to be such a worry for all of us.

  13. Re:You are wrong on Prison Inmate Emails His Own Release Instructions To the Prison · · Score: 2

    Keep telling me how this is highly moral and peachy ;)

    Well, moral I don't know about, but it seems just peachy for the bankers, doesn't it?

  14. Re:*sigh* on Iowa's Governor Terry Branstad Thinks He Doesn't Use E-mail · · Score: 1

    If I were a betting man I would think Ted Cruz will be our next president.

    Yeah. Good thing you're not a betting man. If R's run Cruz, Hillary won't need to bring out her base - fear will do that for her.

    As someone to the left of the D's, I love it when the wingnuts get their man in - it means I don't have to waste my vote on some retarded D and can cast my vote with a clear conscience for the Socialist or WFP candidate.

  15. Re:LOL .... on US Air Force Overstepped In SpaceX Certification · · Score: 2

    To think any part of the government is efficient is laughable at best.pTo think that ANY LARGE ORGANIZATION is efficient is laughable at best. FTFY.

  16. Re:MY data in AMAZON's cloud ?? on Amazon Announces Unlimited Cloud Storage Plans · · Score: 1

    No, you make the move if:

    r_cl r_l and
    C_clo C_l

    Where r_l/r_cl = risk of catastrophic loss on local config/cloud config, similar for the costs.

    You can calculate the cost of keeping production and migration systems running for a migration and shakedown period, as well as the risk/cost benefit of continuing the migration or shutting it down at any point. As such, one can estimate these costs and there are some points in the mathematical domain where it makes sense to migrate.

    However, I believe that we would strenuously disagree about the risk of a cloud system vs. a locally controlled system. Here's one way to think about it, though...

    I'd think that the cost of a contract on your system (should anyone choose to make one thereupon) would be considerably short of $100K. On Amazon's entire system? Millions. Refute that notion of risk estimation.

  17. Re:Are you telling me...? on Millennial Tech Workers Losing Ground In US · · Score: 1

    It would have been much easier and cost effective to just take the first management position and work into retirement at the hospital or bank or retail corp or manufacturer or any of the other places I worked at in the past in IT.

    Ha... ha.... ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.... Oh excuse me. That was droll. As if any of the folks who moved up had any more job security than you. No, you don't get that sort of security until you hit the point where you can pre-negotiate a golden ticket on the way out. And that sure as hell isn't first-level management.

    I did as you proposed. I was an individual contributor who moved up into management and, honestly, only after I'd taken fifteen years moving up the IC ranks to the highest levels my company had and did some serious soul searching about my ability to do the job, having seen both good and bad managers in my career. The result? After fifteen years I still often got paid less than some of the higher-level technical folks I managed and the final layoff came regardless.

    In any case, promulgating the notion that being a manager somehow insulates you from idiots higher up the chain really isn't fair. In most orgs, first level managers are seen as about on par with managers of a local Pizza Hut and have similar job security. One who likes working with the technical folk and so stays at this level finds this out eventually. It's up or out even there. I wanted to stay out of the always political shark fight higher up, so I learned enough about it to play at my level, I enjoyed working in my various jobs with a lot of great technical folks, but I got laid off the same as the rest of my teams. In fact, in my last FTE position, I and another "senior" manager were shown the door while our teams stayed on.

    I'm now a contractor/consultant after my final layoff and, though I make a bit less than I did when I was an FTE and have even less job security, I choose how much I work and I work on things that are interesting to me with people I generally like. On the whole, it's a better life.

  18. Re:Yep on Millennial Tech Workers Losing Ground In US · · Score: 1

    The problem is that most organizations have a variety of tasks at different priorities, many of which do not fit into a arbitrarily defined sprint length. In reality, the wider the spread of job sizes and priority, the more overhead scheduling takes. You split loads into less varying sets and tune the scheduling process for the teams that gets each set for that. Basically, if you don't control the task variance, no scheduling algorithm, agile or otherwise, will help. If you have too many jobs, the same. But ultimately, it is a relatively simple management problem to solve. Trying to pay for it though? Well, good luck with finance...

  19. Re:And as an employer... on Millennial Tech Workers Losing Ground In US · · Score: 1

    And, frankly, if you didn't already know what these were, you haven't been paying attention. Which worries me. If smart people around here are too dumb to understand what this stuff is, who the hell is watching?

  20. Re: Government Contractors on GAO Denied Access To Webb Telescope Workers By Northrop Grumman · · Score: 1

    Funny, when I here government inspectors, I always think incompetence.

    Funny, when I think of government inspectors, I always think of corporate malfeasance. Bit maybe I've just been paying for late, over-budget governmental contracts for too long.

  21. Re:Just in tech? on Win Or Lose, Discrimination Suit Is Having an Effect On Silicon Valley · · Score: 1

    If family leave was decently supported in this country, we would not be having this problem.

  22. Re:And Northrop is right to do it. on GAO Denied Access To Webb Telescope Workers By Northrop Grumman · · Score: 1

    They have neither the time nor the intelligence to actually understand why decisions were made the way they were made.

    I've worked with auditors, both clueful and clueless, just like I've worked with similar people in many domains. The fact that you've only encountered poor auditors is more a reflection of the firm(s) your company is(are) hiring to do your auditing. The fact that you see no value in the process does not mean that others do not see value. Frankly, there are a lot of people (besides compliance auditors) that are quite happy that these laws are in place because we remember what brought them about in the first place. The fact that we're still getting security breaches out here means that we still can't trust companies to do the right thing.

    You want to change things? Fine. Make sure businesses are doing the right thing. Until then, we have laws, motherfucker.

  23. Re:I'm a hypocrite on GAO Denied Access To Webb Telescope Workers By Northrop Grumman · · Score: 1

    Well, yeah, but you won't get it if the folks who are paying for it think they're getting ripped off. Here's the thing, science or no...

    People who are paying for your project have a right to audit. Period. You want to sue them after the fact for the reason that their audit fucked things up and you should still get paid, fine. But fucking play by the rules.

    Frankly, half of the trouble around today is a bunch of rich folks/company that run around screaming "We don't have to obey the rules if we don't like them!" This two-years-old's style of argumentation may be amusing to watch, but in the end, its counterproductive.

  24. Re:Case of government being overzelous? on PayPal To Pay $7.7 Million For Sanctions Violations · · Score: 1

    Gosh. They knew about the law beforehand and ignored it. Why should the little darlings be fined? After all, if you were a kid caught with an ounce of coke, you'd be doing time and that's right! But charge a bidness a few bucks for breaking the law? Unconceivable!

  25. Re:Ah, the BBC. on Jeremy Clarkson Dismissed From Top Gear · · Score: 2

    Because learning from your mistakes is such a bad thing. Idiot.