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User: Weezul

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  1. No child left behind on Why Do So Many College Science Majors Drop Out? · · Score: 2

    I'm friends with various academics who feel students could all be coddled into success. They are wrong.

    I've taught courses four different countries and groked the educational system in another two. There is only one educational strategy that works present opportunities and expect results. It's fine if people fail, just give them a chance to try again later.

    In Europe & elsewhere, there isn't this bullshit idea that students are 'education consumers', no, students are the product, society is the consumer. We present the educational opportunities for free and the students attempt them.

    You know what? American medical schools determine who become a doctor during their admissions phase. European medical school determine that by failing people out.

  2. I donno on Analyzing StackOverflow Users' Programming Language Leanings · · Score: 0

    I've always heard that Mac OS X suck even worse than windows for remote exploits, but they only get exploited by hackers knowledgeable hackers, not viruses andy to script kiddies.

    I'll happily testify to Mac OS X's kernel being epically inferior to Linux. For example, the whole damn machine hangs when it finds one bad sector, and said bad sector will likely corrupt data, even when the drives SMART status ain't anywhere near failing. wtf?!?

  3. Re:PHP on Analyzing StackOverflow Users' Programming Language Leanings · · Score: 0

    I've used PHP for one job. Good god I hated that language! So epically poorly designed. Err, poorly not designed. Form vars dumped in the the global namespace? It takes seriously talented stupidity to improve upon SQL injection. LOL

    I've used one language professionally that I hated more though, namely Visual Basic. It's pretty much exactly PHP with some forethought put into language design, except said forethought was done by an idiot, making it actually worse than PHP's "add random keyword" model.

    I think VB and PHP copied each other's major mistakes fair well, including the form vars stupidity.

  4. Re:LOL !!! on Dropbox Pursues Business Accounts, But Falls Short On Privacy Laws · · Score: 1

    Umm, they could definitely be ordered to roll out a fake update using a national security letter.

    It sounds like Spideroak uses better cryptography than Wuala thought, that's nice. Are you sure the deduplication is only among your own files? Why would anyone bother implementing deduplication for individuals? Or do you mean it does some version packing? If that's true, that's noticeably better than Wuala though. Thanks!

    Btw, there is a pure open source system called Tahoe-LAFS that's kinda overkill for most people, but does basically everything you'd want.

  5. Re:LOL !!! on Dropbox Pursues Business Accounts, But Falls Short On Privacy Laws · · Score: 1

    I hadn't heard about SpiderOak. They're equivalent to Wuala though, reasonable sounding, but : (a) you should avoid closed source crypto software for anything important, even if you otherwise use a closed source OS like Windows or Mac OS X, and (b) their de-duplication trick might weaken their encryption and lets users verify content exists on your cloud drive, which might leave individuals open to lawsuits from the MafIAA.

    SpiderOak looks vulnerable to U.S. NSLs and maybe European subpoenas. Wuala is Swiss. SpiderOak's distributed nature might prevent them from complying silently with either however. I donno.

  6. LOL !!! on Dropbox Pursues Business Accounts, But Falls Short On Privacy Laws · · Score: 1

    There are no cloud storage solutions that provide any measurable degree of security, except perhaps Wuala but even that's funky.

  7. O RLY? on Fee Increase Attempt Inspires 'Dump Your Bank Day' · · Score: 1

    I've used a credit union account in another state for the past 5 years. I should find some local place yeah, but I never got off my lazy ass, and my other one works fine.

  8. Re:Never had a problem with these... on Tough Tests Flunk Good Programming Job Candidates · · Score: 1

    I've always thought the syntax questions were the dumbest. You just know you'll end up working with idiots when they start asking syntax questions. lol

  9. Re:Java? on Is Perl Better Than a Randomly Generated Programming Language? · · Score: 1

    Aren't the languages designed for parallel processing usually functional? Erlang, Concurrent ML, etc. Haskell has lovely research around parallelization. All the math languages like Mathematica, Octave, etc., well kinda.

    Functional languages are reasonable to parallelize because the compiler derives what the 'state' should be anyways.

  10. Re:Java? on Is Perl Better Than a Randomly Generated Programming Language? · · Score: 1

    I've never considered Java any more readable than C++ honestly, reading both consist mostly of a series of realizations that "Ahh, this object is yet another badly hacked together attempt to provide lambda abstraction of an algorithm".

    Java offers less chance for inheritance related errors given the no multiple inheritance thing, which probably helps if you're reading for correctness, not simply understanding. You should not be using any inheritance if you want correct code of course, but hey less is better.

    I'd agree that C++ has been a step backwards in portability from straight C though.

  11. thanks! on Is Perl Better Than a Randomly Generated Programming Language? · · Score: 1

    Ain't surprising that Perl and Python win for string stuff, but :

    C beat both Java and C++. C has no string type! LOL

  12. Re:Java? on Is Perl Better Than a Randomly Generated Programming Language? · · Score: 1

    D huh? I've never looked into it.

    I prefer functional languages myself.

  13. Re:Next question on Is Perl Better Than a Randomly Generated Programming Language? · · Score: 1

    I know C++ fairly well, trust me, it's the most pointlessly complex language on the planet. And the boilerplate goes on forever.

    C++ might have developed sanely if they'd introduced it's major features in reverse order, i.e. lambdas way back in 1983, templates a bit later, and class methods only during the last decade. As it stands, there are basically two types of C++ code : code that badly emulates functional programming styles, and code consisting entirely of calls to simple wrappers around extern "C" functions.

  14. Java? on Is Perl Better Than a Randomly Generated Programming Language? · · Score: 1

    How is Java better than C++?

  15. Next question on Is Perl Better Than a Randomly Generated Programming Language? · · Score: 1

    How does C++ fair? LOL

  16. PHP on Gnarly Programming Challenges Help Recruit Coders · · Score: 2

    Facebook builds their software using PHP which ties VB for being the language of course for when you need as many cheap dumb programmers as possible.

    You don't think they simply needed some new blood?

  17. PHP on Gnarly Programming Challenges Help Recruit Coders · · Score: 1, Insightful

    We're talking about a company who writes all their code in PHP. Nuff said.

  18. Re:Open Source *nix Notification Specification on OS X Notifier App Growl Goes Closed Source · · Score: 1

    I doubt it, just start distributing an OpenGrowl program based upon Growl 1.2.2, but switch the license to GPL.

    A better questions is : Is there any benefit for NotifyOSD and Growl in homogenizing their backend interfaces?

  19. silly on Is Apple Pushing Away Professionals? · · Score: 1

    What dumb ass "creative professional" does all their work on a laptop screen? You want either a desktop machine or a macbook plugged into a desktop monitor and keyboard.

    Apple computers are slightly overpriced, but they're built better, and the offer a nicer OS. Apple monitors otoh are insanely overpriced and offer nothing beyond what's available from other manufacturers, well slightly reduced cable clutter. Apple only sells monitors because some morons pay through the nose so their monitor's case matches their computer's case.

  20. Re:...What was he doing in Cambodia? on Swedish Court Finalizes Jail Sentence For Pirate Bay Co-Founder · · Score: 2

    Umm, they frequently break copyright law!

  21. Re:...What was he doing in Cambodia? on Swedish Court Finalizes Jail Sentence For Pirate Bay Co-Founder · · Score: 1

    I donno why he moved there, bust most like he's missing because the MafiAA simply put a hit out on him. It's nice they waited till he moved outside civilized legal systems.

  22. Yes, exactly. on The "Scientization" of Yucca Mountain · · Score: 1

    The author is simply an idiot. It might be true the DoE should've considered multiple sites though.

  23. Re:I guess reselling TouchPads might appeal some.. on HP Touch Pad Still Popular ... With HP Employees · · Score: 1

    There is a fairly good analysis posted over in comments over on metafilter.

    Basically, HP has always sold these blood-of-the-innocent printers for cultists who worship Cthulhu or whatever, but like all printer companies, they made the cartridges hard to refill. As you can imagine, that's a much larger problem for a cultist who needs the sacrifice dying right there.

    HP has tried to profit form this for years by sending employees out as 'sacrificial printing geniuses', but they needed an awful lot of employees doing this, because so many rituals must occur on the same nights.

    Now, you've got almost all HP employees in one Great Old One's cult or another. So obviously the HP employees rushed out to buy the first tablet that offered blood-of-the-innocent based display technology.

  24. Re:Worse, maybe it's FBI entrapment on Man Charged in Model Airplane Plot To Bomb Pentagon · · Score: 1

    You make an interesting point. I had assumed this guys was targeted for entrapment based upon his 'speech'. Yet, maybe the original informant was running around talking shit looking for possible loons, meaning he was targeted based upon thought crimes. Freaky.

    I'm quite impressed with 'freedoms' on the continent, but Britain has serious issues with libel laws run amuck, kinda a judicial moral panic. America's 'freedom of speech' protections have created a much more appropriately strict evidentiary standard for libel cases.

    I'd imagine the evidentiary standard for libel cases are much more strict on the continent too. I suppose Britian's crazy libel standard was created mostly to protect the nobility form journalists and the middle class. France and Germany wouldn't really have copied that so readily.

  25. Re:Worse, maybe it's FBI entrapment on Man Charged in Model Airplane Plot To Bomb Pentagon · · Score: 1

    Yes, I phrased that poorly. Yet, our accountant could sucker people in pretty effectively. And only later ask if they wanted the special illegal version. So my core criticism remains :

    If the courts don't nip this in the bud, then you'll see real entrapment become vastly more popular in law enforcement, that's just how people work. Taxes, guns, drugs, etc.

    You know, the Europeans have arrested multiple real terrorist groups before they launched any attacks. And they did so by infiltrating from the ground up. All the groups caught in the U.S. had the informant as ring-leader. It's pretty obvious the Europeans are doing police work while we are entrapping random idiots for political reasons.

    In addition, all these silly arrests teach any clever terrorists how they might avoid the FBI, or even exploit the FBI by signing on as informants. there is always the risk the FBI unwittingly creates a real terrorist too. Who accidentally sold all those guns to the Mexican drug cartels again?

    Law enforcement is about stopping crimes, not encouraging them.