Slashdot Mirror


User: borcharc

borcharc's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
220
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 220

  1. Re:Did the cop got fired? on Supreme Court Hearing Case On Drug-Sniffing Dog "Fishing Expeditions" · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is bullshit I am sick of this cops put their life on the line crap, the data does not support it. In 2010 according to the bureau of labor statistics workplace fatalities report there were 545 work related deaths of workers classified as Management occupations, 261 work related deaths of Protective service occupations (inc fire, police, security guards, etc.) One could argue that the rate per 100k is high for Protective service occupations (7.4%) vs management (3.4%) but that ignores the 7% for repair and maintenance occupations, 11% death rate for construction occupations, 14.2% for transportation occupations, and 25.3% for Farming, fishing, and forestry occupations. We can dig deeper and see that all government occupations have workplace fatalities at a rate of 2.2%.

    Police and fire jobs are not dangerous, they just pound their chest and proclaim that they are heroes and deserve to be worshiped. If risk of death is what makes you a hero in our society, lets worship the farmers, fishers, and foresters. Without them we really would be dead.

    Source: http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfoi_revised10.pdf (all rates are per 100k)

  2. Re:Marijuana/Drug Laws on Want a Security Pro? Get Politically Incorrect and Learn Geek Culture · · Score: 1

    Have you ever been to defcon?

  3. Re:Highly unethical. on Is Non-Prescription ADHD Medication Use Ever Ethical? · · Score: 1

    Caffeine is an incredibly powerful stimulant but most people are so accustom to it, they have no idea and will not believe its powers. I recently quit drinking caffeine after my whole life of 6-12 cans of cola a day, I noticed no effects from the drug (so i thought). After I quit, my sleep and mood dramatically improved. Then one day I accidentally had a caffeinated soda without thinking about it, I was so fucking high that I had to go home and lye down for a bit until the effects wore off. The effects were far more powerful then adderall. If you don't believe me, quit for two weeks. The headaches from withdraw aren't that bad, your totally not addicted anyway, right?

    So yeah, as far as I can tell, most people in are already taking addictive stimulants just to help them focus throughout the day.

  4. Re:Translation on Parent Questions Mandatory High School Chemistry · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The approach used in most high schools is college prep. You have no idea as a parent or a high school student where your studies will bring you. The system's goal is to prepare you for further study in any field. Many people want high school to be retooled as technical schools so students will pick a job at a young age and be funneled into, far before they are old enough to decide what their life should be like, but foreclosing the option of higher education without major additional effort. Kids do not have the capacity to choose their own path, they need to be given the tools so that when they are able, they have as many opportunities as possible available to them.

  5. Re:Translation on Parent Questions Mandatory High School Chemistry · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My parents did this to me when I was a kid because the teachers convinced them I would be unable to learn math, chem, etc due to an alleged learning disability. It took me years after high school to get caught up on 10 years of missed math courses. I still hate them for it...

  6. Re:Keep loaning them out. on Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Found Calculators? · · Score: 1

    If you must have brick and mortar, any pawn shop will have one. Or you could buy a modern grapher like the Casio FX-9750 for $50. TI does run a racket and they offer a vastly inferior product. I have a stack of Casio's and I am amazed at how cheep they are and how much better they do everything vs the same TI-83 that I used in middle school in 1992. I was helping a kid with some simple math assignment the other day and I was shocked at how ridiculous using the TI product was, gave him a $20 Casio FX-115ES from my pile and he's never looking back.

  7. Re:Keep loaning them out. on Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Found Calculators? · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    TI-83's are like $50 now and they are pieces of crap. Tell the kids to buy a real calculator when their financial aid excess comes in. Other then that see if another department has a use for them. The chem department where I am at uses them as data collection devices with ancient and worthless equipment fitting of a TI-83. Perhaps your local ghetto school with children who live horrible lives could use them for the 5 kids who take math seriously there?

  8. Defcon isn't the problem Vegas is on Is Sexual Harassment Part of Hacker Culture? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have been going to defcon for many years. In recent years my non tech wife has been coming along. My wife is extremely hot and attracts unwanted attention everywhere we go. Its quite the task to keep creepers at bay most of the time. She has repeatedly made it clear that the attendees at defcon and the parties there have been completely respectful and gentlemanly to her. On the other hand, she has been propositioned for "shopping sprees and condo parties" from creepy Vegas men and attempted to be recruited to be a stripper and prostitute on different occasions at the Rio and Riviera pool by Vegas scum. At one point several random hackers came to her defense as she was trying to get away from Vegas scum at the pool. By the time I got out of my track and to the pool random defconers had "solved" the issue in a ways an angry older brother would. These type of problems are what makes my wife wary of defcon and Vegas in general, Vegas scum, not the defcon attendees.

    If this is all about some drunk kid asking someone to show your tits, well those kids are everywhere there is alcohol. If someone assaults you, sexually or otherwise, charges should be pressed.

  9. Re:Legalize it all. on How Chemistry Stymies Attempts To Regulate Synthetic Drugs · · Score: 1

    Innocents are killed by misuse more then anything else. Drugs are often sold as other drugs causing dramatically different effects then expected at the dose taken. There are also cases where the drugs are cut with dangerous chemicals to increase the profit of the dealers (Levamisole in cocaine). The black market has no regulation or civil liability for poor quality or mislabeled products. There are also no instructions, most synthetic drug deaths are the result of overdose because there is not effective labeling. Most people have drugs in their homes bought over the counter that if you take 2.5x the maximum dose you will die (Tylenol) without medical attention, but with effective labeling we know not to take that much. I am unconvinced that the crazy guy in Florida was on drugs, lets wait for an actual toxicity report to be published, right now its wild speculation. I am unfamiliar with the incident with K2/Spice in Michigan, but if marijuana were legal, the synthetic cannabinoid market would not exist. Most things that I have hard attributed to drug use have no data to support it and look more like the latest version of Reefer Madness-style exaggerations

    Most "synthetic alternatives" for illegal drugs exist solely to fill the demand gap; Bath salts (meth/mdma/speed), MXE (Ketamine), Cocaine, 2C-x, etc. These drugs are prescription drugs in the US and around the world or likely soon well be. MDMA (ecstasy) is in clinical trials with for treatment resistant PTSD with great success. Speed (amphetamine/adderall) and Meth (prescribed under the name Desoxyn in the USA) is given to children and adults for ADHD and sleep issues. Ketamine is used in anesthesiology for adults (3rd world) and children (common in the US) and is being tested in the US for treatment resistant depression with good results. Cocaine is used in medicine in the US. 2C-x/hallucinogens are used around the world for religious and spiritual purposes and have been used that way for much of human history with great benefit (see the recent Johns Hopkins Psilocybin studies) yet we ban them out of fear.

    The only way to solve drug issues is to legalize it all and let the FDA regulate labeling and production quality, lets get instructions and quality control and most issues will go away. This is the only way we can stop the endless drug related violence.

  10. Re:Terrorist incidents in Minnesota: 0 on Minneapolis Airport Gets $20 Million Hi-Tech Security Upgrade · · Score: 1

    Minnesota is a hotbed of terrorism investigations, I have heard they are #2 behind NYC. There have been several grand juries that have been somewhat publicly investigating Somali refuges for participation in terrorism training camps, money laundering, and the Zacharia Musawi matter.

    As for the airport, they are epic tools. I have heard from several reliable sources that they do not record tapes on the current camera system or have employees monitor it. A few years back I questioned an MAC (airport) official on this he got very shaky and tried to feed me a line about how they fixed all of that. Then all he wanted to talk about was who my source was, very convincing. All this system will do is have hard drives full of data that will never be watched except to delete incriminating videos of their officers, a rare event as they spend most of their time outside the terminal harassing passing drivers on Highway 5 or biking at high speed through the terminal. This will never get better until society has enough of overboard policing and the members of the MAC stop being political appointees and stand for elections.

  11. Re:I'm a gatekeeper. on Why Do So Many College Science Majors Drop Out? · · Score: 1

    You are a crappy physicist. I know this because you have been relegated to a community college. I am sure you have complete mastery of the subject, but you will never make it in a real research institution because of your mindset. The gatekeeper/elite mindset you almost brag about is very counter productive, it shows your inability to be creative and take risks. The vast majority of professors fall into this category and I believe they are not professionally happy, they wanted to research, not teach at a community college or small rural state school. They structure classes to only allow people like them into the field, pushing out the creative risk takers. The original links point this out and clearly discusses how counterproductive it is. The USA will not achieve its scientific education goals without reforming the current elite professor class, forcing productivity from them. Fortunately the education bubble appears to be close to popping that will push most of these 3rd rate scientists out of a job and we can get a fresh start.

  12. Re:Pretty simple explanation... on Why Do So Many College Science Majors Drop Out? · · Score: 1

    They are demanding for no logical reason except how it was taught to them. Most STEM students just need a one year survey of math course that teaches them how to use the tools that you will use in industry to complete the math related problems you will face and to understand how they work. If you want to be able to do it with a pen a paper from memory you should consider a math minor. If it can be done in Wolfram Alpha, one of its excellent mobile tools or one of its competitors then there is no point in grinding on it. We don't make kids lean arithmetic for the same reasons, calculators are cheep, plentiful and they work.

    Teach how the various math disciplines work, where they came from and how to use proper tools to solve them. Freshman Chem/Phys are just math classes with some memorization of simple concepts and high school level lab assignments. Those concepts are diluted by all the math teaching that is not necessary (to make it last four years). It is important to understand that you will use computerized tools to solve almost every one of these "math" issues in your industrial career, if you don't, you are inefficient at your job (academia). If an employee brings me a page+ long handwritten math problem he should expect me to send him back to do it in Mathematica, I don't have time and neither does anyone else to check his work for errors and half the time I cant read his writing, its 2012, everything is on the computer, deal with it.

    I am not suggesting just handing them a calculator, they of course need an understanding of how it works and the underlining concepts. Most students get the calculator treatment and no understanding of the underlying math or how to use the the calculator properly. I don't think most math professors understand how to use calculators and computer math tools properly. I can pass the College Algebra CLEP exam with an approved calculator using very limited mental math and no scratch paper. The difference is understanding the concepts of algebra and how to use the calculator (tool) properly. Ten pages of long algebra problems does not give the student time to master the actual subject and they will never do it that way again once they leave academia. Every thing that people had trouble with in Freshman Chem can be determined using the wolfram general Chem assistant mobile app. This form of teaching is great at educating academics who can teach in this manner and pushes out the creative minds and risk takers that will lead to future major discoveries.

  13. Re:Cue conservative wailing on HPV Vaccine Recommended For Boys · · Score: 1

    Those deaths are not age adjusted, in 2007 the death rate for females aged 5-25 is 0.0511% not 0.16%. So you have a similar risk of an adverse reaction as age adjusted death. That being said, I am far more concerned about the rest of the story. The serious reactions need far more study before this should be compulsorily. Dismissing serious adverse reactions and assuming that the question is solved and undisputable sets a poor stage for from a public health and drug safety perspective. There is far to much SEX, MONEY and POLITICS in this issue and not enough SCIENCE, hu, sounds familiar.

  14. Re:Cue conservative wailing on HPV Vaccine Recommended For Boys · · Score: 1

    Saying anyone who questions this vaccination is a moron without studying the facts is stupid. Many vaccines are important, others carry untold risks. The discussion of this issue has been beaten back by people worshiping at the church or big pharma and various political and media forces, but never addressing the research. It is important to understand the issue and not just read what talking heads and politicians have to say.

    The vaccine in question is primarily used prevent a virus that can cause rare cancers 70% of the time [1]. The death rate of cervical cancer is quite low, 4,021 (0.1660% of total deaths) in 2007 [2]. The risks of death from the cancers in question are are similar dying of gallbladder disorders [2]. As for the laundry list of other rare cancers it is linked to preventing, they are dramatically rarer then cervical cancer, data is to support this is readily found for those that are curious.

    The CDC data [3] shows some serious concerns, 20,096 reaction reports including 71 verified deaths over 40 million doses. Of the 20,096 reports, 1,607 (8%) are considered serious. A serious reaction is defines by the CDC as a "report that indicated hospitalization, permanent disability, life-threatening illness, congenital anomaly or death". There is no way to determine that these reactions are not linked to the vaccine without much more study.

    I am not convinced that they are being honest about the risks and benefit of this drug. The number of lives it is supposed to save, 2,815 per year (70% of cervical cancer deaths are linked to viruses the vaccine prevents [1]), does not appear to outweigh the risks of a serious reaction. The benefit looks in the margin of error. Stop believing talking heads and politicians, do your own research, we are nerds after all. I have far more faith in medicine to treat me for a condition in the future then to take a risky medication to prevent a virus I will never get because I made it to the the age of 26 without it [1]. Never expect the talking heads or even your doctor to actually understand the research, few doctors are trained in research, they are practitioners fueled by money and boredom.

    I may be completely wrong and totally misunderstand the data I see published, this will not stop me from actually performing my own review of the research in an effort to actually understand the issues rather then accept biased claims from everyone.

    [1] http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/2008/ucm116945.htm
    [2] http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/vaccines/hpv/gardasil.html
    [3] http://www.cdc.gov/NCHS/data/nvsr/nvsr58/nvsr58_19.pdf, Table 10

  15. Re:So instead of using a GPS system... on Senator Introduces Bill To Stop Warrantless GPS Tracking · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They will just hire a bunch of agents to tail people they want to tail. Costing millions of dollars in vehicles, fuel, payroll and benefits.

    Thats the idea. If they want to do surveillance on you, they actually have to do it. It is not supposed to be easy or cheep for the government to make its case. This makes the government put their attention on the cases that matter.

  16. Re:Almost any Android on Ask Slashdot: Which Android Phone (and Carrier) For WiFi Proxy Support? · · Score: 1

    I am confused by this story... The editors must use iphone's because they lack a basic understanding of how android and its aftermarket distributions work. Its such a simple question for anyone that has paid attention to the andorid space for the last few years or perhaps googled the subject. Its linux... if you have root you can replace the kernel with one that has the NAT module and install iptables... Or just use Cyanogenmod or its competitors who all support it out of the box with fancy graphic click here to make work boxes.

  17. Re:The security force can requisition fuel??? on Inside Las Vegas' Biggest Data Centre · · Score: 1

    Armed guards are normal and operate without incident, claiming you can send your armed guards out to pillage the communities fuel is quite another thing

  18. Re:The security force can requisition fuel??? on Inside Las Vegas' Biggest Data Centre · · Score: 1

    yeah... these guys are clearly smoking crack. all we need is another dumb ass with a private army running around nevada thinking they are god.

  19. 1 year to download on Celebrating 20 Years of Linux · · Score: 1

    20 years back linux came out, 19 years ago i started downloading it from bbs's, 18 years ago I installed it.... thanks to SLS and 2400 bps modems!

  20. Re:Can someone explain IPv6 without NAT? on If You Think You Can Ignore IPv6, Think Again · · Score: 3

    How are we supposed to roll out IPv6 without NAT? Can someone explain, and without RANTING about how NAT is unnecessary?

    Think about it. Let's say I set up my company with link local addresses. IPv6 forbids NAT on routers and firewalls. So how are my hosts going to talk to the Internet? Specifically, if I have a link local address of fe80::/10. That's not going to be routable from the Internet. TCP is two-way traffic, so the servers need a return route to me. How is this accomplished with NAT?

    NAT is necessary so the ISP can send traffic back to my summarized address. I don't understand how this works when they forbid NAT. Someone please kindly explain how that works.

    Sorry to rant at you and not answer your question.

    Have we stopped learning/teaching about routing, forwarding and firewalls because the magic NAT box does all of that for us? This is a sad state for the world of networking that such a question must be asked.. repeatedly... by people who should know better.

  21. Re:Where are the routers for IPV6? does comcast ma on Comcast Activates IPv6 Trial Users · · Score: 1

    how long ago did you use comcast? this restriction went away longer ago then i can remember. Plug new computer into cable modem and reboot, your done.

  22. Re:Let's just see about it. on Facebook's Revenues Leaked · · Score: 1

    Anyone who would buy this is a FOOL! They form a shell company in 05Jan11, crank out a offering memorandum and expect to close $1.5b in 3 business days?!?! $1.5b into a shell company, not even the real company, with unaudited financials? Were is the due diligence? The real financial position could be anything. Zuck could be spending all the money on hookers and blow and you would never know.

    Even worse I suspect FBDC Investors, LP (the entity Goldman is offering) is set up like a hedge fund, so you likely have no voting rights in the company, no way to effect management (something i want if i am ponying up a few hundred million) and I bet you are locked in for several years or whenever Goldman sees fit to let you out... I wouldn't buy this..

  23. Re:Don't they have to prove intent? on Man Arrested For Exploiting Error In Slot Machines · · Score: 1

    Our society has long ago dispatched with the concept of mens rea (guilty mind/criminal intent). With federal charges, he will likely never see trial. His assets are likely already frozen so he can't hire an attorney, so he is stuck with the federal defender who have a backroom deal to get you to plea out or let you sit in federal detention until you get the plead guilty today and you go home next week offer, after a year or so.

  24. Re:Whats next? on 'No Refusal' DUI Checkpoints Coming To Florida? · · Score: 2

    the term homeland security has always creped me out

  25. Re:Something the judges should read on 'No Refusal' DUI Checkpoints Coming To Florida? · · Score: 1

    You can not have common law consent without the ability to freely revoke consent. If its a search, sex, fight, or drive down the road.