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User: tempest69

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  1. Re:They have a much worse problem than that... on The Air Force's Love For Fighter Pilots Is Too Big To Fail · · Score: 1

    We make fighter drones.. with frikkin laser beams attached to their heads.

  2. Re:The final Link on Ask Slashdot: What Is the Future of Old Copper Pair Technology? · · Score: 1

    Then some plucky human will get the bright idea of having crows do trash cleanup.. He'll build a device with a retinal scanner, that will let a crow bring trash to any container in exchange for food pellets. The system will keep the crows from gaming the machine.. This will be hailed as a boon to society, until our streets are barren of garbage, and then we start having scenes right out of Hitchcock's "the birds", as the birds will start proactively getting garbage from the hands, and pockets of the unsuspecting humans.

  3. Re: Equal rights on So What If Yahoo's New Dads Get Less Leave Than Moms? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    INCOME TAX + SS + Medicare + State Income + State and local Sales + Gas + property + plates + fees + utility franchise fees + workers comp tax + tolls +liquor taxes + other sin taxes + corporate income tax + a whole bunch of stuff
    is going to come pretty dang close to the 51.1% for the median family.. The numbers can be moved around some, but taxes are paid something fierce. We just break is down into chunks that each seem fair, some of it falls on the employer, so it is hidden.
    I'd take 51.1% total tax in a heartbeat to have really good government services. I'm paying pretty close to that for a system with few safety nets, few employee protections, and for insurance that has been pillaging the population.

    Sweden isn't utopia. But I don't hear horror stories from my friends who are Swedish nationals.

  4. Re:Lab-grown Kidneys Transplanted Into Rats on Lab-grown Kidneys Transplanted Into Rats · · Score: 1

    Just loitering around the placed they were waiting for dialysis?

  5. Because we live. on Stephen Hawking Warns Against Confining Ourselves To Earth · · Score: 1

    Some organism anchor in one place, and hunker down, relying on the external forces to spread their offspring. This has worked for plants for a long time. We have the ability to sense dangers that no other animal can, to plan an escape from a multitude of catastrophes. We don't wait around for misfortune to find us when we know it's coming. We don't stand in the middle of the street just because we will eventually die.

    It isn't egotism to give the people a better chance at survival. We take the steps today so that there is a chance that we won't screw it up when it matters. Today we are the beneficiaries of the work done by the people of the last hundred years. It seems a waste to sit down on the railroad tracks and wait for the train to hit us. Doing this as a species is immoral cowardice.

    Storm

  6. Re:Startgate Project on How to Get Conjurer James Randi to Give You $1 Million (Video) · · Score: 1

    And how did we make spider goats without psychics? I mean the cover story of genetic work is a good one, but clearly impossible.

  7. Bad premise on Scientist Seeks 'Adventurous Human Woman' For Neanderthal Baby · · Score: 1

    While Dolly did take quite a few tries, cloning goats proved to be a whole lot easier.
    That said, humans are probably trickier, as we have hidden estrus and a longer gestation process.

  8. Re:Does either major political party approve of th on Supercomputer Repossessed By State, May Be Sold In Pieces · · Score: 1

    Um.. it worked in Wyoming, millions into a supercomputer to attract more tech companies.

  9. Karma Whoring. on Amazon: Authors Can't Review Books · · Score: 5, Informative

    You have a system that reviews the reviewers, allowing for weighted values of reviews. Not that slashdot users would have heard of mod points or metamoderating.

  10. Instructions from scratch on A Gentle Rant About Software Development and Installers · · Score: 1

    What I want are the full instructions on how to get software X to function on a known good configuration.
    I'm talking ALL the instructions, as in I have a box with the minimum Fedora v 26 install, what are all the keystrokes that I will need to install this software. No assuming that I will have X set up some way on my machine, or that I've installed the right version of Mesa3D, or that vim is installed.

    I don't want to find out that I'm hunting down some bug because yum install kerberos installed MIT kerberos instead of Hemidall kerberos.
    I want this because almost everyone skip steps they consider obvious. The puzzle is so much easier to figure out when you can look at the picture on the lid.

  11. Re:Keep the Doctor Who series the same on The New Series of Doctor Who: Fleeing From Format? · · Score: 1

    Baah... The kicker is that The Doctor is like your uncle when your three years old. Sure the monster in the shoe-box is scary, but your uncle know's it's only a sock. boom now he's running from the monster too, all good fun. Figuring out how to stop a sock monster is fun, but not a real threat.
    The Doctor has technology that is so insane that it dwarfs any problem he's in. Heck, the sonic screwdriver is probably much bigger on the inside, utilizing power that might rival a small star.
    The plot holes are amazingly huge.. 2 companions get trapped in NYC past. because it's tough to get a Tardis to them, they never consider taking a plane to London or LA. Or having the long lived doctor just park early and just meet them in NYC in a few years. Now either the Doctor has horrible writers, or they are ok with the Doctor stranding his friends in a workable past.
    The deus ex machina is the goal of most of the episodes.

  12. Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? on Ask Slashdot: What Would It Take For Developers To Start Their Own Union? · · Score: 1

    Ok,
    1. Ban corporations from politics. The government is for the people. No money, no lobbying.
    2. Require "news" to be a purely independent enterprise (syndicated) with barriers that prevent monetary coercion.
    3. Change the law drafting practices. So a complex law cannot simply be drafted by a corporation that create calculated loopholes. The people "hacking" the legal system really need to be stymied.
    Any of the above would be a huge boon the country.

  13. Re:At the ripe old age of 38... on What's the Shelf Life of a Programmer? · · Score: 1

    only the 8250, the 16450 and 16550 were slackers.

  14. Linus is over the hill, on What's the Shelf Life of a Programmer? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And I'd bet if asked if he REALLY understood Linux, he'd be saying nope.
    There is something to be said for being comfortable with not knowing everything.

  15. Re:They are still made on The Evolution of the Computer Keyboard · · Score: 1

    I snagged one of the keyboards a couple years back. Nothing else compares for typing. I have an old das keyboard, which is very good, and feels so much better for fps gaming. The F key lost some clickyness. but it's still an awesome choice to type on. The big kicker is that it has the windows key (nifty for moving windows on multiscreens) and a usb interface. It has a freaky long cord which can be handy. The loud clicks can be a bit rough on coworkers.

  16. Re:No it doesn't on Does Coding Style Matter? · · Score: 1

    Good coding style can catch those mistakes.
    A normal function
    if (state=1) {do stuff;}
    has some issues, but with a consistent style
    if (1 = state) {do stuff;}
    GCC will throw a compile time error that it obvious, rather than strange behavior that has to be hunted down.
    Style is far more than tabs and spaces. When and how variables are initialized, do you populate them with error flags, do you have some byzantine check for correctness states. Or do you have a big pile of intermediate variables to determine the state. Do you have a assume true with a disprove, or assume false with a prove X as true.
    style matters

  17. Re:Well Sure! on Green Grid Argues That Data Centers Can Lose the Chillers · · Score: 1

    I think 298 degrees would be more reasonable. No reason to risk superfluidity.

  18. H1B problems on Ask Slashdot: Is Going To a Technical College Worth It? · · Score: 2
    The big problem that I see with the H1B is that the holders of the H1B are at far too much mercy of their sponsor. Putting aside any talk of fairness for the foreign nationals, this is still a bad thing for domestic labor. By having a class of people beholden to their sponsor, it reduces the negotiating power of remainder. If the employer upgrades the job duties, the H1B holders can't balk at the request, without fear of reprisal.

    Years ago I had a junior technician working on my crew with an H1B, he was a bright Iraqi fellow with a Ph.D in Physics. Middle management had him doing programming work for $8.50 an hour with plenty of OT.. With cuts looming in the near future he was safe but that meant that someone else would be taking the cut. So I had to get him a promotion within the company to ensure the safety of my crew.
    Since that experience I have really hated the way H1B works. Though I don't have animosity t'ward the H1B holders.

  19. yea!!, and the british.. on 180k-Year-Old Mutation Allowed Humans To Become Vegetarians, Move Out of Africa · · Score: 2
    I don't believe that Americans came from the British, because there are still British people. Clearly Americans came from a Creator, and we owe him the decency to stop claiming that many Americans are simply the descendants of Europeans.

    right there with you man.

  20. Re:Manager here on Ask Slashdot: When Does Time Tracking at Work Go Too Far? · · Score: 1

    So then how would you feel if upper management asked you to press a button for "bathroom", where the information would be available to the operators.. You know for solidarity.

    I guess I see the bathroom button as a huge sign of disrespect. If a friend asked me how long I was on the can I'd tell them none of your damn business. Now when you realize that someone is taking the efficiency of your defecation into the equation it's horrible. Every frikkin aspect of their time is watched like a hawk, just logg it as personal time and call it good. By treating people like property your going to have horrible retention problems.

  21. Re:Why so little memory? on TACC "Stampede" Supercomputer To Go Live In January · · Score: 1

    Reliability and power.. more memory is more chances for a node to have a failure, ram gets hot, and so it will need to be cooled. And my bet is that it is ECC-DDR3, as el-cheapo isn't remotely worth the price in these applications.

  22. Re:Casual User Here on The True Challenges of Desktop Linux · · Score: 1

    This is a total load of manure.
    Installing software is a pain in the rear end, and I've been doing it for a bunch of years. The googling for an error message is rarely as simple as it seems, as you run into all sorts of outdated information, or information for something other than the distro your using.
    Then you run into a segfault, or the code just exits for "no reason" and then dig through the documentation/ code/ message boards to find that variable X in the config file must be an exact multiple of variable Y


    The other side of this thing is horrible too... I was required to write code (GUI / 3D / interactive/ with Web Access) that would install and work under linux (redhat /debian/ suse) and windows. And it had to be easy enough for an average user to install
    Found a nasty behavior in my code this week where my fog only worked on full 3d objects but not lines, when used on a nvidia/intel hybrid graphics laptop. As I was trying to show a friend how robust/awesome my code was. A little change to his laptop settings, and he was properly impressed, though his battery promptly drained.
    Anyway expecting a user figure out that their in "hybrid" mode is a pretty onerous expectation of a programmer..
    Really as a programmer I think that of your releasing code out to be used by the average joe, it should just work.

    For any program a programmer should provide a step by step guide of getting working software from a minimal install of the target OS's/Distro's
    Anything less is just lazy. Have a couple of test files in the tarball/RPM/DEB that will prove that the program can run properly.
    If every chunk of software had this piece to it, the world would be a better place.

  23. More cores is the only way forward. on World's Most Powerful x86 Supercomputer Boots Up in Germany · · Score: 1

    The traces in the chips are 2.5 atoms thick, the distance between traces is 22nm for the most modern production technique, there is some room for squeezing it down a bit more, but there aren't many more significant drops in size that can be made.
    GPGPU has a long way to go to be flexible enough for general purpose work.
    Besides the real push needs to be the push for less power per op, at 1GF/watt, exaflops are a problem.

  24. Math Dammit on Record Setting 500 Trillion-Watt Laser Shot Achieved · · Score: 1

    gaaa ok
    11496kWhper year/365=31.5 kWh per day
    31.5 kWh per day/24= 1.31 kWh/ hour (or 1.31kW)
    1.31 kWh per hour /60 = .022 kWh/minute (still 1.31 kW)
    .022 kWh/minute /60= .365 Wh/second (still 1.31 kW)
    ______________________________________________________
    When you find a number that is back of the envelope crazy, check your numbers.
    That number would mean that every person has one 30 watt bulb going for 8 hours a night, and that's it.. no fridge, no fans, no pc.

  25. Re:Stellar application potential on Record Setting 500 Trillion-Watt Laser Shot Achieved · · Score: 1

    Nope, you place it on the dark side of the moon. makes it way harder to hit earth.