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User: LaissezFaire

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Comments · 175

  1. Re:More facetime on SendGrid Fires Employee After Firestorm Over Inappropriate Jokes · · Score: 1

    She also has a tweet where she says, "Black people CANNOT be racist against White people. Racism is a position of the oppressor who has the power.".

    Sadly, that is not an unheard of definition. I had a college class that used that definition. If you tried to use one that factored in just feelings or beliefs, or just power differences between two individuals, you'd fail that question.

  2. Re:Remote Desktop on Ask Slashdot: No-Install Programming At Work? · · Score: 1
    If he remotes out to code random stuff during work hours, using work resources, for not work activities, he's going to get fired.

    There's almost always some manager around who's short of resources and needs to get some stuff done. Find him and offer up some time.

    This is also why many employees wind up with tricked out spreadsheets and word macros. They aren't allowed to script in regular languages, can't run websites, can't run databases. So they make do.

  3. Re:Web based or SSH ... on Ask Slashdot: No-Install Programming At Work? · · Score: 1

    If your company doesn't want you to install unauthorized software, they probably don't want you to run unauthorized software either.

    Good call. In companies where you can only run approved software, you frequently can't program in those environments, either. You've now written code that's unapproved.

    I'd be careful about ssh'ing out or using other outside environments on the company time, though. If they're paying you to be in your chair, they aren't going to like you writing code for people who aren't them at the same time. Get some buy in from your boss on what you want to do.

  4. $2,000 for Colorado laws on Liberating the Laws You Must Pay To Read · · Score: 1

    It costs $2,000 for a copy of all of the Colorado Revised Statues (http://www.state.co.us/gov_dir/leg_dir/olls/colorado_revised_statutes_republish.htm). Colorado keeps the state constitution online through Michie's Legal Resources (http://www.michie.com/colorado/), which is a pretty awful website. Unless you like URLs that are buried in calls to DLLs...

  5. Re:Unbelievable on Elon Musk: Future Round-Trip To Mars Could Cost Under $500,000 · · Score: 1

    That makes some sense. Spacex puts their retail price for launches on their website. So, ~$55 million for a Falcon 9 launch (http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php#launch_and_placement). You make a good point that the total cost isn't $500,000, just the cost-per-person.

  6. Re:Traitorous administration on The End of the Gas Guzzler · · Score: 1

    Make sure you don't confuse "achievable" with "economically achievable." With some R&D we could put a man on the moon again, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't effect other government (or private) spending.

  7. Re:Traitorous administration on The End of the Gas Guzzler · · Score: 1
    Sure. It was this line:

    'It almost makes you wonder if the automakers may have exaggerated the costs of compliance, the way they always do.

    It's over-enthusiastic editorializing.

    I'm glad you mentioned the economic trade-offs. Too often proponents of one or the other forget there are consequences to decisions.

  8. Traitorous administration on The End of the Gas Guzzler · · Score: 1, Troll

    I can't believe the Obama administration think there remains some economic trade off with CAFE standards. They should just mandate a 100 MPG CAFE standard for 2013. Heck, that gives car manufacturers over a year to invent new technology and implement it, or just stop selling gasoline cars and sell electrical ones, and overload the electrical grid. (And if you think I'm trolling, you didn't read the post summary.)

  9. Re:So then. on Renewable Energy Production Surpasses Nuclear In the US · · Score: 1
    You've just begged the question of the economics of the issue. Load and supply management is the problem I outlined, and it's freakin' hard with solar and wind.

    Hydro is great if you happen to be somewhere where a hydro plant already exists. Dams are very hard to build now (at least in the U.S.) because of environmental restrictions. Dams have a tendency to drown things upstream.

  10. Re:So then. on Renewable Energy Production Surpasses Nuclear In the US · · Score: 1

    No, but it still requires a massive area of mirrors, has the standard difficulties with long-range transmission, and now you have lots of waste heat to manage, since you're messing with the ecosystem. The costs and secondary effects kill the idea for large-scale rollout.

  11. Re:So then. on Renewable Energy Production Surpasses Nuclear In the US · · Score: 2, Informative
    When solar can generate power at night, and wind when it can generate power while it's calm.

    No one has ever said that it doesn't generate power, just that it's cost ineffective, and requires traditionally generated power in any event to even out the peaks and valleys.

  12. Re:Highly recommended! on Opera 11.50 Released · · Score: 1

    I do like opera's email (aka M2), but I still have thunderbird installed, mostly because Opera has never included S/MIME or GPG/PGP support. Nor smart card authentication, for that matter. I've been using Opera since version 3, and even paid for versions back when that was their model. I just wish they'd let me digitally sign emails and login to websites with my smart card.

  13. News at 11: GPS devices track your location on Google Sued For Tracking Users' Locations · · Score: 1

    SHOCKER: GPS enabled phones know where they are! And when they integrate with an online mapping service, the service knows where the phone is! Can't I just use have a phone with a space-based geolocation system, and not have to know to turn it off if I don't want it to tell me where I am?

  14. Re:superior value on Netflix Subscriber Base Eclipses Comcast's · · Score: 1
    Which is why forcing net neutrality is, at best, worthless.

    It's Comcast's network, so they should not be forced to put a Netflix server there. And, when they don't, Comcast's customers will punish them. Many will leave -- I did.

    If net neutrality is involved the federal government will study the problem, take both sides into account, determine that the market is over-saturated on video anyway, change their opinion based on the new high-bandwidth streaming video PACs, and force in a Netflix server right in time for the IPv6 rollout.

  15. Re:superior value on Netflix Subscriber Base Eclipses Comcast's · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Which is why trying to force net neutrality on the system is ridiculous. People are already voting with their dollars.

  16. Re:So was Obama right? on SpaceX Aims To Put Man On Mars In 10-20 Years · · Score: 1
    Politically, I think it was more of an exchange of space science / engineering dollars disappearing to placate the entitlement spending crowd. Space is frequently a whipping boy "we need to take care of [X] down here on earth before we go to [the moon|Mars]".

    SpaceX had already launched before the 2008 elections, and the shuttle program has been a dead man walking for years. Granted, I prefer commercial space exploitation than government, but in Mr. Obama's case I think it was a happy coincidence of interests, not a core philosophy change.

  17. Re:Tell me when you can put a man on Mars tomorrow on SpaceX Aims To Put Man On Mars In 10-20 Years · · Score: 2

    We don't have the basic science for nuclear fusion, though. Mars is largely an engineering problem, not science.

  18. Re:Tell me when you can put a man on Mars tomorrow on SpaceX Aims To Put Man On Mars In 10-20 Years · · Score: 3, Informative
    SpaceX is building rockets, so they are doing things in line with going to Mars.

    Space programs take a quite a long time to develop. The average government satellite takes around 12-16 years from development to operation. They have to think 10-20 years out.

  19. Re:Not so bad to have different systems. on Why Does the US Cling To Imperial Measurements? · · Score: 1

    Well, since the US economy dwarfs every other country's, I'm guessing that they should use more imperial measurements. Heck, if you can't do the math for three feet to the yard, how should you be trusted to use pi? Europeans probably get 1.33381 for an answer when they should get 1.33382.

  20. Re:Here's an example of market failure on Piracy Is a Market Failure — Not a Legal One · · Score: 1

    The report notes “the pirate market cannot be said to compete with legal sales or generate losses for industry. At the low end of the socioeconomic ladder where such distribution gaps are common, piracy often simply is the market.”

    You're right on. Just because someone doesn't want to buy a product at the price offered doesn't make it a market failure. It just means there wasn't a sale. Far too many people throw around the phrase "market failure" when what they really mean is "the market isn't doing what I want it to do."

  21. Re:"Argue" on Ma Bell Stifled Innovation, AT&T May Do the Same · · Score: 1
    I'm not sure what "right wing economists" ever said that the market should be closed to more than one provider. TFA missed out on the cause and effect.

    From 1877 to 1984, Ma Bell had a monopoly in the US telephone industry. During this time, it stifled innovation.

    Ma Bell didn't stifle innovation, the Federal government did. I know this because Ma Bell didn't pass any laws that restricted entry into the phone market. The government gave the entire market to Ma Bell, so they are the ones that stifled innovation and competition. They made some product choices that we can now ridicule, but half of slashdot readers have ridiculed their product development departments for bad product choices, too.

  22. Re:suspicious on German Foreign Office Going Back To Windows · · Score: 1

    No, I didn't, but I'm not sure that matters. CUPS is just the underlying printing subsystem. I'm pretty sure that Mac users don't have to point a browser to http://localhost:631/ to add a printer, or use the Gnome/KDE GUIs. That can be the hard part of adding a printer. (They may have different drivers available than linux tends to, but I don't have any data on that.)

  23. Re:suspicious on German Foreign Office Going Back To Windows · · Score: 1

    Printers and scanners are a common issue in linux. (Software modems were another, though less common now, of course.) And the drivers just don't work the same as the windows drivers. I still wind up setting up separate simplex and duplex "printers" most of the time.

  24. Give away and sell on Book Piracy — Less DRM, More Data · · Score: 1
    Both giving away and selling the same product can work really well. For example, there's this Linux thing I've heard about that seems to be doing that.

    It's very true in the economics world. The Austrian economists have been giving away books for as long as they've had a website, and they've found it increases the market for their printed books.

  25. Causes interference to licensed spectrum users on Smart Grid Brings Powerline Broadband Back? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Groups like the American Radio Relay League have fought against this for a long time, as well as recently, too. There's talk of notching the BPL, and is done some places, but not everywhere. Since the feds took over the developing ownership rights of the spectrum with the FCC, it's their responsibility to ensure BPL providers aren't interfering with licensed spectrum users.