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User: Trepidity

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  1. Re:Either comply, change the law, or emigrate. on How To Foil NSA Sabotage: Use a Dead Man's Switch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most people cannot legally emigrate, so that isn't really an option. If you have dual citizenship, or unique in-demand skills, this may be more feasible, but China is not going to accept random American citizens who want to move there, especially not people who want to move there due to political disgruntlement.

  2. Re:A patheic thought on Amazon Hiring More Than a 100 Who Can Get Top Secret Clearances · · Score: 1, Troll

    On #2, even fewer competent youngsters. Not even the CIA wants to hire your average ideological College Young Republicans member.

  3. Re:A lot of this is not aversion to risk on Schneier: We Need To Relearn How To Accept Risk · · Score: 1

    That isn't the reason for things like national-security policy; you cannot sue the federal government for its security policies (due to sovereign immunity). However you can vote politicians out of office, or vote them into office if they grandstand in a way you like, which is what they're worried about.

  4. Re:Was Java a good choice for the AP requirement? on Murdoch's AP Computer Science MOOC Goes Live · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As best I can determine:

    It was Pascal for many years, which had once been widely used as an introductory language. But by the late-'90s Pascal was starting to be seen as an obsolete choice, and the exam was switched to C++ in 1999, with the justification being that C++ was widely used and more practlcal than Pascal.

    However this move was seen by many educators as producing significant teaching complexities, since the classes (partly exacerbated by what material the exam chose to test) ended up spending an inordinate amount of time on accidental complexity that obscured real issues for novice programmers, like how iostreams works. I took AP CS in 1999, and we spent weeks on iostreams, along with miscellaneous other C++-specific nonsense. Dissatisfaction was high enough that the exam fairly quickly abandoned C++, but wasn't willing to go back to Pascal, which was still seen as obsolete. So they moved to Java in 2003, with the justification that Java could exercise many of the same concepts as C++ (you could teach OO and whatnot), but with less up-front complexity for novices. And it's stuck there since.

  5. Re:Doesn't surprise me at all on Chris Kraft Talks About The Decline of NASA · · Score: 3, Informative

    The space shuttle wasn't just for popularity, but a military boondoggle. A whole bunch of its requirements were basically imposed on NASA by the Pentagon, because they wanted it to be dual-use.

  6. Re:But but but...... on Chris Kraft Talks About The Decline of NASA · · Score: 2

    Is there any privately-funded space travel? About the largest I can think of was Armadillo Aerospace, which folded. SpaceX claims they want to go private in the future, but they're currently mainly funded by government grants and contracts.

  7. Re:Typical on The CIA Is Closing the Office That Declassifies Historical Documents · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is one way, at least, in which the politicians who always promise to "run government like a business" seem to be keeping their word. When budget cuts come in the private sector, the corporate history/archival department is among the first to get axed. Sure, 30 years later you might need those documents, but that's a problem for someone 30 years later to sort out.

  8. Re:Hormone therapy? on Bradley Manning Wants To Live As a Woman · · Score: 0, Troll

    Americans aren't a civilized people, so you can't really hold them to first-world standards.

  9. Re:They aren't drowning in plastic on US States Banned From Exporting Trash To China Are Drowning In Plastic · · Score: 1

    Sweden does that as well. It works better for countries that have district-heating systems, though; incinerators are typically much more efficient at doing that than at electricity generation.

  10. Re:Try claiming "Death to the Great Satan". on Time Reporter "Can't Wait" To Justify Drone Strike On Julian Assange · · Score: 1

    Ward Churchill did lose his job, but there is no Constitutional right to have a particular job. If you say McDonald's meat sucks, that's your constitutional right, but if McDonald's fires you over it, you can't really do anything about it.

  11. Re:Try claiming "Death to the Great Satan". on Time Reporter "Can't Wait" To Justify Drone Strike On Julian Assange · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You can't be arrested for saying you thought 9/11 was a good idea. Fred Phelps claims 9/11 was God's punishment that America deserved because of its embrace of homosexuality, and he's within his rights to express that opinion.

  12. Re:Unless the amortized annual cost is low on Dishwasher-Size, 25kW Fuel Cell In Development · · Score: 2

    Electric outage frequency really depends on your local weather and infrastructure. Neighborhoods with buried lines have a lot fewer outages than those with above-ground lines, for example.

    Where I currently live, there hasn't been an outage in several years.

  13. bad thing for who? on The Decline of '20% Time' at Google · · Score: 5, Insightful

    An article at Ars makes the case that this is not necessarily a bad thing, because Google has enough good products that simply need iteration now, making the more innovative 20% time less useful.

    A change from a work environment where you can spend 20% of your time experimenting with new ideas you have, and 80% working on the "regular" mainline products, to one where you're expected to spend at least 100% of a regular workweek iterating on the "regular" products, seems like a bad thing from the perspective of the engineer at least. Ars seems to be arguing that it's not necessarily a bad thing for Google's stockholders, which is a pretty different question.

  14. Re:TL;DR on Yahoo Deletes Journalist's Pre-Paid Legacy Site After Suicide · · Score: 1

    Novella-sized, perhaps. If you want a Tolstoy-esque novel by someone who committed suicide, check out Mitchell Heisman's suicidenote.info.

    Bonus: check out the chapter titles.

  15. Re:also goal of 2009 stimulus program on Datacenter Gives Internet To 70 Percent of Navajo Nation · · Score: 1

    Generally tribal land is administered separately, due to its quasi-autonomous status, so they wouldn't be covered under the "regular" rural-broadband programs. However the federal government could choose to give them equivalent subsidies via the Bureau of Indian Affairs to manage themselves, which seems like what's happening here.

  16. Re:Gamification must die on How Gamers Could Save the (Real) World · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's a kind of zombie that never dies. Charles Fourier, utopian socialist, proposed in the 1850s that in the future, productive play could replace work. Vladimir Lenin, glorious leader of the revolution, thought in the 1920s that internal competitions were a good way of motivating production. Since then a dozen hack management consultants have been reinventing the ideas of work-as-play, productive play, etc every 10 years or so. Someone coined the word "playbour", if "gamification" wasn't obscene enough for you.

  17. Re:based on my experiences on Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Med-School Note-Taking? · · Score: 1

    I'm a CS professor in my day-job. I've met lots of med-school students, and I'm not all that impressed. Some are smart, some aren't. Some are good at memorizing piles of things, some aren't. I will grant you that med school students do think spending a lot of hours in class and studying a lot for exams is some kind of virtue in itself.

    But if you look at working doctors some decades out of med school, they make heavy use of simple, standard references. This is not a criticism of them, because doing so is reasonable. Much of medicine is now standardized. Following flow-chart procedures produces measurably better patient outcomes than using ad-hoc doctors' judgment does. Evidence-based medicine is transforming the field, though it's not done doing so yet.

  18. Re:From ivory tower to silicon valley on New Tech Money, Same Old Problems · · Score: 1

    In fact the two main operators of employees-only bus networks in San Francisco are:

    1. Google [discussed here]

    2. UC San Francisco

  19. Re:it's not really an integrated economy yet on Is Europe's Recession Really Over? · · Score: 1

    It would be better if there were at least more labor-market mobility. Countries could still run their own domestic economies, but someone who didn't like the economic policies of country A could just move to country B and choose theirs instead.

    That is legally possible today but in practice done much less than e.g. state-to-state movement in the U.S., for many reasons. Some of them are legal barriers to recognizing credentials, although those are slowly being harmonized (e.g. medical licenses are now harmonized). Language barriers are one major one, though very asymmetric: an engineer who speaks English can easily get a job in Copenhagen, even if they speak no Danish, but an engineer who speaks no French will have a harder time being hired in Paris.

  20. it's not really an integrated economy yet on Is Europe's Recession Really Over? · · Score: 5, Informative

    The EU is getting more integrated, but is still nowhere near one economy that moves in unison. So the answer to the headline question is: yes in some places, no in others. Germany's GDP is growing; Spain's is shrinking.

  21. Re:Huh? on MIT Research: Encryption Less Secure Than We Thought · · Score: 5, Informative

    As usual, the paper makes more sense than the press release, but is less grandiose in its claims.

    It's a fairly technical result that finds some appeals to the asymptotic equipartition property lead to too-strong claims, compared to a more precise analysis.

  22. Re:So Much for Democracy on Egyptian Security Forces Storm Pro-Morsi Camps Leaving Nearly 100 Dead · · Score: 1

    If I recall my History Channel correctly, when the Grand Imam of Al Azhar and the Coptic Pope get together and formally agree on something, strange events start taking place.

  23. Re:This is TRAGIC but.. on Egyptian Security Forces Storm Pro-Morsi Camps Leaving Nearly 100 Dead · · Score: 1

    Yeah, the worry is "one man, one vote, one time", i.e. a party wins free and fair elections and then promptly abolishes democracy and installs themselves permanently in power. Or until someone overthrows them.

    In the Muslim Brotherhood's case, that worry looked more than hypothetical, since Morsi attempted several times to rule by decree, and sort of succeeded at least once. It was not hard to guess what his plan was.

  24. Re:How does this help anyone? on Class-action Suit Filed Against Microsoft Over Surface Write Off · · Score: 1

    The problem here is that the owners of the company are suing their own company for damages, which doesn't really do them any good, since the company they own will have to pay any damages!

  25. not that different from cheap servers on EFF Slams Google Fiber For Banning Servers On Its Network · · Score: 1

    Google offers 'unlimited fiber to the home' in the same way that Dreamhost offers 'unlimited web hosting': unlimited with some restrictions on the kind of use you'll make of the service. So Dreamhost won't let you use the unlimited space for hdd backup, since it's only supposed to be for webhosting, and Google won't let you use the unlimited bandwidth for hosting an FTP server, since it's only supposed to be for residential internet access.

    I would personally like there to be reasonably priced unrestricted fiber to the home. But I suspect it would cost a lot more. Have you looked up what an unrestricted port at these speeds costs at any kind of colo facility? If you really want a 1 Gbps commit, you're going to pay a lot more than Google Fiber's prices, even at the cheaper facilities.