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User: C10H14N2

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  1. Since this is obviously a common misperception... on FCC May Push Bells to Unbundle DSL · · Score: 1

    Do you honestly think it takes MORE power to send a photon down fiber than it does to send an electron down copper? Seriously. What the #$#ck do you people think powers POTS?!?! AIR?!?

    Geezuz. If people with this asinine notion of "golly, Ma Bell werks fer me, yer stupid wich yo IP fone" had any clue how much infrastructure runs on very, VERY well redundantly powered IP lines (like, for instance, your analog calls once they travel 50 feet past your #@#$ing driveway), you'd not even think of uttering this silly meme.

  2. Depends... on FCC May Push Bells to Unbundle DSL · · Score: 1

    ...on who's lighting your fiber.

  3. I have an IP phone. on FCC May Push Bells to Unbundle DSL · · Score: 1

    ...which is FAR more useful than a POTS phone, which is probably why the company I work for, which has about a quarter million employees, has nothing but IP phones.

  4. What the hell kind of POTS service do YOU have? on FCC May Push Bells to Unbundle DSL · · Score: 1

    If my $12.99 POTS contract results in a $127.01 discount on my DSL, I'm thinking this action will have roughly, oh I don't know, a $12.99 effect on their bottom line.

  5. Re:Uh? on How About a Nice Game of Global Thermonuclear War? · · Score: 1

    Except that you are assuming the height of the United States' arsenal detonating with 100% effectiveness...

    Truth is, a nuclear attack isn't 100% assured to happen >>at all if launched, and even then, there's a HUGE difference between the 250kT weapon likely to be detonated by even CHINA, much less Korea and the 15MT capability of the United States.

    To use a tired, yet accurate, measure, you're talking 10 Hiroshima compared to 600 Hiroshima...

    Most potential nuclear attacks are measured in 100% casualty in terms of BLOCKS not square miles.

  6. Re:Experience with Government Secrets on Cost of Secrecy Continues to Increase · · Score: 1

    Hehehe... ...suffice it to say, erm, DHS is quite a similar experience. ...but I'm not one to gossip, so you didn't hear that from me.

  7. Depends on the definition. on Cost of Secrecy Continues to Increase · · Score: 1

    When people think "protecting government secrets" they immediately jump to Hollywood spy movie scenarios, not realizing that such a classification encompasses almost everything imaginable in government these days. Hell, I wouldn't be suprised if you need a clearance to clean the toilets at the Department of Agriculture.

  8. Re:Weapons of war. on Weapons of War Now Include Lightning Guns · · Score: 1

    However, using the MAD example, deterrence comes from the assurance of massive casualties.

    The rise of effective weapons like this will lower the threshold for using violence to deter resistance or enforce conformity, and, thus, lower the threshold for rational thought on the side possessing the weapons in question. You just fire the non-lethal weapon and to hell with the reason why you're being confronted. OTOH, if a non-lethal weapon is successful enough and the people on the receiving end are determined enough, the threat of effective non-lethal deterrence may increase the likelihood of raising the level of violence as a means of avoiding that deterrant.

    Don't think people won't calculate the difference between the willingness to indiscriminately neutralize by non-lethal means and the willingness to indiscriminately kill. Assuming that the non-lethal weapon in question is psychologically effective enough to give the impression of ~100% physical effectiveness, its presence may alter the situation such that your opponent will consider a limited lethal response more desirable than an unlimited non-lethal response and thus will prepare for the latter when you're preparing for the former. That is, when they might otherwise just bring their megaphones and banners, these weapons might ensure that they'll show up with grenades.

    However, I find the greater danger on the side of those possessing such weapons as it eliminates the moral questions of firing on people. Occasionally, it is worth wondering why you're having to send people out in riot gear in the first place.

  9. Actually, that's rather the point. on Uneducated IT Managers, and How to Deal? · · Score: 1

    Sometimes it takes a blinking idiot to point out the obvious. This is why I like to have the most simplistic morons I can find working as my QA testers. If I didn't code against them, *I* would be the one they called stupid because I failed to account for some inconceivably absurd circumstance that the brainless dolts came up with in ten seconds flat.

  10. Re:Slippery Slope on Is Your Boss a Psychopath? · · Score: 1

    After reading those questions damn near the entire working, adult population would register "be very afraid."

    Time to go pitch a tent in the woods and catch up on Thoreau. Cripes...

  11. More obviously on Strong Emotions May Cause Temporary Blindness · · Score: 1

    The control sequence was much, much slower.

    Seems to me the problem this test proces is that in arbitrary images displayed at 1/10th of a second are virtually impossible to process in the first place, regardless of some infinitessimal "trauma" associated with the image.

  12. Re:i'll second that on Space Meat Coming to your Kitchen · · Score: 1

    I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that my rutabaga didn't conceive of growing up, attending Harvard and becoming a lawyer. With that out of the way, yes, ALL biomass is potential food for something from large predators down to carrion scavangers, worms, bacteria, fungi and lovely, pretty orchids.

    Since I'm eventually going to be eaten by numerous living things, I have no problem joining the moment and eating other living things. While those other living things may have had "other ideas," which is debatable on a case-by-case basis (e.g. it's a bit of a stretch to think, say, a scallop had any ideas about anything as it has no brain) I have no illusions that any other carnivorous creature thinks about my 401k maturity before taking a chunk out of me. Whenever this subject comes up, I picture some idiot "freeing" the cute and cuddly lions and bears from the local zoo -- and ending up an afternoon canape.

    Seems to me a lot of this crap comes from the hubris of thinking that humans occupy a space outside the foodchain, despite the fact that you and all your excreta are being eaten every day. So, join the moment and show the rest of the foodchain the same respect it shows you and eat whatever the hell you want.

  13. Loyalty on Server Based Slots of the Future · · Score: 1

    The value of "comps" is almost precisely equal to your rate of gambling / the house edge.

    So, if the Casino's edge is 5% and you want that $300 room, you'll have to guarantee them that your time gambling will net them $300. So, if you sit around gambling for eight hours, you can probably get that comp if you throw $750 per hour across the table. However, if you spend most of the day between the pool and the buffet and maybe spend two hours at the tables, you'll have to be pushing $3k per hour at the dealer. Now, if you want the $1,500/night suite and dinner for two at the $100/plate restaurant and you're planning on gambling for four hours, you'll have to drop $10k per hour.

    The "benefit" here is that if your stats are up, you don't need a reservation -- there are always comp rooms because it makes more sense to comp a $300 room to someone who is tossing $6,000+ at the tables than to sell it to someone playing $500 on the nickel slots. and if you know what you're doing, your gambling losses won't far exceed your comps, but make no mistake, you're paying for them.

    This is one way the computers are your friend. At the tables, unless you're very conspicuous, you have to make an effort to make sure you're being rated. If you're playing the machines, every dime you bet goes into the comp calculation.

  14. Re:And what if... on Genetic Discrimination in the IT Workplace · · Score: 1

    What is the source for the reasoning that everyone has a "right" to work, and to work for a particular employer, to those who believe that?

    This is part of the notion of social contract. The working population pays taxes to support the "safety net" only insofar as the commercial sector does everything possible to ensure the lowest possible charges on those public insurance programs by virtue of employing in good faith as many people as possible. This is why unemployment insurance premiums are based on the rate of terminations without cause. An employer that is disproportionately volatile in its hiring and firing practices ends up paying more of the burden for ensuring that those workers do not end up as liabilities to AFDC or, worse, completely destitute and homeless, which society has deemed is "a bad thing," even if it is just in the sense that we don't want to see it and end up spending resources policing and incarcerating them that would be better spent on dealing with truly damaging criminal elements.

    It's very short-sighted to think that unfettered commerce is blindly "a good thing." There are trade-offs no matter how you organize the market and the notion of "right to work" is one example of mitigating one negative outcome by regulating the behavior of the entities most likely to contribute to it.

    Things such as screening for various genetic predispositions doesn't save you any money in the long run -- it just shifts the burden from private to public and that usually makes the end result substantially more expensive. So, the private companies take the burden of the least burdensome and leave the public sector to pay for the most burdensome.

    That's not a sustainable formula for social stability, but certain cynics seem to think it is an excellent formula for bankrupting the government, which incidentally, is you. Talk of cutting off your nose to spite your face...

  15. What is he? Well, literally, on Software Agents Can Help Time-Stressed Teams · · Score: 1

    Pique:
    1. To cause to feel resentment or indignation,
    2. To provoke; arouse
    3. To pride (oneself):
    4. Prick

    Paille:
    1. Straw, being something of little to no substance or value.

    Hmm... A more fitting name could not be found.

  16. Yeah, testing and review... on Choice of Language for Large-Scale Web Apps? · · Score: 1

    There's the rub, babe. Particularly the "review" part.

    The point, which you've obviously taken into account yet discarded for the sake of being contrarian, is that in an environment of any large application, there is a "testing and review" stage in the lifecycle.

    Certainly the vast, vast majority of major deployments contain varying degrees of Byzantine or worse "review." If your environment does not and you are managing such a large codebase, you are in for one hell of a CYA session (perhaps resume polishing, even) should anything not go as expected if that is not the case as the sole responsible party will thus be the developer who last typed "commit, deploy."

    If you happen to have such a rapid turnaround as is implied, the next question is, what species of beings occupy your organization? If "minutes" is truly the turnaround, clearly it is not "humans."

  17. Tiny. on Choice of Language for Large-Scale Web Apps? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If your code is at 20,000, you haven't even begun to get to the point where manageable code is truly problematic. A skilled developer can get a grip on that (about 400 printed pages) in a day unless it is utterly obfuscated.

    Now, with respect to #1 and #2 as applied to #3? The WORST of execution and compilation time generalized to _all_ bytecode? WTF?

    With a proper J2EE development environment (no .Net here), my compile/build/deploy cycle on most projects takes one command and, guffaw, 20k lines would compile in a few seconds. As for execution speed, this has been disproven so many times at this point that it is laughable.

    In any organized production environment (that is, not just Rinkydink, Inc), changes will NEVER be immediate, usually they'll take at LEAST several weeks or months to implement, so this idea that somehow a 30-second build process is an impedement to large applications is just a joke. In such an environment, anyone who would just run in and perform a quick-and-dirty "fix" on the production server would be escorted out of the building before they got up to get their next cup of coffee.

    However, we seem to agree that with any language, the problem exists between keyboard and chair...

  18. The corollary on Websurfing Damaging U.S. Productivity? · · Score: 1

    If you can't get your job done in a normal work day, you're not giving 110%, you're just working 110% as long to achieve 100% production. All that does is delay production and reduce your hourly rate if you are on salary or increase the cost if you are paid overtime. Imagine if you were CEO and ran the company that way.

    That kind of behavior encourages bad management more than it demonstrates a solid work ethic. Nothing I hate more than someone who diddled their day away with personal errands calling ME at 10:30PM because NOW they need their damned financial report. Screw that, I'll get to it during normal hours, just as they should have. People will learn very quickly not to pull that shit if you don't let them.

    I used to positively live at work. I actually enjoyed my job and hated traffic, so a ten or twelve hour day was normal even though I was exempt from overtime and was only required to work 7.5 hours. The day I worked 21 hours straight to fix a problem someone else caused and was then reprimanded for leaving for eight hours to, oh I don't know, SLEEP was the day I stopped "giving 110%." Don't fool yourself. People recognize talented workers whether they work 37.5 hours or 70 hours per week. 99.999% of the time, the latter just gets you used and abused. Sure, you may get a promotion, but it'll be because they can get 3000 hours out of you for $65k ($21/hour) instead of 1875 out of someone else ($34/hour). Bravo, babe.

  19. Power is definitely it... on Win2000 Still Performs on 8-year-old Hardware · · Score: 1

    I recently acquired by chance a stack of 300mhz machines. After toying around with the idea of running them as a linux cluster to provide roughly a 1.5Ghz machine with about 1GB of ram, it quickly became obvious that at the end of the year it would suck up about 5,256KWh. At $0.06/KWh, it'll cost $315 per year to run--about four times what a comparable new machine would burn, the cost difference being roughly the price of a new machine of greater specs to say nothing of architecture. After four years, that's a $1,000 difference in operating cost--by far enough to justify simply throwing out the old. It's an interesting exercise in extending the life of hardware. It just doesn't make any financial sense, even if you don't need more computing power. Considering that equation and the fact the, frankly, the new whiz-bang effect seems to be waning, it seems to me manufacturers should start labeling their computers like refrigerators and print the expected electric bill next to the price. Sort of "yes, your old 486 still runs just fine, but it's costing you more than the price of this new machine just to keep it turned on."

  20. Re:What case was that? on What's On Your Network? · · Score: 1

    However, it's a joke in need of better writers.

  21. What case was that? on What's On Your Network? · · Score: 1

    Seriously, please direct us to one single, solitary example of a company that was literally shut down because an employee was looking at a stiff nipple.

    Honestly, so much of this liability paranoia is such crap it boggles the mind that people actually believe it. Sure, if someone is doing something illegal, the company may be questioned and asked for assistance by the authorities, but that's a far cry from "Sometimes it even results in the closing of an entire company and results in a rise in unemployment which these people called "taxpayers" really have something against."

    Seriously, people using this sort of bullshit language are far more to blame for these absurd policies (be they factual or otherwise) than any real liability exposure.

  22. No, I think this is terrible. on Supreme Court Rules Private Property Can be Seized · · Score: 1

    However, I don't think the abuse in in the Supreme Court. The city made a very good case in passing constitutional muster. It wasn't just "we can make more tax revenue" as people have been crowing.

    This is a problem that should be dealt with at the local level. The Supreme Court should not be the venue where city redevelopment plans are argued. People's laziness and apathy about becoming involved in the local democratic process should not be used as justification for engaging the highest court of the country. If the people of the city didn't want this to happen, they could have stopped it. If there was so much corruption that they got steam-rolled, they could recall every goddamned one of the elected officials. Government doesn't always work, but it is subject to consent.

  23. Pardon, BUT... on Supreme Court Rules Private Property Can be Seized · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This was a constitutional question. The so-called "liberal" judges restrained the issue to whether the local government had abused their power and simply established that, yes, they clearly had the "public good" in mind and were compensating the owners of the property. The fifth amendment guarantees ONLY that you will be compensated for such seizures, NOT that such seizures will not occur and NOT that such seizures must be purely for non-private benefit. The Supreme Court has no business deciding ANYTHING but the constitutional question and that is precisely what was done. Having read the opinion, they did an excellent job of determining that the local government had a well established justification with the public good in mind and that the owners were being compensated ergo it was a constitutionally sound action--thus deferring any further judgment to the appropriate state and local bodies. What, precisely, is improper about that?

    In that sense, these "liberal" judges were being extremely CONSERVATIVE. The so-called "conservatives" were wanting to run rough-shod over the constitution to leap-frog the federal government straight over the state into an issue appropriately handled by local government. THAT would be a "liberal" action in the usual pejorative sense of the term.

  24. Completely disagree. on Orlando Cancels Free WiFi Project · · Score: 1

    That's 810 connections per month, or two bucks each.

    Assume for the moment that these were city employees. That's NOTHING.

    I used to live in Long Beach, CA. They started a WiFi project and, like Orlando, it is a city that lives on convention income. As a benefit to conventioneers, this type of expense barely registers on the accounting books, yet it is GREAT PR.

    Abandoning this sort of thing is just penny wise and pound foolish. It's a loss-leader. Get with the program.

  25. Re:It's PLEBEIAN. on Censored Nagasaki Bomb Story Found · · Score: 1


    I'm an atheist, but I prefer to stop short of blatant blasphemy. I say "geezuz" like many say "Yhwh." Deliberate misspelling is much different than obvious ignorance.