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  1. Re:disclosure on How One Climate-Change Skeptic Has Profited From Corporate Interests · · Score: 1

    $100 honorarium is not a big deal. I've seen people wave it off with "donate it" just to avoid the paperwork.

  2. what conflict? on How One Climate-Change Skeptic Has Profited From Corporate Interests · · Score: 2

    Receiving money to conduct research is conflict of interest if the funds come from parties with vested interest in findings' results? 1.2 million over a decade is hardly a "fortune". It's on par with grants received by any small-size lab. In fact, probably much less. If he is quoted as often as the summary claims, he should be receiving at least 5 times as much in government funding.

  3. Re:No, absolutely not. on Ask Slashdot: How Can Technology Improve the Judicial System? · · Score: 1

    buh... slashdot didn't allow a single < go through. The "O(n^K) O(n!)" was meant to says "O(n^K) is less than O(n!)".

  4. No, absolutely not. on Ask Slashdot: How Can Technology Improve the Judicial System? · · Score: 1

    The only thing which can improve the judicial system is making it as luddite as possible. US has a common law legal system. All common law systems have O(n!) complexity. Any attempts to fight the expanding complexity by hiring more lawyers are attempts at linear scaling (O(n)) solutions to O(n!) problems. Adding computers into the mix allows for exponential solutions O(n^K). Which creates the illusion of solving the problem because O(n^K) > O(n). But, for sufficiently large n and any fixed K, O(n^K) O(n!). So this creates a problem which will manifest itself as the system collapses under its own complexity with justice becoming completely impossible. The only reason that common law system existed and were viable before computers is that people forget. So all attempts at hiring more lawyers go out the windows and O(n) does grow very large; laws which are at the centers of the nodes which cause common law spider web of irrevocable "precedents" get repealed. But hiding this obvious need for repealing certain laws inside of the O(n^k) solutions makes near impossible to discern which laws need repealing. Which causes the whole legal system to collapse. The only solution to winning this game is not to play.

  5. Re: Wait ... on A123 Sues Apple For Poaching Employees · · Score: 1

    An employer can't make you sign a contract that says "...and I will be your slave forever and will never work for another company."

    "I'll be your slave forever", no, they can't. "I will never seek any form of employment anywhere else", yes, one most certainly can enter into such a contract. Even if no future considerations are given. It may not be prudent, but one can enter into such a contract.

    As long one enters into it with full knowledge (not likely), one can agree to such terms. People exchange immediate considerations for future opportunities all the time (selling proceeds from future rights for immediate cash payout would be one such example). And no one "forced" anyone to sign a contract. Employment can be employment at will without any contract restricting the terms beyond those established by laws.

    Having said all of this, I still don't understand how they can sue Apple for violating terms of a contract to which Apple is not a party.

  6. Re:First people complain about not poaching on A123 Sues Apple For Poaching Employees · · Score: 1

    Apple's not a party to the agreement though, are they? This isn't a criminal matter, so it's not like they can be co-conspirators in causing damages to the claimants. Whatever damage they suffered, can only be caused by the violating employees themselves. 123 can try suing the employees for breach, but if I were in their place, I'd already have had a deal with Apple to cover legal costs in such a contingency.

  7. Re:We are your gravediggers, capitalists on Mood-Altering Wearable Thync Releases First Brain Test Data · · Score: 1

    That makes no sense. Wealth devalues. So hoarding that is not invested has a de facto tax on it. The wealth gap can only be produced by continued increase in the ownership of the means of production (due to continued investing in new means of production).

  8. Re:We are your gravediggers, capitalists on Mood-Altering Wearable Thync Releases First Brain Test Data · · Score: 0

    umm.. so freedom is slavery? I guess it goes hand in hand with war is peace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2....

  9. Re:We are your gravediggers, capitalists on Mood-Altering Wearable Thync Releases First Brain Test Data · · Score: 2

    A system in which new means of production are created by the private interest reinvesting gains from business activity (aka "free capital")?

  10. what do you expect? on DOT Warns of Dystopian Future For Transportation · · Score: 0

    when George Bush's title "the last US President" should be the more permanent "The Last US President"? Yeah, yeah, flamebait me into oblivious, but no matter how leftist you are, you know Obama doesn't even bother with the law even if you agree with his goals. At least, Bush hired lawyers before deciding on where to walk the fine line between legal and illegal. Obama's more of a "law shmoe" kind of executive. So his DOT puts out SciFi as prediction for the future. Sure. Why not. He can't say we are in a recession because that would mean that we are. He can't say that Romney's plan for solving the national health care problems was better than his plan (and than Romney's plan for solving MA health care problems), he can't say that Russia is waging war in the Middle East (and winning) in order to divert attention from its war in Europe. Never mind that he can't say that the only way he could figure out how to solve the housing crises was to inflate the prices of everything else until they kept up with the prices of inflated housing market. So he puts out SciFi from DOT. Why not?

  11. waaaaiiit on Female-Run Companies Often do Better Than Male-Run Ones (Video) · · Score: 1

    How to lie with statistics... "up to"? What's that "down to"? What's average and what's the median?

  12. well on Massive Layoff Underway At IBM · · Score: 1, Interesting

    You can only expect people to buy the "most of world's data is stored on IBM mainframes" crap for so long. Virtualization made mainframes irrelevant. No one ever needed the full resources of a mainframe. They were only used to run multiple virtualized instances. The cloud made the difference between instances running on one piece vs instances running on multiple pieces of iron irrelevant because of cloud storage. You CAN compute a billion transactions in a day and then not use the hardware used for those calculations for the rest of the day now. Mainframe model simply can't compete with it. Oh, and all the legacy code which is presumably irreplacable because no one understands it... well, all the language research which was done because of the domain specific language fad has now made it trivil to tranlsate solutions between languages fairly efficiently. IBM simply has lost every single niche they had up to now. It's not the death of an industry as some suggest... just of the business model of that particular company.

  13. Adapt the lawyer model on Building a Good Engineering Team In a Competitive Market · · Score: 1

    If someone is instrumental to a law practice, they get a partnership. Why shouldn't the same model apply to other endeavors where people are required to be highly competent and creative in their endeavors towards increasing the outcome of a business. The 9-to-5 model is a remnant of the age where people worked on assembly lines and performed repetitive tasks. If you want individuals whose work is non-repetitive and requires half-a-lifetime of dedication to master, why should they settle for anything less than a partnership?

  14. "hacktivist"? on FBI Put Hactivist Jeremy Hammond On a Terrorist Watchlist · · Score: 0
    From the article:

    Hammond is currently serving the remainder of a 10-year prison sentence for his involvement in a series of high-profile cyberattacks targeting federal agencies, private government contractors, and police departments.

    Also from the article:

    “If we want to use the terrorism database to protect human life, it’s only effective if it is narrowly focused on people who actually pose a threat to human life,” former FBI agent Michael German, now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Daily Dot.

    Simple question: how is a civilian gaining control, without authorization, of command-and-control equipment of police departments and federal agencies not a threat to human life? Did he inform them of their security vulnerabilities in order to allow them to fix em? Granted, it's not his responsibility to do so, but hacking into multiple government facilities for any purposes other than concern for their safety should at least indicate that he is a person worth watching, shouldn't it? It's not like there is a kill-on-sight order against him. He is on a watch list.

  15. pardon, but on Scientists 3D-Printing Cartilage For Medical Implants · · Score: 1

    How is this different from what Harvard Apparatus is already doing in clinical studies?

  16. Re:The thing about new languages... on Is D an Underrated Programming Language? · · Score: 1

    Well, technically speaking, if your C++ spins python instances, it's JIT as well. Not to mention that it might be generating and loading shared libs (or at least accepting some sort of signed injected shared libs) in order to deal with unpredictability of changing requirements. I am actually somewhat baffled that the same people who think that dynamically generated shared libs are clever can be the people who think that JIT runtimes are crutches.

    Having said that, let me actually get to your point. Semantically, C++ is C + syntactic sugar. So, while it's not implemented this way (anymore), it can be. So can any other language which has a run-time similar to that of C. Once you allow for language costructs which call into the native C libs on a platform, your language is good to go to be pre-processed into C at compile time and than compiled with whatever compiles your C.

    BTW, syntactic sugar is not an insult. Syntactic sugar is a Good Thing (TM). It allows to offload to machines work which would otherwise have to be done by humans.

  17. Re: jessh on "Mammoth Snow Storm" Underwhelms · · Score: 2

    How far is long island even from NYC?

    an hour by train or 2 hours by car.

  18. Re:jessh on "Mammoth Snow Storm" Underwhelms · · Score: 1
    Except that this

    There is a snowstorm and the officials leave the city running. Possible severe damage to infrastructure, possible death toll, cleanup is significantly more complicated and takes far longer. Officials are berated for their carelessness.

    is not the case. Giulliani to deal with 2-3 feet of snow in 1 night ('95 or '96) and the city was back to normal within a few days. Effective didn't require national guard or anything. The city managed it. Effective leaders are effective.

  19. Re:Damned if you do .... on "Mammoth Snow Storm" Underwhelms · · Score: 1

    Not really. There was a time when NYC got 2.5 feet of snow under Giuliani. Subways didn't run for a full day or two AFTER the snow. Effective government is effective. Delusional government is full of hot air.

  20. regulators plan on "Mammoth Snow Storm" Underwhelms · · Score: 1

    nature laughs.

  21. Re:It's a little early on Americans Support Mandatory Labeling of Food That Contains DNA · · Score: 1

    Minerals (such as table salt) can be found without any additives containing DNA.

  22. Re:No way! on Senator Who Calls STEM Shortage a Hoax Appointed To Head Immigration · · Score: 1

    "Cheaper" is hardly the issue. Salaries can be adjusted. But forcing citizens to compete on workplace conditions with "guests" for whom getting fired is an equivalent of getting deported is quite another story.

  23. sqlite on Ask Slashdot: Linux Database GUI Application Development? · · Score: 1

    it's portable, doesn't require a runtime and had bindings in most languages you'll want to use.

  24. Re:Symptom of thinking vocabulary is the key on Little-Known Programming Languages That Actually Pay · · Score: 1

    OO is a nuisance. If C just added direct access to the return value space instead pushing the whole return value on stack, OO would have been an esoteric footnote in some theoretical comp sci book. Instead, you get a paradigm which mixes data and code in one name space and completely takes attention away from the duality between data and functions. Oh, and without yield, no one would have heard of Python. You'd just here the gripes about whitespace being overly restrictive from everyone who wants braces. yield is what makes Python elegant. Metaclasses (ie, post-creation templates) and descriptors (ie, pre-creation templates) are actually somewhat cludgy. You understand that you can do everything in Python without ever having to worry about creating a single queue simply because of yield, do you not? Do you really not see how that simplifies code?Breadth-first tree traversal via simple recursion? Show me what other language will let you do that.

  25. interesting on In-Flight Service Gogo Uses Fake SSL Certificates To Throttle Streaming · · Score: 1

    I was wondering why ALA stopped offering them altogether after the New Year's. I guess they knew something was coming ahead of time and didn't want their name to be pushed into the mudslinging to come.