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User: presidenteloco

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  1. Electronic Countermeasure on Radar That Sees Through Walls Built In Garage · · Score: 1

    Put on your tinfoil hat and turn on your microwave oven.

    CAUTION: do not stick your head in the microwave.

  2. Be a translator, a general, and a good waiter on Ask Slashdot: What Makes a Good Work Environment For Developers and IT? · · Score: 1

    Translator:
    Mediate with reality as a guide between stakeholders and software/IT people.
    Don't ever ask for an estimate then say something to the effect of let's try to get it done in half that time.
    Live with the triangle and manage it. Something has to give. You decide what.

    Waiter:
    A really good waiter doesn't break my flow when I'm in the middle of a good conversation, and yet is there with useful solutions or suggestions when needed, and anticipates next needs. A good waiter facilitates a great meal experience for all concerned, by artful interventions and artful absence.

    General:
    Wins by exploring for and prioritizing risks and opportunities, well in advance. Uses an 80-20 rule. Get's er done. Earns respect by good personal example of doing the job well and consistency in the decisions and commitments of leadership.

  3. It doesn't matter how knowledgeable I am on Google 'Makes People Think They Are Smarter Than They Are' · · Score: 3, Interesting

    any more (or anyone for that matter).

    What matters is how knowledgeable the cyborg comprised of me + net is.

    There are two kinds of cases where it still does matter how well I can do on my own.
    1. Where time is of the essence and I don't have time to hyper-learn.
    2. When I have passed the "Warning: You are leaving the twitterverse" signs on the dirt track off the highway.

    What's important in most cases today is how effective cyborg-me is at systematically formulating good questions then systematically acquiring, integrating, evaluating, and using knowledge.

    Stop thinking what matters is how good a human individual is at doing something/knowing something. That doesn't matter that much anymore, and will matter less in the near future. I like maintaining my celestial navigation skills, but it's really just for nostalgic reasons.

  4. It depends how good/bad the old shit is on Why You Should Choose Boring Technology · · Score: 1

    Whether to go new or not should depend on how horrendous the old way of doing something was, AND how stable, well documented, and community supported the new thing is AND how many of the old way's fundamental problems/weaknesses the new thing solves.

    It's not a simple decision, and needs to be made case by case.

    What really matters is the quality of the technology and the community that is actively working with it, supporting it and improving it. Not the age.

  5. So now we're supposed to believe on NSA: We Mulled Ending Phone Program Before Edward Snowden Leaks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    that it's stopped.

    Mm hmmm.

    (google "disinformation")

  6. Re:custom languages don't have functions on A Bechdel Test For Programmers? · · Score: 1

    Yeah. A language without functions/procedures/methods/named predicates/subroutines (same thing basically) is not a programming language, unless it's assembler, in which case, if you're not using standard conventions that essentially implement organized subroutines (i.e. functions...) you're not doing it right.

  7. One thing I don't get on Generate Memorizable Passphrases That Even the NSA Can't Guess · · Score: 1

    Ok, if I'm writing a webapp that accepts a password, presumeably if I wanted to increase security somewhat I would put in a guessing rate limiter.
    5 strikes and you're out (for a while).

    So assuming (a reasonable assumption still in most cases, I hope) that the adversary does not have the file of password hashes, how exactly do they try the trillion guesses per second?

    Explain please. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.

  8. Geoblocking is highway robbery on European Commission Proposes "Digital Single Market" and End To Geoblocking · · Score: 1

    It's good to see that the bandits and bridge trolls trying desperately to maintain artificial scarcity and artificial economic friction may soon be disarmed.

    Now let's just make that global.

  9. Re:And now why this can not be done in the USofA on Costa Rica Goes 75 Days Powering Itself Using Only Renewable Energy · · Score: 2

    "What everyone needs to come to grips with is that there is no energy source without environmental impact."

    True, but that doesn't mean we should throw our hands up and stop exercising judgement.

    Impacts can be weighed, placed on a relative magnitude and severity of risk/impact scale, and acted on accordingly.

    On such a scale, the impacts of for example, solar PV and wind technology are fairly obviously much less than that of continued fossil fuel energy systems.

  10. Re:What a stupid piece. on Costa Rica Goes 75 Days Powering Itself Using Only Renewable Energy · · Score: 1

    Hydroelectric and solar photovoltaic energy, and wind power, and fossil fuels, are all non-renewable in the several billion years time scale, since they are all byproducts of the energy gradient caused by the sun's electromagnetic radiation hitting the Earth assymetrically, and that nuclear process will eventually burn out, and before that change to a level that won't sustain life here.

    So the term renewable is actually a functional term which has a time span parameters i.e. renewable(cycleLengthLow, cycleLengthHigh, maxOverallDuration ) which is true for certain ranges of duration for different energy exploitation technologies. Hydro-electric then, if used to a level that reduces buffers, is renewable(1y,1y,5billion y), solar pv is renewable (1d, 1m, 5billion y), etc. where as fossil fuel use (at buffer exhaustion consumption rate) is renewable(100m y, 500my, 5billion y).

    Roughly.

  11. Re: Oracle on Why I Choose PostgreSQL Over MySQL/MariaDB · · Score: 1

    If you have a team of unemployed DBA plodders that you need to provide work for, and an employer that needs to get rid of piles of money fast as a tax dodge, use Oracle, ...

  12. So my cat is doing illegal commercial antics? on FAA Says Ad-Bearing YouTube Drone Videos Constitute "Commercial Use" · · Score: 1

    without a license? (pronounced "lee sons" - see "The Pink Panther - Peter Sellers" "Do you have a lee sons for your moon kay?" "Show me the lee sons!"

  13. Losing the MagSafe charging connector? Arrrrrgh on Does USB Type C Herald the End of Apple's Proprietary Connectors? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That is a severely regressive design move.
    This computer should have retained magsafe for charging then had one of these USB-C things for, you know, port stuff.

    My current MBP would have been knocked from table/chair to floor ten times now if not for magsafe. What the hell were they thinking?

    I can only hope the next ultralight MB Pro retains magsafe and a couple of ports.

  14. Just how warm was Mars surface back then on Martian Canyons May Have Been Carved By Wind · · Score: 1

    that water could flow on it?

    And what accounts for the difference in surface temperature, given that Mars's orbit didn't shift by that much?

  15. Re:"I forgot" on Quebecker Faces Jail For Not Giving Up Phone Password To Canadian Officials · · Score: 3, Funny

    Maybe you just need a nice quiet place with no distractions (like an outside window) where you can remember.

  16. Re:The poison pin ... on Quebecker Faces Jail For Not Giving Up Phone Password To Canadian Officials · · Score: 4, Funny

    The second password shouldn't brick the phone, it should take you to a second version of your phone's file system, which contains only the "happy birds" game, a collection of bad but sincere teenage poetry, and a spreadsheet listing the names of each member of Canada's federal government cabinet alongside a 6 figure dollar number.

  17. Whole areas of art and music on Gritty 'Power Rangers' Short Is Not Fair Use · · Score: 2

    wouldn't exist if it weren't for copyright or "IP" violation.

    Traditional music, folk music, jazz, blues. And what about the second and subsequent painter working in any characterizable style/genre.

    Greed vs Art is about what it amounts to.

  18. Re:Simple methodology on The Programmers Who Want To Get Rid of Software Estimates · · Score: 4, Funny

    My methodology:

    If someone gives me their estimate for a software project or task, I double it and add 30.

    If someone asks me for an estimate for a software project or task, I rough it out, then double it and add 30.

    It's really amazing how much stress that avoids (oh, and it also does a passable job of converting Celsius to Fahrenheit.)

  19. Re: Cost savings on Argonne National Laboratory Shuts Down Online Ask a Scientist Program · · Score: 1

    Ever heard of a brain break?

    (Of course you have. You're doing slashdot.)

    The idea that you can get better productivity out of scientists and engineers by preventing them from taking brain breaks in between their manic periods is ridiculous newbie MBA talk.

  20. Re: Cost savings on Argonne National Laboratory Shuts Down Online Ask a Scientist Program · · Score: 1

    "You want this kind of thing to continue? Make sure there's funding (and paid time) earmarked for doing it."

    So let's see. A simple web-app with a database hosted on a crappy server computer somewhere.
    That's going to cost the whopping sum of what $50 a year to maintain right?

    I for one welcome our new fiscal watchdog overlords.

  21. So this is a "please assassinate me" honeypot on Darkleaks: an Online Black Market For Selling Secrets · · Score: 1

    Obviously.

    Don't go there.

  22. Another way of stating the problem on What To Do After Robots Take Your Job · · Score: 1

    4) We've engineered the world to produce our needs and material wants without much supervision or labor.
          a. Now what do we do with our time, and
          b. how do we value ourselves and
          c. each other?

    Personally, I would have no trouble with a. I have an infinite capacity for defining new questions and projects and explorations to fill more than my lifetime.
    b. I suspect would not be an issue for most people if it weren't for nasty tendencies in our nature or aculturation around c.

    So for my money (or should I say my issued-at-birth crypto currency barter economy exchange tokens), c. is what we need to think hard on and be culturally ingenious about now.

  23. Social health benefits on Alcohol's Evaporating Health Benefits · · Score: 1

    I suspect the positive benefits found were because people who are relaxed and pro-social enough to have the occasional drink and a laugh with friends are going to be less solitary and stressed individuals.

    It's well known that people with a support group do better on several health and longevity metrics than solitary stoics.

  24. Re:Not "written by a computer" on The Poem That Passed the Turing Test · · Score: 1

    Except it's easy to write a maximally complex program, with sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and have it consume random data as its initial conditions.

    In such a case, the programmer cannot know what the program will generate, nor even, in some cases, the general pattern of what the program will generate.

    In the same way, no programmer who wrote part, even a substantial part, of Google's search program knows what answers you'll get when you type in your next query.

    The algorithms are doing it all by themselves, with random input, and complex autonomous alteration of their behaviour based on feedback from that input.

  25. Google search would fail the Turing test on The Poem That Passed the Turing Test · · Score: 1

    because it is too knowledgeable, when you ask it very specific questions about a wide range of domains. No single person is that good, and we would know that.

    That's one of the reason's why the Turing test is not a terribly useful test for presence of intelligence.
    Why should a computer have to simulate human knowledge gaps and attention-wanderings and unjustified personalizations of answers, typical of human conversation, in order to be considered to have intelligence?

    And no. It's not the human contributors of the answers who are responsible for Google being able to answer your specific question. It's the google algorithm and digital memory structures which are answering your question, based on a very general process of matching your new input (the query) against lots of related memorized old input (the knowledge base).