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User: Entrope

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  1. Re:Security clearance on Ask Slashdot: Moving To an Offshore-Proof Career? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Citation needed on why it doesn't work so well. For one thing, railgun tech probably isn't all that highly classified. For another, offshoring to other members of the Five Eyes isn't going to reduce costs much -- and highly classified stuff generally couldn't be offshored anywhere that is much cheaper than the US. For a third, some highly classified stuff is NOFORN (not releasable to foreign nationals, even if they otherwise have appropriate security clearances and otherwise might have a need to know).

  2. Re:Seriously? on LinkedIn Used To Create Database of 27,000 US Intelligence Personnel · · Score: 1

    You should write a letter. Or file a lawsuit. I'm sure that the US court system would show all due appreciation for your desire to prevent people from exercising their freedom to associate with LinkedIn.

  3. Yeah, data quality in this seems pretty poor. It looks like the only "useful"/interesting fields are -- no surprise -- the skill and contact lists. Most of these resumes only have matching keywords under skills, and I would guess the only useful thing you can do with the data set is social network analysis. The data is also practically anti-normalized: Most of the fields for a given user are repeated for each position that a person has held, so grepping for things turns up way more hits than it should.

    I suspect that LinkedIn's keyword search functions tried to be "helpful" but ended up pulling in a bunch of iffy results. There are -- purported -- people in there named "1 2" and "DC SECURITY CLEARANCE CONSULTANTS, LLC.". There are at least a few people listed in the 'EQUATION_(Group)'_SIGINT list whose only connection to the spy world seems to be an interest in differential equations. Other people, in lots of the lists, worked directly or indirectly for the US Government in the past -- but the keyword hits are for unrelated positions. You can probably guess which distillery has an awful lot of employees who don't seem to have ever done government work, but are still listed in 'MAKERS_MARK'_SIGINT. And no points for guessing what popular software development methodology lumps a lot of people into 'AGILEVIEW'_SIGINT (even without "view" being anywhere in their resume or position history).

  4. Re:Can't we all just get along? on When Enthusiasm For Free Software Turns Ugly · · Score: 1

    Emacs is a nice operating system, but it sorely lacks an editor, an init process, an audio mixer and an IPC messaging bus.

  5. I've gotten Amber Alerts on my phone without using any data service. If the RF protocols that kind of emergency broadcast, I am sure they support more traditional ones as well.

  6. Re: Debunking a myth on Would-Be Bomber Arrested In Kansas; Planned Suicide Attack on Ft. Riley · · Score: 1

    Do you always spout such vapid drivel when you decide to avoid a question? It makes me suspect you're not really interested in thinking for yourself or addressing criticism -- only in name-calling and self-congratulation.

  7. Re:Debunking a myth on Would-Be Bomber Arrested In Kansas; Planned Suicide Attack on Ft. Riley · · Score: 1

    Cole's thesis is that Islamic law forbids terrorism. The bailey version of the argument is that this is somehow relevant to modern life. The motte version is that there is textual support for this prohibition.

    Personally, I think he knows that he is engaging in a motte-and-bailey argument. Did you realize what he did when you cited him?

  8. Re: the Qt is vastly superior to .net on Mono 4 Released, First Version To Adopt Microsoft Code · · Score: 1

    What made the Qt4 breakage "a necessary evil" but also prevented them from adopting remotely modern C++ principles at the same time? Why was that breakage good, but making it practical for developers to adopt standard C++ practices could, and can, be so lightly set aside?

    The sad thing is that Qt people are probably going to remain stuck in a 1990s mindset about C++ as long as people like you are willing to make apologetics for their misdesigns.

  9. Re: the Qt is vastly superior to .net on Mono 4 Released, First Version To Adopt Microsoft Code · · Score: 1

    Non-iterator types? In *my* C++? It's more likely than you think!

  10. Re: the Qt is vastly superior to .net on Mono 4 Released, First Version To Adopt Microsoft Code · · Score: 1

    As you point out, Qt 4 broke source compatibility in a major way -- so obviously it is not the kind of showstopper you suggest it should be. I would propose using idiomatic C++ design approaches, rather than sticking to architectural decisions that made sense 20 years ago before there was much consistency between C++ compilers. Nowadays, there is no good reason to prefer QString over std::string or std::wstring (and many good reasons to prefer the latter), and the same applies to every Qt container type. The Qt idiom of pass-by-copy-on-write-value makes runtime performance hard to predict, requires care in multithreaded use (do all types implement COW in a thread-safe manner?), and is very much at odds with the standard C++ library. Qt's efforts to make things "just work" end up hiding build-time, storage and execution-time costs, making it hard to figure out how to optimize code.

    As you say, it is not Qt's fault that C++ took so long to really be a cohesive, modern language -- but it is Qt's fault that it continues on as if the state of C++ were the same as it was 15 or 20 years ago.

  11. Re: the Qt is vastly superior to .net on Mono 4 Released, First Version To Adopt Microsoft Code · · Score: 1, Informative

    I haven't looked at Qt 5 -- does it still insist on duplicating the STL except with a horrible naming convention and poorly justified design changes, making it painful to use any non-Qt C++ library?

  12. Re:$100 million on Education Company Monitors Social Media For Test References · · Score: 1

    The same universe as what? My argument doesn't rest on some idea of the way things used to be. What are you smoking that makes you think name-dropping NCLB or RTTT is a convincing argument? What does the current affordability of college have to do with whether standardized testing at the K-12 level helps charter schools? (For the record, I think an awful lot, and maybe a majority, of college degrees are currently overpriced, and students are suckers for taking out big loans to pay for them.)

    Charters are judged -- even more harshly -- based on results of these standardized tests. The fact that there's a mechanism to set up charter schools when the public schools suck has nothing to do with the fact that governments have long tried to, and still do, push private schools into the margin. Government's efforts to do so make a mockery of the AC's claim that this social-media snooping debacle was caused by "the philosophy that the free market will be the best solution in every walk of life".

  13. Re:$100 million on Education Company Monitors Social Media For Test References · · Score: 1

    Why in the world do you think that standardized testing is good for, or inherent to, charter schools? Standardized testing long predates charter schools. Standardized testing -- and standardized curricula, which is what Common Core is really pushing -- are in many ways an antithesis to charter schools. Charter schools are successful to the extent that they can distinguish themselves from what their (public or private) competitors offer. If all schools have the same material and the same tests, and those mandated bits cover as much of the school year as Common Core says they must, then charter schools will have precious little to distinguish themselves with. Besides, charter schools are at best a hybrid between private and public education. They're good in that they generally let parents choose a school for their children, but bad in that they are much more accountable to the existing public-school bureaucracy rather than to parents.

    The primary way that government has (very intentionally) pushed private schools to the sideline is by using fairly uniform taxes, usually in the form of property taxes, to pay for the public schools. Anyone who wants to send a child to a private school has, until the very recent phenomenon of school-choice vouchers, had to pay twice: Once for public schools, and once for the private school they choose for the child.

  14. Re:$100 million on Education Company Monitors Social Media For Test References · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There are special needs kids who can't just click through a test on a computer screen -- blind children are an obvious example, and anyone with dyslexia needs special accommodations for the test to accurately measure skills beyond reading comprehension. Anything more complicated than a multiple-choice question -- for example, being able to get partial credit for showing work in a math or science problem, or any essay question -- tends to be very hard to grade by computer. Setting up computer-focused course materials takes extra work, and if that doesn't amortize over enough classes, it is wasted effort. How often does the course material need to be reworked, do to changes in the available hardware and software platforms? Does the computerized curriculum mean that schools in the inner city, rich suburbs, and rural areas all need to have their students follow the same curriculum, or is there any room to tailor to local needs and abilities?

    There certainly is a lot of budget that is wasted or abused in public schools, and bureaucracy and teacher's unions contribute much to that, but good solutions are not always as simple as they seem from the outside. If they were, we'd see more success stories of how a plucky reformer (with backing from the right school board members or whomever else) was able to turn a failing school around and deliver improved results for notably less money.

  15. Re:$100 million on Education Company Monitors Social Media For Test References · · Score: 3

    What part of one level of government coercing another level of government to adopt new educational standards, and then both of them together working to select a contractor to do these extra things (that even the government realizes it's too incompetent to run on its own), all while pushing private schools to the sideline, reminds you of a free market?

  16. Re:So which way do you propose? on How Activists Tried To Destroy GPS With Axes · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's a lousy analogy. A better analogy in this case would be that someone offended by apartheid took an axe to the bus, and after being arrested, ranted about the white people's plot to breed black people into Morlocks. Does that help clarify why Lumsdaine is such a counter-productive "activist"? His attempt was doomed to fail -- it would not stop either the military-industrial complex, or even the particular program he went after, but would put off practically everyone who disagreed with him and some of those who did agree with him.

  17. Unless a state passes a right-to-work law (California has not), "closed shops" are allowed under Federal law and typically required by union contracts. A "closed shop" agreement means that employees must be union members at the time of hire, or must join the union within a certain period. To conform with the First Amendment, employees who do not wish to pay for the union's "extra" activities (beyond collective negotiation for their bargaining unit that the employee belongs to) can opt out of full union membership and pay a reduced rate for the union's representation. The reduction is almost never a big reduction, which might surprise people who know how much unions spend on political activity. Also, people who do opt out can no longer vote on what the union should negotiate for, and unions like to make them social outcasts, so there are strong incentives to not opt out.

  18. Re:... Driverless cars? on Teamsters Seek To Unionize More Tech Shuttle Bus Drivers In Silicon Valley · · Score: 1

    Jimmy Hoffa was unavailable to comment for this story about the Teamsters' violent behavior and links to organized crime.

  19. The money to pay for benefits will come out of the employee's paycheck one way or another. If the employer has to pay employees when they're not working, it means the employee's per-working-hour salary will be lower than it would be otherwise.

    Drivers who would get "50% pay when ill" are probably not that likely to stay home, and most companies that have policies like that require a doctor's note when someone takes advantage of the policy (to deter people from abusing it). Making your employer part of your relationship with your doctor should be an option for the employee, not a requirement.

  20. Re: Not this shit again on Bill Nye Disses "Regular" Software Writers' Science Knowledge · · Score: 1

    You do know that IEEE 754 defines, and two IBM mainframe architectures implement, decimal floating point formats and arithmetic, right? Some languages -- mostly to support financial applications -- provide data types that are defined in decimal floating-point terms.

    Using these is uncommon, there are various tradeoffs for decimal floating point, and the values are encoded using bits, but the high-level semantics and in some cases hardware instructions are explicitly base 10.

  21. Re:Good on Canadian Climate Scientist Wins Defamation Suit Against National Post · · Score: 0, Troll

    We must prosecute Galileo -- the academic consensus is clearly against his nutty heliocentric ideas.

    We must exterminate defective races -- the science is clearly in favor of Aryan supremacy.

    We must take to the courts and prosecute anyone who dares to insult our religion^Wscience!

  22. Re:Not a fan on Government Recommends Cars With Smarter Brakes · · Score: 1

    In some cases, yes. In the other cases where I've noticed it, the turning car was already far enough out of the lane that I could drive past it while staying entirely within my lane.

  23. Re:Not a fan on Government Recommends Cars With Smarter Brakes · · Score: 1

    Is the tradeoff in favor of this kind of system yet? I have it one my car, and the part that I have found useful is the flashing warning -- not the braking. Among other flaws, it tends to have false alarms on certain stretches of road (I'm not sure whether it is picking up signs or fences or something else, but it is almost a given at one spot on my commute home from work), and it gets close to the auto-braking threshold when a car in front of me is turning into a parking lot. (The system in my car has three levels: flashing a warning, pre-tensioning [tugging] seat belts, and automatically braking. A turning car sometimes triggers the pre-tensioning, which is distracting in itself.)

  24. Re:They do it for us! on IEEE: New H-1B Bill Will "Help Destroy" US Tech Workforce · · Score: 4, Informative

    According to the best estimates out there, the US pays substantially more for Medicare fraud (even excluding Medicaid fraud, which is something state governments would handle) than for unreimbursed care. But don't let reality interrupt your little fantasy of how the world works.

  25. Re:IMSI Catchers are Wiretaps, usually illegal on New App Detects Government Stingray Cell Phone Trackers · · Score: 1

    You are just addressing a different part of the 4A's limits than I am. Some things are not 4A searches. The government theory here is probably that Smith v. Maryland (1979) makes an IMSI catcher not a 4A search. Some things are 4A searches, but do not require a warrant to be reasonable -- if the police say "mind if I search your car?" and you say that's okay with you, they don't need a warrant. Other things are 4A searches, but require a warrant to be reasonable -- non-consensual searches of a home, absent some imminent danger, require a warrant. Other things would be considered searches under the 4th Amendment, but even a warrant cannot make them reasonable; but this category is so small that I don't know of any good examples (a lot of possible examples are more clearly prohibited by the Fifth Amendment's limits on compelled testimony against oneself).

    My personal take is that use of an IMSI catcher is probably a 4A seizure that would need a warrant -- it disrupts the normal functioning of many phones in an area, temporarily disconnecting them from the cell phone network -- or alternatively it counts as a search because it scoops up so much data from so many people (similar to the "mosaic theory" that some circuits have recently approved).