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User: FooAtWFU

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Comments · 3,258

  1. Re:"Ridesharing" on Battle To Regulate Ridesharing Moves Through States · · Score: 1

    The driver is not "sharing" anything, nor is the passenger. This is a taxi service.

    UberPOOL and Lyft Line, anyone?

  2. Re:and dog eats tail on Feds Order Amtrak To Turn On System That Would've Prevented Crash · · Score: 0

    For 36 years, Senator Joe Biden commuted by Amtrak. If he were still a Senator he'd still be riding the train.

    Yeah, and notice how the Acela makes a stop at Wilmington, DE. Must have been convenient.

  3. Re:"Cashless" is meaningless on The Solution To Argentina's Banking Problems Is To Go Cashless · · Score: 2
    The funny thing is that the Germans have already substantially bailed out Greece's existing debt, and everyone expects that they'll take massive debt write-offs. But the real problem is that the bailout was finite, so suddenly Greece needed to run a balanced budget -- instead of a 10% deficit. Greek politicians have sold their public on the idea that these cuts are the fault of the Germans being really mean and obnoxious and demanding onerous repayment schedules. This is part of an impressively effective propaganda machine for an increasingly authoritarian government where Syriza officials are characterizing dissent from their policies as treasonous "fifth column" collaboration with the shadowy outside capitalist conspiracies.

    What Greece really needs is reform that will allow its private sector to actually conduct capitalist, profit-making businesses. Presently it is hampered by an onerous and corrupt bureaucracy that enjoys bribery and favors existing cartels over new businesses, some of the world's strongest labor unions who will fight any reform that would make new employers interested in establishing a business, and a population which views more government spending and government jobs as the answer to all economic woes (the public sector is an awesome 40% of Greece's economy) even as the government has run out of tax revenues to spend. Speaking of which, Greece also needs to somehow move from "taxes are stupidly high because most people evade them anyway" to a normal regime.

    Instead, Greece will stifle dissent and double down on a system that has made universal healthcare available to anyone who can afford to bribe their doctor. Their exit from the Euro and further economic stagnation is probably inevitable.

  4. Re:Not for animals or locations on World Health Organization Has New Rules For Avoiding Offensive Names · · Score: 1

    This may have also been a move to deal a blow to Coptic christians, a religious minority in the mostly-Islamic and pork-unfriendly region.

  5. Re:Someone pissed they didn't get hired? on A Visual Walk Through Amazon's Impact On One Seattle Neighborhood · · Score: 2

    I have never, not once, heard a programmer use the word "brogrammer". I have only heard it used by SJWs when denigrating programmers, and the companies they work for (Amazon in this case).

    I'm a programmer, and I've met some brogrammers in my lifetime. They were easy enough to tell from regular programmers: they're the ones on Caltrain sipping Budweiser and talking about how great it is to work at Zynga and how those people who got their RSUs revoked last week had it coming and don't deserve any sympathy. (Remember that episode?) Typically there's a bit of a scruffy look to them. I cannot make a solid characterization of their actual programming skills (or lack thereof).

    I'd be surprised to find tons of brogrammers at Amazon; it struck me as less "bro" and more "nerd". I am generally dubious of the submitter's characterization.

  6. Re:WTF on Canadian Town Outlaws Online Insults To Police and Officials · · Score: 1

    What's the legal structure that allows Quebec to have laws that wouldn't pass Constitutional muster in the rest of the provinces?

  7. Re:Canadian Memorial to Vietnam opponents on Statues of Assange, Snowden and Manning Go Up In Berlin · · Score: 2

    You can tell me all you want that the US intervention in Vietnam was disastrous and should have been avoided. You can say what you will about its execution, and your public policy interpretation. Have fun. And maybe all the draft-dodgers gone up to Canada believed this verbatim. Sure.

    But while you're considering US motives, please pause a moment to pay some respect for the million or so (South) Vietnamese who were killed in the war proper (the majority civilian), and for the millions who died afterwards in re-education camps, doing hard labor, escaping the country on ramshackle boats, executed for being enemies of the state, or simply starved through disastrous implementation of collectivized agriculture policies.

  8. Re:Motive on Inside the Military-Police Center That Spies On Baltimore's Rioters · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yeah... If anything this is a better justification than they had before. There were looters running through stores, rioters burning down buildings, and the one guy even puncturing the fire hose when the fire department tried to put the flames out. There is a much more credible, obvious, proximate threat to life and property than there would be with some shadowy nonspecific radical-jihadist plot. Things were literally on fire, people.

  9. Kind of sad, really. on Bitcoin Is Disrupting the Argentine Economy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Technological marvel and portent of things to come or not, it's really quite sad that Argentina's is so messed up that it makes Bitcoin look good.

    Don't cry for me, Argentina, cry for yourselves.

  10. Re:What about the soot on New Study Suggests Flying Is Greener Than Driving · · Score: 1

    I'm curious where you heard that, because my understanding had been that those upper-atmosphere particulates mitigated against global warming (mildly), much like the volcanic eruptions which periodically cause cold winters.

  11. Re:Halt Trading? on How One Tweet Wiped $8bn Off Twitter's Value · · Score: 2

    NASDAQ will halt trading any time your stock suddenly starts doing badly enough (in terms of percentage drop during an individual trading session) but it won't do you much good if people have fundamentally lost faith in your business. All it does in that case is postpone the inevitable by a couple hours at best.

  12. Re:Agile has saved and will save many companies. on IBM CIO Thinks Agile Development Might Save Company · · Score: 1
    The problem with agile is that it's a brand that has no owner. You can see this as a tragedy-of-the-commons or as an extension of Gresham's Law (when people can't tell the difference, bad "agile" firms will drive out the good)... and assessing the quality of the efforts by which people have actually attempted to pursue principles associated with agile like "incremental delivery" or "extensive test suites to support refactoring efforts", as opposed to mere devotion to superficial components of the formula, is very difficult given the closed-door nature of most corporate development shops, especially as regards their failures.

    While this is not an indictment of any "true Scotsman" agile, it does point out a real risk associated with the actual pursuit of the quality of your Scotsman when adopting agile processes, which will be the first risk that a company will face in the process.

  13. Re:Why such crap? on Crashing iPad App Grounds Dozens of American Airline Flights · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Do you have a better and more reliable tablet system in mind, or are you suggesting that they should have stuck with the 35-pound suitcases full of printed material?

  14. Re:It's not about the cost, it's about convenience on iTunes Stops Working For Windows XP Users · · Score: 1

    If that's really the nature of the obstacle, why aren't you buying it from Amazon? I mean, the quality of Amazon's music app UI is pathetic, but you can browse for the stuff on the website and you'll get mp3s right out of it.

  15. Meh, New-Maps. on Google Sunsetting Old Version of Google Maps · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The vectors are shiny but the user interface looks like it was designed by a team of managers more concerned about slickness than usability. Moreover it's only fractionally as powerful as the old system. (Among other things, I bet several people in places like San Francisco are really going to miss the combination bicycle/terrain maps.)

  16. Re:Better on Can Online Reporting System Help Prevent Sexual Assaults On Campus? · · Score: 1

    For those, there's the real police department. They can do things the campus police department can't do -- like "send someone to jail", or "be responsible for applying the due process guarantees that our constitution insists we provide to everyone (including accused and/or actual rapists)".

  17. Re:Why does anyone do STEMS on Cornell Study: For STEM Tenure Track, Women Twice As Likely To Be Hired As Men · · Score: 1

    I would flip the problem around and ask why proportionally more males seem to be sticklers for punishment and waste their talents going to work in a difficult field with little job security and low pay (relatively) when they could go do almost anything else and be much more successful?

    Meh. I'm 30, I have half a million in the bank and I'm making over $10,000 in a month. As for security, my LinkedIn profile explicitly says not to email me with opportunities, but I still get at least one a week. A little of that is good timing, but still: software or the win.

    The chemical engineers and geologists are going to work for oil fields, which are high-pay but have elevated sector-specific risk. You've got me on the rest of them, I guess.

  18. Re:Well, great on Turkish Hackers Target Vatican Website After Pope's Genocide Comment · · Score: 1
    Since you ask, I recommend @pontifex_ln.

    (Seems @pontifex_tr doesn't exist. Makes some sense: that's not exactly Latin-rite territory, more Byzantines and Orthodox and Syriac churches that don't go for the filoque or the Immaculate Conception. Do any of the eastern patriarchs have Twitter accounts?)

  19. Re:And it's not even an election year on Ten US Senators Seek Investigation Into the Replacement of US Tech Workers · · Score: 0

    Oh, look -- another post full of the economic-policy voodoo "logic" that suggests we can prosper better as a nation by isolating ourselves from trade, contrary not only to theory but to every single example in recorded history. You'd think that this would be frowned upon as much as climate-change denial these days, but apparently not.

    As long as we have millions more people in the US who consume computer-powered services than earn their living producing them, the population as a whole will prosper better by having those services done at a lower cost. The same goes for importing manufactured goods at reduced prices. Sure, owners of the corporation (including many rich assholes, not just individuals or retirement funds) will earn more money for themselves, but it's a fraction of the total economic benefit, most of which goes straight back into consumers' pockets in anything resembling a competitive marketplace.

    But since the benefits of are spread among millions and the costs are concentrated, it's a textbook case where it's profitable to go rent-seeking and mandate that people are forced to consume American programmers' programming, or American laborers' manufacturing. This is an insidious form of wealth transfer that is very regressive in nature (it hits the poor a lot harder than it hits the CEOs).

    Finally: of all people, computer programmers in this country are hardly the tragically underpaid class which can't AFFORD to buy toys.

  20. don't need to look it up on Back To the Future: Autonomous Driving In 1995 · · Score: 1

    I had a 486DX2 for a while. The 486 ran at 33Mhz and came in SX and DX versions (the DX's had floating-point coprocessors). The DX2 ran at double the speed (66Mhz) and so did a mean job of running Fractint. You could expect to see them running something like MS-DOS 5 or 6, and maybe Windows 3.1.

    I think they were about a generation after the Turbo Button fad (the ones I saw usually toggled 8/33Mhz or so).

  21. Re:Muhahahaha on Turkey Blocks Twitter, YouTube Access Over Image of Slain Prosecutor · · Score: 1
    Actually, in the past 10 years America's oil production has ramped up substantially. If it came down to it we could be self-sufficient pretty quickly. The main barriers to that right now are regulatory (our current administration being of the opinion that fossil fuels are bad for the Earth). But the oil's there, we can drill it if we feel like it, but stored oil capacity is at an all time high... the biggest short-term question would be refinery capacity, whether it's prepared to deal with shale oil instead of imports. Oh, and also available: Canadian tar sands.

    All the recent geopolitical analysis I've seen has suggested that the United States doesn't care about oil over there and is quite willing to let the Middle East go to pot: ISIS and Iranian nukes and what-have-you.

  22. Re:Still marveling at on Strange Stars Pulse To the Golden Mean · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whoa, dude. Tenured professor? I dunno, maybe you should aim for something more achievable -- like, an astronaut, or a world-famous basketball star.

    I'm only exaggerating a little. :b

  23. Re:Another kids computer book on Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer Science and Other Improbable Things · · Score: 1

    Is it an allegory about what happens to packets which don't ever make it back across the Internets, then? "We shall cook him with rice at sunset tonight!"

  24. Re:No, Never, for Any reason. on Ask Slashdot: Should I Let My Kids Become American Citizens? · · Score: 1

    Virtually everyone I know who has dual citizenship has officially (and expensively) renounced it, and none have any regrets, and all are still free to visit the USA.

    But not to work there. For Belgian passport-holders and the like, that's the real benefit.

  25. Pass around a real mic. on Ask Slashdot: Wireless Microphone For Stand-up Meetings? · · Score: 1

    Get one, mmaybe two real wireless microphones from Shure or someone like that -- think "audio equipment catalog", not "computer equipment catalog". Get the cables to hook the base station up to standard microphone input. Pass the mic around to whoever is talking; it doubles as the "currently speaking" token (and you only have one person at a time talking at standup, right?). Make sure you have lots of spare batteries (presumably rechargeable) in a convenient location.