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User: Stormy+Dragon

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Comments · 1,252

  1. Re:Backdoors and Encryption on Carly Fiorina Says Government Needs a Way To "Work Around" Encryption (dailydot.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Conservatives give to charity at a much higher rate than libs.

    Only if you count donations to churches, the vast majority of which ends up getting returned to the donors in the form of member services.

    If I pay a psychologist for marriage counselling, no one considers it charity. If you pay a minister's salary for it, it does.
    If I pay to join a country club to attend social gatherings, no one considers it charity. If you pay for a church building to host social gatherings, it does.
    etc.

    If you look at money spent on actual public philanthropy efforts (which for most churches is a tiny fraction of their budget), liberals donate far more than conservatives.

  2. Open Source Awards on Mozilla Hands Out Open Source Awards (mozilla.org) · · Score: 2

    A couple months ago, we discussed news that Mozilla was planning to give back to the open source projects they rely on, to the tune of $1 million. Now, Mozilla has announced the first round of awards, giving out $503,000 in the process.

    Oracle immediately created a fork where Larry Elison won all the awards.

  3. Re:Fingerprints are Hashable on Unhashable: Why Fingerprints Are Weaker Security Than Passwords (hackaday.com) · · Score: 1

    Not only CAN there be, there MUST be. If there is absolutely no invariant whatsoever, then there is no way to explictly distinguish between two fingerprints that match or don't match. The phrase "small errors" implies a distinction between variations that are truly part of the data and variations that are part of the "error".

  4. Re:Fingerprints are Hashable on Unhashable: Why Fingerprints Are Weaker Security Than Passwords (hackaday.com) · · Score: 1

    You can't eliminate all variations.

    Sure you can. Unless the detction algorithm accepts every potential fingerprint is presented, there is implictly some invariant feature of the fingerprint that is being used to make the decision. Eliminate everything but that invariant during pre-processesing and you have something you can hash on.

    At some point you'll have to check whether fabs(x,y)

    Quantize x and y.

  5. Fingerprints are Hashable on Unhashable: Why Fingerprints Are Weaker Security Than Passwords (hackaday.com) · · Score: 2

    Fingerprints cannot be hashed. By their very nature, each read of your fingerprint will be a little different, which breaks the hashing method.

    Just pre-process them with something like SIFT to eliminate the variations introduced from one reading to the next and hash that.

  6. Re:Not just google on The 'Trick' To Algorithmic Coding Interview Questions (dice.com) · · Score: 2

    It could be argued that the fact the solutions are available on google makes them even more useful as interview questions.

    They identify the potential employee as someone who walks into important meetings without even bothering to do basic preparation.

  7. During WWII, US Census data was used to identify Japanese citizens to be rounded up an placed in camps. We also no that it's been used since 9/11 to keep tabs on "suspicious individuals".

    No one knows what the government will be like in the future, and questions that seem harmless now may end up being used to hang you later.

  8. It's Not and All or None Question on Should Programmers Be Called Engineers? (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    Some people working on software development are rightly considered engineers, some are just programmers.

    The people Ian Bagost works with are almost certainly just programmers. They people developing flight control software for Boeing, on the other hand, are almost certainly engineers.

    The distinction is is the level of rigor in the design, coding, and testing being applied.

  9. Re:Here is what works. on The Popular Over-The-Counter Cold Medicine That Science Says Doesn't Work (forbes.com) · · Score: 1

    My Grandpa ate a clove of garlic every day, and never got sick (no colds, no flus, no pneumonia, no bronchitis, etc).

    Because his breath was so horrendous no one ever got close enough to spread an infection to him.

  10. In Store Pickup on Walmart Plays Catch-Up With Amazon · · Score: 3, Funny

    Walmart is building vast new fulfillment centers and is rapidly enhancing its delivery capabilities to take advantage of its extensive store network to provide convenient in-store pickup and adds that 70 percent of the American population lives within five miles of a Walmart store.

    I'm not sure having to pick up your delivery in person at a Walmart is quite the benefit Walmart thinks it is. The old joke about Target being the store for people who are willing to pay more to avoid being around Walmart customers exists for a reason.

  11. Re:easy on OPM Says 5.6 million Fingerprints Stolen In Cyberattack · · Score: 1

    No, it's really more like:

    1. Criminal wants to access fingerprint-based facility
    2. Criminal bashes hole in door, eliminating need for fingerprints

    The only reason you need the fingerprints is if you want to be able to enter surreptitously, which you're obviously not worried about once you get to the "cutting off people's fingers" stage.

  12. Not Everyone Owns a Garage on Are We Reaching the Electric Car Tipping Point? · · Score: 2

    always "full" every morning

    Ever notice how electric car backers seem to assume everyone owns a garage for their car where a charging station can be installed?

    With charge times measured in hours, what are all the people who rent or park on a street going to do?

  13. I hear... on DHI Group Inc. Announces Plans to Sell Slashdot Media · · Score: 1

    ...Ellen Pao and Tommy Craggs are looking for new opportunities.

  14. Re:Keeping a roof over game developers' heads on Razer Acquires Ouya's Storefront and Technical Team · · Score: 1

    My TV did do that the first time I turned it on, but to be fair that's only because channel 2 is QVC.

  15. Presumably you'll still need a google+ id to log into google+

  16. Re:Scripts that interact with passwords fields aws on A Plea For Websites To Stop Blocking Password Managers · · Score: 1

    As the article points out, malware doesn't steal password by copying them out of password fields, it does it by capturing keystrokes. So this does nothing to prevent malware.

  17. Tax Policy Problem on The Vicious Circle That Is Sending Rents Spiraling Higher · · Score: 1

    It's a result of the fact that most local government services are paid for predominately with property taxes.

    When costs scale with the number of people and revenue doesn't, it's inevitable that zoning will end up discouraging new residential construction, particularly high density residential contruction.

  18. Comparing apples to miniature oranges on CDC: Americans Getting Heavier, Average Woman Weighs As Much As 1960s Man · · Score: 3, Informative

    It should be noted that the average US male (5'10" vs. 5'8") and female (5'5" vs. 5'3") in 2015 are both two inches taller than their 1960 counterparts. Based on the cube law, you'd expact the average female weight to have increased almost 10% as a result ((65/63)^3 = 1.098).

    Increased height accounts for more than half of the weight gain noted in the study.

  19. Proofreading Fail on AMD Radeon Fury and Fury X Specs Leaked, HBM-Powered Graphics On the Way · · Score: 1

    The garden variety Fury touts single-precision floating point (SPFP) performance of 7.2 FLOPS compared to 5.6 TFLOPS for a bone stock Radeon R9 290X.

    If you only need 7 operations per second, a discrete board seem overkill. Most CPUs can handle that easily.

  20. Ob Futurama on Secret Files Reveal UK Police Feared That Trekkies Could Turn On Society · · Score: 1
  21. Companies Are Supposed to Be Worth More... on Stock Market Valuation Exceeds Its Components' Actual Value · · Score: 1

    ...than just the sale value of their assets. If they weren't, there would be no reason to bother with running the company; you could just buy a pile of assets and store them somewhere.

  22. Re:Kickstarter on Oculus Rift Hardware Requirements Revealed, Linux and OS X Development Halted · · Score: 1

    The 9500 Kickstarter backers got their DK1 for their money.

    Which is now about as useful as an HD-DVD DK. Great if you want to play around on your own, but useless for actually developing anything because it's an abandoned platform that has no compatible consumer product.

  23. Keychain on Ask Slashdot: What's On Your Keychain? · · Score: 1

    Swiss Army Cybertool Lite:

    http://www.amazon.com/Victorin...

  24. Kickstarter on Oculus Rift Hardware Requirements Revealed, Linux and OS X Development Halted · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hope all the kickstarter backers are happy with what became of their money.

  25. Re:Yes on Is Agile Development a Failing Concept? · · Score: 2

    I second the management thing. None of the managers want to change the way they manage things (I need a schedule for your work for the next 6 months!) in away that prevents any of the advantages of Agile from being fully realized.