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User: Darktan

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Comments · 67

  1. Re:Good from a libertarian view? on Finland Considers Minimum Income To Reform Welfare System · · Score: 1
    1. 0. This is pointless busywork. Further, someone on the government end has to create and manage the paperwork, making it pointless and inefficient. taxpayer, libertarian or otherwise should want that.
    2. 1. There's nothing inherently wrong with keeping funding levels constant but providing a higher level of service. Would you complain if the Highways department managed to maintain the roads to a much higher standard with the same budget?
    3. I'm assuming you're in the US. So I should think that this would be administrated as a State program, rather than a federal one. Either way, you're still on the first of your four boxes, as this is being proposed for Finland. As such, is still a pretty long way from even being an election issue in the US.
  2. Re:basic income? on Finland Considers Minimum Income To Reform Welfare System · · Score: 1

    Not saying you're wrong, exactly, but it's worth noting that a lot of places have welfare without food stamps or housing vouchers, and it seems to work okay. In fact, it appears that food stamps are a uniquely American thing. Where I am (British Columbia), welfare is just a monthly cheque.

  3. Re:Meh on Presidential Candidate Lincoln Chaffee Proposes That US Go Metric · · Score: 1

    That's only true for hardwood (which is often sold rough). Softwood used to be cut to 2x4, but with better milling technology, it's now cut to the smallest size that still ends up at 3.5" x 1.5" after planing.

    Interestingly, in Canada, our whole forest industry is metric. The only part that is imperial is the labels (We still turn out 2x4s but they are defined in millimeters). Construction is still all imperial here though.

  4. Re:it's not "slow and calculated torture" on Greece Is Running Out of Money, Cannot Make June IMF Repayment · · Score: 1

    sovereign countries can NOT declare bankruptcy and refuse to pay

    What are you talking about? That is the definition of sovereign. Of course they can refuse to pay. They just can't expect favourable interest rates afterwards.

    Argentina is kind of a bad example. They had huge inflation through the '80s, then locked their currency to the US dollar through the '90s to compensate. This made their position much worse, as they needed to be able to devalue their currency to keep what industry they had competitive. The default was just an unavoidable consequence of decades of economic stagnation and bad policy. They were screwed before the default, and surprise, surprise, are still kind of screwed after.

    It's just a trade. You trade your ability to borrow money in order to drop the obligation to repay past debts.

  5. Re:Summary of above post on NTP's Fate Hinges On "Father Time" · · Score: 1

    But you don't really need 40,000 GPS receivers, you just need one, and put the antenna up on the roof. Then you have one computer attached to it that keeps time, and all the others can sync from it over your network.

    I suppose with that many clients, your time computer might get overloaded, so we better create a second tier of load balanced servers that can query the tier 1 time computer thingy, and serve requests out to the rest.

    The scheme just needs a name. Lets call it the Network Time, umm, Program. There. Done.

  6. Re:Not Slashdot! on The Cost of the "S" In HTTPS · · Score: 1

    I had wondered where all the old Slashdot trolls went. Looking at Pipedot, now I know. It's a pity, as the layout and UTF support are rather nice.

  7. Re:Easiest way... if you have money to burn on Ask Slashdot: Workaday Software For BSD On the Desktop? · · Score: 1
    You forgot the /s.

    If that wasn't intended to be sarcasm, note that the price for a five year old quad core machine on that site averages about $1200. You could get a new quad core i7 for two thirds that price. In short, prices for Macs represent terrible value, and have since about 2005.

  8. Cubic litres on IBM Solar Concentrator Can Produce12kW/day, Clean Water, and AC · · Score: 5, Funny

    The system is capable of producing up to 1,600 cubic liters of water per day

    Either the author is an idiot, or his universe has more dimensions than mine.

  9. Re:hope for improvements on Microsoft To Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang For $2.5 Billion · · Score: 1

    Hmm. I get 15 FPS on my mother in law's old laptop. Core 2, 2GB RAM, some shitty mobile Nvidia thing. Granted, that is with reduced settings, but I get get ~90FPS at full settings with my desktop machine that is still much less than yours. Perhaps you have a video driver problem?

  10. Re:By Country on China's Island Factory · · Score: 2
    The dreadnaughts effectively were made obsolete in the First World War. They were forced to stay far enough out to sea as to avoid the small, cheap, torpedo boats. By the time the Second World War rolled around, battleships couldn't safely leave port except in cloudy weather, or risk destruction by land based aircraft.

    I suspect aircraft carriers are where the battleships were in the First World War. Great for force projection against lesser navies, but have to stay far from shore to keep from being overwhelmed by small, cheap, missile boats and land based missiles and aircraft. As always, you can't know until you try.

  11. Re:War of government against people? on America 'Has Become a War Zone' · · Score: 1

    registration = list of houses to raid. a list that has been used time and again by totalitarian governments, including GB.

    You know V for Vendetta wasn't a documentary, right?

  12. Re:Environmentalists eat your heart out. on Feds Issue Emergency Order On Crude Oil Trains · · Score: 3, Funny

    Because oil tankers never call on ports in North Dakota or Alberta. It's a conspiracy, I tell you.

  13. Re:Microsoft make up your mind! on The Upcoming Windows 8.1 Apocalypse · · Score: 1

    ...and still have access to the superior Linux command line tools.

    I see you haven't learned PowerShell yet.

    Powershell is a scripting environment, not a command line. The fact that you can enter your script interactively doesn't change the many inadequacies it still sports.

  14. Re:Control vs. Prosperity on A Strategy For Attaining Cuban Internet Connectivity · · Score: 2

    Wait. What does Capitalism have to do with democracy? Some Capitalist countries, especially the richest ones, are democratic, but democracy is by no means a required part of the Capitalist economic system.

    A better statement might be to say that central planning of economies doesn't work. While central planning is a typical feature of Communism, they aren't always the same thing.

  15. Re:Performance on Background Javascript Compilation Boosts Chrome Performance · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nope. That's the Just In Time part of the JIT. Javascript can't be (efficiently) compiled to native code until the data types of function arguments are know. Since Javascript is a dynamic language, the types can't be known until the function is actually called.

  16. Re:Adobe Logistics on Australian Government Releases Report Into IT Price Fixing · · Score: 1

    No, but Inkscape does. Honestly, if your requirement for software is that you never have to learn anything new, you're stuck paying whatever Adobe wants to charge, forever.

  17. Re:Humanities not science? on Why Engineering Freshmen Should Take Humanities Courses · · Score: 1

    When the only tool you have is a hammer...

    You know the rest.

    Every problem looks like a thumb.

    Did I get it right?

  18. Re:Their API's are exactly what you would expect on GIS Community Blocks Esri's Geospatial 'Open Standard' REST API · · Score: 1

    I find the truth is almost the opposite. The REST API is pretty good, at least compared to anything the OGC has put out. While ESRI's tools are okay for authoring maps, their server software is some of the worst crap I've ever had to work with. It's slow, and buggy. And slow. Map tile generation takes 7000 longer than on open source software, on the same hardware.

    While technically all their stuff is documented, they have a nasty habit of creating a new documentation portal for every major release. And Google always takes me to the version from three releases back.

    Rather than standardization, I just want a way to take a map document and turn out cartocss, or mapnik styles.

  19. Re:Cooking on White House: Use Metric If You Want, We Don't Care · · Score: 1

    ... and shit

    There's your problem.

  20. Re:Not only tech, but new cars also on Is Buying an Extended Warranty Ever a Good Idea? · · Score: 1

    When buying my last dishwasher, the salesperson gave me the big list of things that can go wrong, was really going for the hard sell on the extended warranty. I put on my best concerned face and replied "Oh gosh! Is it really that likely to break? I certainly don't want to buy such a poorly made appliance."

    It's always fun watching them back-pedal like mad.

  21. Re:Heh... Radical...Islamists...redundant... on Islamist Hackers Shut Down Egyptology Research Journal · · Score: 1

    The Koran is more internally consistent, having a single author and single editor, and is read in its original language.

    In Klingon?

  22. Re:We need gas control! on New York Passes Landmark Gun Law · · Score: 1

    Oddly, in Canada, the opposite is true. Rifles are widely owned for sporting purposes. Handguns associated with law enforcement and criminals. As such, it's pretty easy to get a rifle, but much harder to get a license to buy a handgun. Unless you're a drug dealer, self defence rarely enters into it.

    As an aside, we tried having a registry for firearms, but that idea was so flawed I have a hard time imagining why any Americans think it would work. What does work is licensing the gun owner.

  23. Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu on Why Girls Do Better At School · · Score: 1

    Girls aren't better students because they are thinking about their future careers, they are better students because of either biological differences and/or society norms that make them more obedient.

    You're almost right. There's little evidence to suggest that women are biologically more obedient than men. More likely, women are better students because the metrics used to measure success in education are crap. In the past, they favoured boys. Currently they favour girls by a small margin.

    The easiest solution is to stop using grades for inappropriate purposes, such as employment selection. GPA should be a relative number used only internally by the school. Externally distributed transcripts should show only pass or fail.

  24. Sharepoint on Ask Slashdot: What Web Platform For a Small Municipality? · · Score: 3, Funny

    The increased staffing required to develop and maintain it will drive your little town's population up to 20,000 in short order. Best of all, most of those new jobs will be for highly paid SharePoint consultants, so the town should get a lot more property tax revenues!

  25. Re:Meg, Carly on Meg Whitman Says HP Was Defrauded By Autonomy; HP Stock Plunges · · Score: 1

    What, unlike men, who buy stuff and then later regret it when they sober up?