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User: ghettoimp

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  1. Re:That last sentence... on Harvard Hit With Racial Bias Complaint · · Score: 1

    I don't necessarily disagree. The students that universities can accept or reject are, of course, the products of their parents, their school systems, and their communities in general. This probably doesn't position the university especially well to solve racial or other forms of socioeconomic inequality.

    Then again, no single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood. If a university thinks it can make a small difference by trying to encourage a more diverse student body, that seems pretty reasonable.

    Of course, this debate is just a spectacle to distract the riff-raff. If you really want to assure your spot at a university, you should get yourself some influential parents or friends...

  2. Re:Well done! on George Lucas Building Low-Income Housing Next Door To Millionaires · · Score: 1

    Remember that most Slashdotters are younger, non-homeowning people with no children.

    [Citation needed]. I, for one, wish I could still party like it was 1999...

  3. Re:Well done! on George Lucas Building Low-Income Housing Next Door To Millionaires · · Score: 1

    We're not American's, God damn it.

    Get off my lawn.

  4. Re:Makes perfect sense. on Florida Teen Charged With Felony Hacking For Changing Desktop Wallpaper · · Score: 1

    There needs to be a /whoosh option for moderators.

  5. Re:There is no such thing as equal work on Win Or Lose, Discrimination Suit Is Having an Effect On Silicon Valley · · Score: 1

    That problem is solved by providing paternity leave.

    Solved is a pretty strong word to use to describe a benefit that lasts for, what, a few weeks? Maybe two months? Three?

    Paternity leave is great and I'm all for it. But what happens afterward? Daycare, grandparents, or one of mom or dad stays home. And you can probably guess pretty well who it's going to be.

  6. Nothing to worry about on Austin Declared a Drone-Free Zone During SXSW · · Score: 1

    anyone flying one could have it seized, the organizers warned

    But if someone is flying it, it's not a drone...

  7. Re:128 GB ought to be enough on Intel Announces Xeon D SoC Line Based On Broadwell Core Architecture · · Score: 1

    Wow! Well played, sir!

  8. Re:Don't forget the risk on The Mathematical Case For Buying a Powerball Ticket · · Score: 1

    Like... uh... the ocean?

  9. Re:Fraudulent herbal supplements? on Major Retailers Accused of Selling Fraudulent Herbal Supplements · · Score: 2

    So we should trust what they say, but be careful signing up because they're going to try to trick us...?

  10. Re:Open source code is open for everyone on Serious Network Function Vulnerability Found In Glibc · · Score: 1

    To be fair, derision toward the likes of Microsoft has historically been pretty well warranted. Windows has, historically, obviously, been plagued by viruses, malware, crapware, etc., to a degree far surpassing any other operating system.

    That's not to say this necessarily has anything to do with proprietary versus open-source. Obviously Windows has always been far more popular than any alternative, making it a much more tempting target for attackers. High profile bugs like shellshock have certainly pointed out that open source isn't a magical elixir that wards off security problems.

    Nobody does security very well, yet. (Well, maybe excepting folks like the CompCert people and Sel4 people.) The underlying causes, I'm sure, is that it's not what your average (or even above average) consumer can evaluate and value, and it's not what your average programmer can deliver.

  11. How about a web browser on Ask Slashdot: Linux Database GUI Application Development? · · Score: 2

    Web applications are portable, easy for users to install (they don't have to do anything), easy for users to update (they don't have to do anything), and accessible from just about anywhere on just about any device. HTML/CSS/JavaScript have matured a lot. It is very easy to prototype your application's UI, and easy to develop very slick looking applications with rich fonts, colors, fancy tables, etc. Unless there's some fundamental reason you absolutely must have a native UI, I would never choose a toolkit over the web.

  12. Re:June 1, 2015 is it on Eric Schmidt: To Avoid NSA Spying, Keep Your Data In Google's Services · · Score: 1

    Hah -- good one!

  13. Re:Not all that surprising... on Errata Prompts Intel To Disable TSX In Haswell, Early Broadwell CPUs · · Score: 2

    The FDIV bug was actually relatively limited in scope. Quoting Wikipedia, "Though rarely encountered by average users (Byte magazine estimated that 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results),[3] both the flaw and Intel's initial handling of the matter were heavily criticized. Intel ultimately recalled the defective processors."

  14. Re:It's open source on Ask Slashdot: What To Do About the Sorry State of FOSS Documentation? · · Score: 1

    This seems pretty perverse. If a developer doesn't write documentation because he doesn't like to, how does that make him an asshole? You're the one who is asking him to do more work, for your benefit, for free.

  15. Re:It's open source on Ask Slashdot: What To Do About the Sorry State of FOSS Documentation? · · Score: 1

    Eeh. I agree that, as a user, it's frustrating when software doesn't have proper documentation.

    On the other hand, if someone donates his time to develop a program and makes it free software, it seems hardly fair to fault him for not writing documentation to go along with it.

    Someone who really cares could, of course, do it themselves, or offer to pay the developer to do it. If most people don't care enough to do that, then maybe that's the problem to focus on.

    If someone comes along and gives you a free hamburger, you don't complain that they didn't bring fries and a drink.

  16. Re:Xiki Sucks.. on Meet Carla Shroder's New Favorite GUI-Textmode Hybrid Shell, Xiki · · Score: 1

    A pity. Every time I convert a shell script into a ruby script, the world gets just a little better.

  17. Re:CPU cycle != 1 second on Understanding an AI's Timescale · · Score: 1

    Not really.

    A single "calculation" such as moving data between registers ("mov ax, cx") actually takes many clock cycles. The instruction has to be fetched and decoded, which may itself take several cycles. Then the instruction has to be scheduled, the operands have to be fetched from the register file, and eventually the result of the operation gets written back into the register file.

    Thanks to pipelining, branch prediction, result forwarding, and so on, much of this latency can be hidden and, under ideal conditions, your processor might achieve an average throughput of many instructions per cycle because it is decoding and executing many instructions simultaneously. But, if you track any particular instruction from start to finish, it takes several cycles.

    And of course, in practice there are much harder instructions than register moves. Division can take dozens of clock cycles. Waiting for data from main memory can take hundreds of core clocks. Mispredicting a branch stalls you out while you figure out where to start decoding from again...

  18. Re:Affirmative Action on Jesse Jackson To Take On Silicon Valley's Lack of Diversity · · Score: 0

    We are in the 21st century. We need to get rid of diversity quotas. Let the most qualified person get the job. Bill Cosby is right in that Blacks need to rid themselves of the ghetto mentality and educate themselves. Blacks (everyone, really) need to take responsibility for their own situation instead of blaming it on events from the 1800s.

    What have the 1800s to do with anything? Look back no further than the 1960s to find grossly horrible things like segregated schools and restrooms and so on. While the civil rights movement made many impressive accomplishments, instantly curing the land of inequality was not among them.

    Even today in the 21st century, Blacks still seem to have a lot going against them. Their unemployment rates are far worse than those for whites. Law enforcement seems to be out to get them, e.g., look at prison demographics, drug sentencing disparities, stop and frisk, stand your ground laws, etc. The "ghetto mentality" as you put it---by which I infer you mean, e.g., absent fathers, gangs and guns, drugs, learning to be "street-smart", hiding your intelligence to avoid getting beaten up---is tragic, and seems to me to be both a symptom and a cause.

    Many people would like to see a more diverse tech culture. There have been countless articles on Slashdot, for instance, about why there aren't more women in computing and whether that's bad and why that is and what can be done about it. I assume Mr. Jackson wants to have a similar discussion with these tech leaders. Maybe he has some ideas, or maybe it's a stunt to raise some money and publicity. Whatever the motive, it doesn't seem like an altogether bad thing to think a bit about what the tech industry could do to help out.

    TFA says nothing about quotas.

  19. Re: Writing 32 lines is not "Learning CS" on More Students Learn CS In 3 Days Than Past 100 Years · · Score: 1

    You have a pretty optimistic view of how computers operate.

  20. Re:Officials say? on Officials Say HealthCare.gov Site Now Performing Well · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Damn straight you should count yourself lucky.

    There are seriously terrible things out there. Cancer. Parkinson's. MS. But do go on. Complain about paying more than your share, you always-healthy person, with your great genes, with your great personal character and intelligence that have kept you away from drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, with your even temperament that has shielded you from depression. Complain, with your good job, where you aren't exposed to toxins, which pays for your good house in your nice neighborhood, where gang violence is the farthest thing from your mind, where you have a great grocery store that enables your fully organic diet, where you have a great gym just up the road that you work out at five days a week.

    The whole point of insurance is that we all get screwed a little, so that when someone gets really fucking boned, they don't get screwed sideways on top of it. Even a perfect person like you can fall off a bike or get hit by a car.

    Of course, you're also right. We're all getting screwed way more than we should because we didn't have balls to say to hell with wall street and insist on a single-payer system.

  21. Re:Good luck on Ask Slashdot: How Reproducible Is Arithmetic In the Cloud? · · Score: 1

    And with anarchy, too.

  22. Re:yes and no on TSA Screening Barely Working Better Than Chance · · Score: 1

    Putting a gun in the locked cockpit seems basically reasonable. Maybe it could provide a last line of defense against terrorists who somehow manage to take over the cabin and pacify the passengers, and start working to bust down the door.

    Giving guns to the cabin crew sounds like a terrible idea. Then, instead of having to try to sneak a weapon onto the plane (possibly getting caught, which could ruin any sort of 9/11 style simultaneous multi-plane conspiracy), the terrorists merely need to overpower a crew member to obtain a firearm.

    If we're really worried about this sort of thing, well---the Air Force can have operators fly drones over Iraq from New Mexico. Can't we put some kind of emergency button in the cockpit that gives control of the plane to a remote operator, so if terrorists do storm the cockpit, the pilots can push the button to disable all local control of the plane?

    Full disclosure: I don't own a firearm and don't really understand people who do.

  23. Re: Control... on Where Does America's Fear Come From? · · Score: 2

    Its sad because its true.

  24. Re:I hypothesize.. on Just Thinking About Science Triggers Moral Behavior · · Score: 1

    In a related study, thinking about religion has been linked to abuse of parentheses.

    God protects Lisp programmers, little children, and ships named Enterprise?

  25. Re:Can we please stop reimplementing the wheel? on Web Apps: the Future of the Internet, Or Forever a Second-Class Citizen? · · Score: 1

    My excuse: web apps are way better to deploy than native apps, both for me and my users (computer engineers at my company).

    • My users don't even have to think about running an installer; they just click on the link in the email I send them.
    • When there's a bug, I just fix it and... behold, it's fixed! No bothering people to update, no worrying about old versions of the software doing something bad.
    • All that time we didn't waste on installation, upgrading, dll hell, testing installers, etc, can be spent doing actually productive work, instead.

    Native software is fast, sure, but deployment sucks for everyone. How many times a day are you being pestered to update this or that, right when you're in the middle of trying to look up something for or check your email. It's like sitting down for dinner with your family after a long day, just to be called by a telemarketer.