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User: Agronomist+Cowherd

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Comments · 90

  1. Re:Web sites? on Verizon's Plan To Turn the Web Into Pay-Per-View · · Score: 1

    Bullshit. They make a minor capital outlay to improve service by some percentage, then oversell that to many users as improved (higher bandwidth) service, suitable for the new features (like, say, streaming video). Once enough users are on the new tier, paying their money, the additional funds are used for the next increment of improved service. Lather, rinse, repeat. Basic business.

    Sure an idiot could invest a huge amount in the hope that millions of users will pay ("if you build it they will come"), and profit can be made if you guess right, but that's usually a recipe for a loss.

    The major providers are just complaining that they need to keep improving. The dollar values look large because the companies are large, but they aren't hurting; just look at their filed financial sheets. They just want more money for a small investment in lawyers. Don't make investing in lawyers worthwhile; invest in service, not in lawyering.

  2. Re:Sugar on What's Causing the Rise In Obesity? Everything. · · Score: 2

    How much do you drink? Most of our weight is water, and while most of the food we eat is also water, just retaining a gallon of water per day would add 56 pounds to your weight in a week. Some of that from a few pounds of food, some from drink, some absorbed through respiration. We aren't closed systems, only taking in what we eat under controlled conditions.

  3. Re:Do You Really Know Your Algorithm on Hiring Developers By Algorithm · · Score: 1

    Not a syntax error, either. Syntactically it's valid. Semantically it's dubious, but only if the range of values in that int is out of the range of values of the unsigned. Even then its well-defined for a particular platform (except for very weird platforms), but it could be a very bad idea if the expected range of values in the int goes negative. Unless you're extremely pedantic, everytime you put a small number into an unsigned you're relying on the int->unsigned conversion.

        unsigned int x = 37;

    That line doesn't look too bad, does it? And it compiles fine too. Only the extremely pedantic make it

        unsigned int x = 37u;

    but otherwise the constant 37 has type int, and you assigned an int to an unsigned.

    Getting into a signed/unsigned argument shows either that you are bad at explaining the issue, or they are pricks who don't listen. Either way a bad fit.

  4. Re:You know... on Google Gets Consumer Service Ultimatum From German Consumer Groups · · Score: 1

    Gesundheit.

  5. Re:Biased Just a Little? on Is the Wii U Already Dead? · · Score: 1

    Recently we moved our Wii upstairs to the guest room (got a Wii U). That TV is 720p, and connected through SVHS. The TV it used to be on is 1080p, and we had it connected through the component cables. Surprisingly, I find the Wii much better looking on the SVHS connection (although the TV is different too, so it could be that).

    The Wii U (component) in Wii mode also looks better than the old Wii did.

    So my point is that I think the Wii looks better over SVHS cables. My theory is that it matches the capabilities of the actual hardware better; and the lower quality analog connection degrades more prettily than the component connection.

    But it could all be the change in TVs; don't have the hardware (or the inclination) to exhausively test it.

  6. Re:If there was a Bad at Math Map... on Secession Petitions Flood White House Website · · Score: 2

    Actually, we have 100 Senators. I'm going to use your tiny typo to float a different mathematical idea: increased representation at the federal level. I say there aren't enough senators.

    My thought is that there should be 1 representative (senator or house member) for each 100,000 voters. If we assume an even 310,000,000 in US population (it isn't even, but it's close enough, I think) then that would be 3100 representatives. If 10% go to the senate, divided by state, then each state gets 6 senators. The other 2800 get apportioned by population into the house of representatives; NYC would get (at an assumed 8 million citizens) 72 representatives, and the rest of NY would get 99. My small town would get about a quarter of a representative, which is better than we get now.

    I'd also make it a rule that districts must be cohesive. No more (or at least much less) gerrymandering. The ratio of the area of the smallest oval covering the district over the area of the actual district can't be over 2 (or some other small number). No more twisty outlines. And the representative districts need to fill the senatorial districts.

    I'd also allow voting on neighboring districts, but with less weight: 60% from the district itself, 40% from outside. So a local nutcase can be overridden by people nearby.

    If anyone sees this, let me know just how ludicrous it is.

  7. Re:X12? on X11 Window System Turns 25 Years Old · · Score: 1

    Not true. RDP has support for hosting single applications from multiple servers on your screen. No one uses it that way except for enterprise stuff like Citrix, but it's part of the protocol.

    And today, X remoting is essentially "shitty pixel scraping", because all the frameworks don't use X server rendering, they draw to local buffers and hand that to X (that's how you get pretty font support, for example). So X is schlepping pixmaps around, and if you're going to do that, why not just get rid of the rest of the protocol cruft: hence Wayland.

  8. Re:It comes down to purpose, not conservatism. on Software Engineering Has Its Own Political Axis From Conservative To Liberal · · Score: 1

    Where I work the client DOES want the current buzzword-du-jour. They fear being stuck with some ancient legacy crap that no one can support. As a result they get stuck with unproven shiny stuff that turns out not to work in practice, and no one can support.

    No silver bullet.

  9. Re:Stand on Zanzibar on Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Depressing Sci-fi You've Ever Read? · · Score: 1

    Myself, I never found Stand on Zanzibar OR The Sheep Look Up all that depressing. The Brunner book that I found most depressing was Children of the Thunder. The Wikipedia write-up (and cover blurb) don't really reflect my memory of the book, which I recall liking up to the end, so I guess I ought to reread it. But that has always stuck in my mind as a book I didn't WANT to reread because it was so depressing.

  10. Re:Expressing the wrong concern? on Ask Slashdot: Best Option For Printing Digital Photos? · · Score: 1

    Sad to say, wrong again.

    You meant "to".

  11. Re:Is this actually due to more indecents of autis on CDC Reports 1 In 88 Children Now Affected With Autism In the US · · Score: 1

    You monster!

  12. Re:Supremacy Clause on State Legislatures Attempt To Limit TSA Searches · · Score: 1

    Just a note on usage: an "in-state flight" is known as an "intra-state flight". What you're thinking of, where the federal government regulated things, is and "inter-state flight". "intra" means "within"; "inter" means "across multiple" (sorta; I'm hard-pressed to come up with a better short definition).

    What you wrote disagrees with itself, because "in-state" is the same as "intra-state". Nonetheless, I'm sure we all understood what you meant.

  13. Re:right. on Megaupload.com Shut Down, Founder Charged With Piracy · · Score: 1

    Newsflash: whooosh!!

    Check your sarcasm detector, as it seems to be completely broken.

  14. Re:Define, please? on Ask Slashdot: Changing Career From OLTP To OLAP Dev · · Score: 1

    Woosh.

    He's pointing out that the 4 letter acronym OTOH (On The Other Hand) wasn't spelled out.

  15. Re: Math fail on Carbon Emissions 'Will Defer Ice Age' · · Score: 1

    I had no idea we were already living in a Rush album.

    Try 512 AD.

  16. Re:As an eBook writer on Are Programmers Ruining the Design of eBooks? · · Score: 1

    I think your showing more issues with Word than with ePub.

    That you manged to get Word to print your document in a way that "looked great" is amazing. It's even more amazing if the formatting managed to stick after an edit. Personally, having written a number of reasonably long technical documents in Word, I've found that it usually manages to screw up somewhere along the way, with mysterious refusal to break a line (or not break a line, or apply a style) somewhere, and the only way to fix it is to move the text elsewhere, delete it, and copy it back, and then apply formatting again. When I can, I avoid Word, because it sucks.

  17. Re:Maybe they'll finally explain it on ORNL's Newest Petaflop Climate Computer To Come Online For NOAA · · Score: 1

    So if 1/3 show a decline, and 2/3 show an increase, isn't there just a smidge of a possibility that the overall average is going up? (It's not a gurantee, obviously; if the increases are small and the declines are large the overall number would be down.)

    Climate models aren't intended to explain the local variations; they're there for the big picture.

    The cagey way you phrase this makes this a likely troll. The climate folks have looked at all the numbers and concluded that, overall, temperatures are increasing. Yes, some local temperatures are declining. You yourself admit it's even a minority of local temperatures. That you try to turn it into some sort of accusation is trolling.

  18. Re:Framework, anyone? on The Great JavaScript Debate: Improve It Or Kill It · · Score: 1

    While that SOUNDS nice, the performance would be atrocious. As another reply points out, this has been done, but no one uses it. The reason, I'd bet, is that round-trip times kill you.

    One call is pretty fast. But once you're querying a significant part of the DOM to get some values, all those round-trip times add up. This is the same issue that makes X slow over a WAN (not unusably slow, just annoyingly slow): X has synchronous requests and responses; you can't make the next request until the response comes back, and even fast pings on a real network are measured in tens on milliseconds. That adds up to a second with just a hundred calls.

    You need a higher-level protocol. One where all the presentation can be sent at once, and painted on the screen. Once it's there, we can get all the data, and send up actions that manipulate the data. With little scripts to do immediate validation already running locally, sent down as part of the initial presentation. (This sounds familiar, somehow.)

    Or you could try for asynchronous. Send up a bunch of requests at once, and get all the responses back at once. Then round-trips don't kill you. The problem there is that all too often the data you want depends on the result of the previous request. You could shoot down a whole program that collects what you want and sends it back....

  19. Re:Trademark copyright on NYSE Sends Cease and Desist Letter To News Organization · · Score: 1

    Those things are all true, except the last (and only with a contrafactual assumption there). If it were the case that Coke did not, in fact, have high-fructose corn syrup in it, then they could complain about your picture of Coke. Just because it is a soft drink, and popular, doesn't give you the right to print a picture of the trademarked Coke logo when that has nothing to do with the story. (In the real world, Coke is full of HFCS, and it would be fine.)

    In this case, the NYSE has nothing to do with the insider trading (apparently), and they don't want to be associated with the story, and that means they can use their trademark on their "image" to prevent it being tied to a story that isn't about them.

    It's as if a story about pedophiles in our midst were illustrated with pictures of you playing with your kids. Sure, the story never claimed you were a pedophile; it never mentioned you at all. Yet the presence of your image there would cause an association you would certainly not like, and you would for damn sure use whatever legal basis you had to get your pictures off of there.

  20. Re:I would prefer colour on Hands On With the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook · · Score: 1

    You realize they are talking about the case color, not the display capabilities. The screen is a standard color screen.

  21. Re:no free energy on Artificial Leaf Could Provide Cheap Energy · · Score: 1

    That's the third law of Slashdot.

  22. Re:no free energy on Artificial Leaf Could Provide Cheap Energy · · Score: 1

    Whooosh!

    That's the sound of the cold air from my air conditioner.

  23. Re:Is it Twelvember yet? on Happy Pi Day · · Score: 1

    Yes it is!

  24. Re:That's it, I quit humanity on Blade Runner Sequels and Prequels Happening · · Score: 2

    The rock had a good agent...

  25. Re:VGA, DVI, HDMI or DisplayPort? on DreamPlug ARM Box Brings Power To Plug Computing · · Score: 1

    It's USB.