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User: Watson+Ladd

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  1. Re:The bit i like on The Best Mac OS X Software Tools · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Programing is hard. It doesn't matter if you use drag and drop widgets, or switches on the front board. You still need to specify what you are doing in a precise manner. With Labview it is easy because it has a very limited domain. Not so with general programing.

  2. Re:Easy on Political Leaning and Free Software · · Score: 1

    The worse possible enemy of privacy isn't something that is accountable to me, it's a corperation that isn't. If the goverment doesn't control the accumulation and aggregation of data and kill things like NGSCB then we lose all our privacy.

  3. Re:More than a little off-base on Why Consumer Macs Are Enterprise-Worthy · · Score: 1

    Athena is free. And books exist on using LDAP+Kerberos to administer unix systems. Also, security is a lot more of a problem then administration considering what the EU requires of computers with personal data on them.

  4. Re:Side Effects on Why Is "Design by Contract" Not More Popular? · · Score: 1

    Like a compiler? If your functions don't fit the model, change your functions, not your model. Functional programing makes errors reproducible, tractable, and fixable. And you can do it any language.

  5. Never trust an analyst on SSL Optimization Over WAN Needs Scrutiny · · Score: 1

    The cited analyst is confusing proxying conducted by someone the site designates vs. yourself. One doesn't let anyone do anything they can't already. The other means you have all your confidential information sitting on a device that is not engineered for efficency.

  6. Re:Yeah well... on Sweden Admits Tapping Citizens' Phones for Decades · · Score: 1

    Sweden is a signatory to a lot of human rights treaties, both European and international. The right to privacy is part of the Universal Deceleration of Human Rights.

  7. Re:I can't believe this guy on Orbital Express Launches Tonight · · Score: 1

    The dominant cost in launching is fuel. If you make two trips you end up paying a lot more than any potential design savings.

  8. Re:hm. on Higher Pay for Math and Science Teachers · · Score: 1

    That statistic is bullshit. One of the things they used was the spending per student. So a more efficient education system would get penalized in that category. California also has a lot of immigrants. One of the factors is graduated from high school. Poor Mexicans/Chinese probably did not graduate from high school, esp. Chinese women. They also use medians for comparisons, without considering variance among samples. The proficiency requirements also vary widely by state, making their use problematic. A state that sets a high bar and just misses will do worse then one which sets an absurdly low bar on that scale.

  9. Re:Yes! That's a horrible idea! on 'Gates for President' Group Gives Up · · Score: 1

    So why doesn't buying stuff pump money into the economy? And Europe has high corporate taxes but the Euro seems to be outperforming the dollar every day.

  10. Re:trade offs ... on New Report On Municipal Wireless · · Score: 1

    The issue is that the monopoly operators have no competition as the cost of putting in new wires is very expensive. So if you want to switch you are screwed.

  11. Re:I made billions- but you'll be replaced on Bill Gates Speaks Out Against Immigration Policies · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Microsoft's issues relate more to management suffering from a massive case of NIH syndrome and an inability to realize mistakes. They could have taken OpenBSD, put in video card drivers and a new window manager, slapped it in a box and called it Vista for a fraction of the money they spent, and gotten a better product. But they didn't.

  12. Re:does anyone use this license? on What the GPLv3 Means for MS-Novell Agreement · · Score: 1

    How the GPLv3 license provisions make a corporate end user steer clear of it? If anything, getting immunity from patent suits *for free* will drive them to Linux, not away from it.

  13. Re:Subtitle of the book on The Book of JavaScript · · Score: 1

    The browser environment isn't too hot, but aside from that and a few stupid quirks (string concatenation / addition issues, especially) it's a neat little programming language where functions are actually first-class objects; you can do some pretty nifty inheritance things with this, building objects' behavior by aggregation...
    Oh, just like you can with Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Standard ML, and Perl?
  14. Re:It's a serious problem. on In France, Only Journalists Can Film Violence · · Score: 1

    I bet the cops would have liked it to nab the burglar without injuring anyone. And if you need a gun to make you safe, your must be at death's door. How much effort does moving your arms slowly take?

  15. In through the back door on Cybercrime Treaty — Hidden Costs For All · · Score: 1

    Just watch as US passes laws restricting rights to "comply with the treaty" they helped draft, just as with the Convention on Psychotropic Substances.

  16. Re:This is military procurement-turn down your ala on The Pentagon Wants a 'TiVo' to Watch You · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That kind of asymmetric warfare is what citizens would do against a repressive state regime.

  17. Re:RTFA on Sun May Be Warming Both Earth and Mars · · Score: 1

    Instead of continuing to operate and pumping out even more CO2? And you are assuming that regulators will not fix market failure. And your statement about relative concentrations is wrong

  18. Re:Why are you guys always against this? on Homeland Security Offers Details on Real ID · · Score: 1

    Come on. If Congress can issue the ID cards, and state that they are government property, then they can regulate how they are used. Just impose European-style privacy regulations onto all businesses.

  19. Re:Forget CO2 on Build an Environmentally-Friendly PC · · Score: 2, Funny

    Methane is already completely reduced. You can't add any more electron pairs to it.

  20. Re:The Nazis where looking for this kind of stuff on Reflectivity Reaches a New Low · · Score: 1

    No it hasn't. No comparison to the Nazi's has yet been made.

  21. Urban Legend on NASA's Future Inflatable Lunar Base · · Score: 1

    Both the hammer and the toilet seat were special limited run items that had very tight engineering requirements. You *can't* get them in a hardware store.

  22. Re:another "idea" on MySQL Cookbook · · Score: 1
    Not so. Let's look at your list one by one:
    1. Caching: If we are caching function values, then it's very similar across languages.
    2. Distributed Applications: Message-passing is the same in C or Erlang. The differences are ones of flexibility vs performance. But if you have a design in one, it probably will translate to the other without much difficulty.
    3. Clustering: See above
    4. I have no idea what Business Intelligences are.
    5. Reversal of Dependency: This is a design pattern that is defined in terms of low level constructs. It's cross-platform.
    6. Optimization: Most optimization is algorithmic. This is inherently cross-platform
    Maybe I'm missing something big, but all the recipes you listed seem to translate easily across platform.
  23. Re:Before we get all high and mighty on China Treats Internet Addiction Very Seriously · · Score: 1

    Something tells me that this would violate Articles 5, 9, and 3 of the Universal Deceleration of Human Rights, several laws against cruelty to children, and you might want to call the social worker about it.

  24. Open DRM? on Apple's iTunes DRM Dilemma · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How can you have open DRM? Doesn't that mean that anyone can make a program use it and then not put restrictions on the user? And isn't the point of DRM to be obscure and inscrutable by all but the most dedicated?

  25. Re:No, this is *very* clever. on VMware-Microsoft Battle Looming · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And when has Microsoft ever made something safe? Their solution to buffer overruns is not ASLR(address space layout randomization) but making all programs run in a VM. This doesn't work as a lot of apps still will use unmanaged code and a lot of flaws exist in the security model of the VM. In over 30 years of work on the security model of Unix people still discover flaws, especially in X11. Microsoft only had a security model 7 years old, still in flux, and we are supposed to trust it? They have a horrible track record on security. For them to say that VM's are a security risk is hypocritical considering that .Net is a VM. And for them to say that they make something more secure then the completion would be laughable.