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User: 140Mandak262Jamuna

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  1. Just follow the software industry's lead. on The Makerspace Is the Next Open Source Frontier · · Score: 1

    when building physical products we can't always afford to build and test new physical hardware for it to then crash and burn ...

    Well, it should just follow the software industry's path breaking achievements in shaping user expectations and user behavior.

    First there should be an EULA claiming the body and soul of the user, with added clauses to add more demands later any time.

    Then user should be made to accept, "it is going to crash and burn. Can I get get something done in the mean time?".

    If it builds we ship. Then the customer feedback is how we know whether what we built works. This is the software industry standard.

    If you don't want to be evil, you will very generously call your product "in beta".

  2. Re:Erm.. Why a computer? on Allegation: Lottery Official Hacked RNG To Score Winning Ticket · · Score: 1

    That is not the game played by lottery. To keep the pot at 200 million, and nplayers=20, we need to raise the price of the ticket to 10million + house margin. Something like 22 million. (Yes, the pot is less than 50% of the collection) So would you pay 22 million bucks for 1/20 chance of winning 200 million dollars?

  3. Re:This dimwit became a grandmaster? on Chess Grandmaster Used iPhone To Cheat During Tournament · · Score: 2

    Looks there was an Indian boy who was using a blue tooth device sewn into his cap and an accomplice. It went undetected for a long time, and he qualified for the nationals as the top seed. Even he shows more "thinking" than "run-to-the-toilet-and-look-at-iPhone" grand master.

  4. This dimwit became a grandmaster? on Chess Grandmaster Used iPhone To Cheat During Tournament · · Score: 4, Funny

    How can such a simpleton become the grandmaster? It belies imagination. Everyone knows the way to cheat at that level of chess tournament is to have a team analyze the game in the audience and have them send color coded yogurt to the player in the middle.

  5. Re:Erm.. Why a computer? on Allegation: Lottery Official Hacked RNG To Score Winning Ticket · · Score: 1
    Yes, lottery is a tax on mathematically challenged.

    But such people exist, and if the government does not provide it, more unscrupulous operators will fill the vacuum and skin them alive even more. Ideally we should educate the people so that they slowly stop gambling. In the mean time, provide slightly better alternatives than criminal gangs.

  6. Yes, we can. on Can Civilization Reboot Without Fossil Fuels? · · Score: 1

    That is why we have sent Doc Brown in a heavily modded De Lorean into the future to bring back the technology of crystallic fusion to reboot us, once we get rid of Big Oil and the Big Banks. Destruction of Morgan-Stanley and Goldman-Sachs alone is incentive enough to trigger a nuclear war.

  7. This is nothing. Think lik multi trillion dollars on New York State Spent Millions On Program For Startups That Created 76 Jobs · · Score: 1, Insightful
    Around the time Dubya took office, we had a surplus and the debt was being repaid and was going down. Then he cut taxes, income taxes, inheritance taxes, all kinds of taxes and promised millions of jobs and prosperity for all. All the money ended up with his cronies, and the economy lost millions of jobs and we came to the brink of total financial collapse. In fact all the trickle down economics and tax-cut politics are simply means to transfer wealth to the rich, keep the middle class despo enough to accept abysmal wages and working conditions. All in the names of "jobs jobs jobs" and "job creators".

    All the tax-cuts since the Reagan administration actually creation millions of jobs and explosive economic growth, in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, Indonesia... The rich took all the tax cuts, shafted America and invested them all abroad. All our economic woes can be traced to middle class naively believing the Republicans promises of wealth and prosperity by giving tax cuts to the rich.

  8. Seven year old story on Ask Slashdot: Best Medium For Storing Data To Survive a Fire (or Other Disaster) · · Score: 1
  9. But not to Nestle. on California Looks To the Sea For a Drink of Water · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Nestle has been bottling the California water, which it takes at some abysmally low cost and ships it out. May be it would be cheaper for California to just buy the entire output of Nestle at market prices than to embark on this desalination process.

  10. Very first world/American view. on The Myth of Going Off the Power Grid · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The article is written looking at the situation from the POV of an average American. The "grid" is practically non existent in large parts of Africa and South America and lots Asian countries. Even where it exists it is quite unreliable. But in almost all these countries the grid is often a state owned inefficient monopoly. The demand for electricity is high and there are lots of people willing to pay way over what the American utilities charge for power. There was an journalist who recounted rich folks in Karachi, Pakistan, driving around in their air conditioned luxury cars when the grid goes blackout. The counties might be poor, but these rich folks collectively far outnumber the middle class in America. They will provide the market, and the invisible hand will find providers. These folks will underwrite the R&D costs of moving off grid.

    Think about it: Half of India does not know when their next meal is going to be. Which means the other half has food security. Still they live in a hand to mouth existence. Half the rest are better off than hand to mouth. Half of the better than hand-to-mouth have decent disposable income. This 1/8 of the population of India is 125 million strong, as big an economy as Japan and bigger than many European countries. Living in a sea of dirt cheap labor, none of the labor saving devices would sell there. But anything not doable by throwing more people in, electric power or cell phone etc will have big markets there. Add Africa and South America, you can bet they will leap frog over the developed countries in off grid power, like India did with cell phones a decade ago.

  11. Alternative to batteries on The Myth of Going Off the Power Grid · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Some utilities have also experimented with using home water heaters as an economical substitute for batteries

    Many large buildings used to make ice overnight when the electricity rates are low (in some parts) and melt the ice to cool the building during day time reducing the load on the air conditioner. Such techniques would be effective if the electricity rates vary. Like the old long distance plans, having a peak and off-peak pricing alone would encourage the consumers to schedule their washing machines and dishwashers during the off-peak hours.

  12. Re:Time to stop considering individual components. on Intel's Core M Performance Is Erratic Between Devices · · Score: 2
    Number of people needing a machine capable of transcoding 900MB video clips is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of people watching videos. For a long time we made no distinction between content creators and content consumers. The content consumers were buying computers for more powerful than they need, and in that process lowered the cost of computing for content creators.

    Now those two groups are moving apart content creators (programmers, video/audio editors, web site creators etc) will have to pay more for their toys. In some remote sense it is returning to the staus quo ante. Content consumers used to watch TV or play back VCR tapes, and content creators worked on special purpose unix workstations or heavy duty analog production facilities. Cost of everything electronic has come down a lot, still powerful machines for content creators is likely to be far more expensive than the ones for content consumers.

  13. Applies to all subsidiaries of Intel? on US Blocks Intel From Selling Xeon Chips To Chinese Supercomputer Projects · · Score: 1
    Intel USA can sell to Inter-Ireland, which will sell it to China. Probably it is already doing it for double Irish tax dodge. That is probably why Intel did not protest too much and agreed to play along.

    The logic seems to be, "we got to do something", "this is stupid", "stupid or not it is something that can be done" "so let us do the stupid thing"

  14. The clinic is not mentioned on Japanese Court Orders Google To Remove Negative Reviews From Google Maps · · Score: 1

    Well, I think I should google for a clinic with anonymous bad reviews in google maps.

  15. Re:The web crawler would only index it if... on Has Google Indexed Your Backup Drive? · · Score: 1

    Yes, the robots.txt is a good idea. All the good guys who respect robots.txt will stay away. And the Nigerian princes and Bulgarian hackers and the Chinese 413th Cyber Warriors Battalian, and NSA will know which files are sensitive and which are fluff so that they can get the really interesting stuff without having to crawl through the whole backup drive.

  16. Autorickshaws market is tough on Uber Finally Accepts Cash -- For Autorickshaws In Delhi · · Score: 2
    The autorickshaw market is brutal, on the customers. It is ripe for taking. The Indian autorickshaw drivers routinely tamper with the meter, haggle with the customer, demand tips on top of the metered rate, refuse to fares etc etc. Most Indians are fed up with them and those who could afford the wait time and money prefer to use "call taxis". But..

    It will be a tough market to break into. Most of these autorickshaws are actually owned by the traffic policemen and lower level politicians with strong criminal nexus. The actual driver is usually a hired hand. Some of them rent the vehicle for a flat per-diem rate. The policemen do not enforce the laws on the book for "their" autorickshaws. If they decide to selectively enforce all the law on the book on uber affiliated drivers, Uber will find it difficult to handle.

    Unless Uber gets into cahoots with a local politician with enough clout, this won't work for Uber. Even if it works, it won't work for the ordinary Indians. Corruption in USA is distant, does not affect the daily life directly, it is more abstract. In India, it hits you right between the eyes, in every turn. From getting simple driver license renewal to getting the building permits to getting electricity connection to getting a death certificate to legal heir certificate to... every where there is a someone sheepishly grinning with a hand held out, "Saar, take care of the usual saar"

  17. Re:Taller men get more girls the world over on Did Natural Selection Make the Dutch the Tallest People On the Planet? · · Score: 1

    • Theorem1: Richer men get more girls the world over. Wealth being roughly equal, the tiebreaker is height.

    If this theory is right, the process can not be called natural selection. Uniformly distributed affluence, to the extent, height alone determines reproductive success, is very unnatural.

  18. Re:Not necessarily on Did Natural Selection Make the Dutch the Tallest People On the Planet? · · Score: 0

    You can't compare a civilized, advanced country like Netherlands with a primitive, brutal, dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all third world country like the USA.

  19. Poor California on The Solar System Is Awash In Water · · Score: 4, Funny

    Looks like California is not part of the solar system. It does not seem to be awash in water.

  20. What did he predict 5 years ago? on Smartphone-Enabled Replicators Are 3-5 Years Away, Caltech Professor Says · · Score: 2

    Before we get too far with this thing, what has this guy predicted 5 years ago? How did that turn out? Without some calibration there is no reason to pay attention to his predictions more than the predictions of Satguru Somereallylongnameanandaswami.

  21. 1% = several million on Google: Less Than One Percent of Android Devices Are Affected By Harmful Apps · · Score: 2
    How to lie with statistics, trick number one.

    95% of the brand A cars build in the last 10 years are still one road, does not mean brand A cars have a 95% chance of lasting 10 years. Only 10% of the cars built over the last 10 years is likely to be 10 years old. So they could be talking of just 50-50 chance of their cars lasting 10 years.

  22. Re:The joke's on us. on Tesla's April Fool's Joke Spoofs Market Algorithms · · Score: 1

    They are buying the stock without knowing anything about what the news is. You think it is just limited to Tesla? Every damned trade they make is equally precipitous, unthinking gamble. Their reward structure is, if there is a profit they get a share of it. If there is a loss, someone else will bear it. The traders are not trading on their money.

  23. If it stops them from .... on How to Prepare for an IT Security Disaster (Video) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If these drills make the pointy haired bosses stop thinking IT security purely as a cost to be minimized it would do some good. If an IT dept works well and prevent disasters they never get credited for it. It they slip up and make a huge mistake, they get fired. If the best reward you can hope for is "not getting fired", it will attract a level of talent that considers "not getting fired" an achievement and goal. Unless the management mentality changes IT disasters will keep happening. At least if we fired the top management too along with IT disasters and sue the corporate board for mismanagement, then they might pay attention.

  24. The joke's on us. on Tesla's April Fool's Joke Spoofs Market Algorithms · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Don't laugh, cry. We slog all day and then dutifully maxout our 401Ks and "invest" in mutual funds and other such instruments.

    While these thieves on the other end are high on opium (OPM= other people's money) rolling high, taking insane risks, and all the profits and bonuses are theirs. If they make a loss, they are too big to fail and our taxes will bail them out. If they blatantly lie, cheat and commit felonies, they are too big to jail too.

    Realize this. The. joke. is. on. us. They are laughing all the way to the bank (which they own probably).

  25. So who was the iceberg. on Einstein and Schrodinger's Quest for a Unified Theory led to a Titanic Clash · · Score: 2
    OK. We got a titanic clash. We know Einstein is the Titanic of math and applied physics. That would make Schrodinger the iceberg. But we all know Heisenberg is German for iceberg. It is all so uncertain. Do scientists take dual forms like Schrodinger and Heisenberg and coalesce into one or the other only at the time of observation? Can one see Schrodinger while others see Heisenberg?

    If I lock up Einstein, Schrodinger and Heisenberg in a room with a capsule of cyanide gas and a time release mechanism for the gas, would I be sent to jail? Or to the mental institution?