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Comment Re:why? (Score 1) 677

Ditto. Any significant C I've written had "cleanup:" at the end of many functions, and "goto cleanup" wherever you had to bail out of the middle of such functions. Once I got over the "never use goto" mentality that was drilled into my head, I realized it was the most maintainable way of dealing with things that had to be released such as file handles, graphics contexts, memory, etc. Anybody who analyzed my code should have quickly picked up on the fact that this was an idiom for something like destructors in a language that doesn't have them.

Comment Re:prison is as prison does (Score 1) 176

Isn't the point of prison to separate criminals from the general population?

This; but with some very important caveats. First, the separation must be as humane as practical. Why? Well there's the obvious "don't be a sicko and mistreat anybody, even a prisoner because it's immoral" argument. There's also the "hey, they might be innocent" argument. Everybody, even the most hardened "tough on crime" person should understand this. Every single one of us is potentially a victim of mistaken imprisonment. What, not me? Yes. You. If you disagree, please refer back to the definition of "mistaken imprisonment". Thus, we all have a personal stake in safe, humane treatment of prisoners.

Second, we should carry out this humane separation only when necessary, and in a way that isn't too costly.

The policy as described in the article summary seems neither humane, nor necessary. In the long run it will be costly too. Extended solitary can lead to severe mental conditions. Severe mental conditions are costly to society, either because of new crimes when released, or the need to turn the prisoner over to an expensive psychiatric facility for the rest of their lives.

If they're concerned about people running gangs from prison, they could monitor their networks. Collect all the information and trade it with your friends... then collect their friends and put them in the same cell. Of course there'd be less of this if we weren't waging a war on drugs; but that's a separate rant.

Comment Re:Electroplating in college dorms (Score 1) 690

Now I really want to know how many C-64s, Apple ][s, Osbourne's, or other contemporary machines available to students we would have needed to have a 95% chance of mining a coin before the semester was out. That's assuming that crypto currency existed in 1987, which it didn't. I suspect we would have overloaded the breaker panel and not have had much of a chance. These machines struggled to render one crappy low-res image of the Mandlebrot set.

A more plausible technique back then would have been to steal cycles from an academic computer. I don't know what they had in the 80s, but when I returned to school after dropping out there was an RS6000 and a Sun cluster to which we had access, and possibly more that we could have found and compromised. Not sure how much computing power could have come from pooled student accounts. It might have been more plausible; but the ability to run unattended jobs was often restricted. Computing privileges at a university generally aren't worth risking for such nonsense...

Comment Electroplating in college dorms (Score 1) 690

Electricity was not metered in our dorms. A lot of us joked about electroplating. AFAIK, nobody did it. This was in the 80s when most weed was ditch from Jamaica or Mexico. People weren't hip to hydro there. If you offered college students free electricity now, grow-ops would definitely be their first thought.

Of course this is Greece we're talking about here, so they'll just end up with rolling black-outs if they aren't doing it already. It's hard to run a grow-op, server farm, or anything when the juice is only on for a few hours a day.

Comment Re:inert gas (Score 1) 378

Too much of a fire hazard. I don't see any local fire marshal wanting to sign off on such a thing. I'd go with a gas detector that sounds an alarm and releases CO2 into the chamber. It would rapidly displace whatever they managed to pump in. The cold steam hissing out of the box would also give them one heck of a startle.

Comment Re:Regulation? (Score 1) 339

Not only is that obvious on its face, you can see it in the statistics: the more "statist" and regulatory governments have been, the less well economies have done and the more income inequality we've seen.

That's an awful lot of un-quantified stuff. You can have fun measuring these things in oh-so many ways. I propose to measure oppression in Stalins per acre, and economic outcome in chickens per pot. Fair enough? Let's get some real analysis started now...

Comment East coast storms are notorious (Score 1) 397

East coast snow storms are notoriously difficult to predict. I'm not surprised that even with modern technology they still can't get it perfect. In addition to the dynamic nature of the low-pressure circulation interacting with the coast and the gulf stream (like a hurricane) you've got the all-important freezing temperature line. It's even worse than "a line that might shift" though, because if the cold air intrudes under the warm you get freezing rain, not snow.

I grew up in that region (DC area) and it was always like this. I have no envy for those forecasters.

One of my fondest memories is of the 1978 storm. Hit in the afternoon, 2" predicted. 6PM, forecast increased 6-8". Next morning? Most of us had 24", some hit 36". I wonder if modern tech could have done better.

More often than not though, it seemed like DC always got cheated out of snow when I was a kid. Rain, sleet, snow that got rained on and turned into a soggy mess. Beautiful snow that you could play in on your day off was just all too rare.

Comment Re:Think of the children! (Score 4, Insightful) 413

Going to cause a lot of collateral damage to start doxxing people who may or may not be pedobears

Call me when anonymous starts busting down doors without warning at 3 AM and kills occupants. Call me when they snag people rolling through town who just took out cash to buy a car, and confiscate the money. Call me when they drag people through the court for years, ruining their good name with no real conviction. Call me when they just shoot you on the street even though you're un-armed.

Those are all things the "real cops" have been doing. When the authorities aren't doing their job, alternatives start to look better.

Comment What is there on a fighter that could help? (Score 1) 110

What is there on a fighter jet that could possibly help? It's a bomb threat. Fighters have... bombs, guns and missiles. Well, since we already don't want an explosion at the airport, bombs don't help. Missiles, pretty much the same deal except there's a nice WhhoooooOOOSH before it hits something. Seems bombs and missiles would only make matters worse. That leaves guns, typically used air-to-air or for strafing. Since they aren't under threat of air attack, strafing seems to be the most likely course of action, should the fighters actually engage.

That doesn't make a lot of sense though. A device, if found, will typically be removed and detonated or detonated in place after the area has been cleared.

Maybe, just maybe... the logic is something like, "Hey, can we strafe the bomb this time?". CO: "No, EOD is going to follow procedure". Pilot: "Damned EOD. Maybe we'll strafe the bomb next time".

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