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Comment Re:To be fair... (Score 1) 253

But why should the support staff waste their time repetitively answering a question that is already answered in a customer forum?

Because that's their job and the paying customers require that service as part of what they have paid for.

Well most do not pay enough to cover their demands.....
Many are too lazy to read the fine manual.

However many manuals are written from the inside looking out perspective
and do not help a customer outside the developers circles gain access.

One perspective is the php documentation where a well structured and well
written set of documents still misses things. Their solution was a WiKi like
view where comments and questions could be added and the authors would
respond and at times revise the book.

There are two important types of documentation: teaching and reference.
Both are hard, it is harder to address both in one document.

Comment Time will tell more. (Score 1) 552

If you can communicate at all you have help. i.e. Your loved one can help you
help. Consider that a finger is all you need for morris code and 30-60 words per min are
possible. Blinking tapping ..... 5wpm is very helpful.

This is a complex topic and there are as many avenues for therapy....

The most difficult aspect may be personal you may have to learn
something new... think sign language if hearing was lost for example.

Comment Re:Next target, please (Score 1) 626

With the need of LESS law enforcement, maybe that's not such of a bad thing.

Sort of.... some equate law enforcement with traffic enforcement.
Some equate the war on drugs with war...

OK OK it is true they all have laws behind them but traffic is the most profitable the safest
to enforce and collect. It is also the guile and excuse to stop and search for other
transgressions that trigger property forfeiture which is big $$ in some locations.

Drug enforcement is interesting because moral justitude has pushed drugs outside
of the law. All commerce and money outside the law still needs law to protect from
thieves etc. Law outside of the law has few options.... murder is one... and that is
a massive social problem.

We as voters need to pay attention.... the observation that automated vehicles
might bankrupt police departments is a hint that something is wrong in the financial
structure of the system. One problem might be contracts that keep union folk on payrolls
no matter the need.

Comment This is just the tip of the (Score 1) 1

This is just the tip of the problem. I fear that many infections are not
from sex but from sloppy aunt flinikie kisses as well as the shared
water cup in the bathroom next to the tooth brush.

The good news is we do know how to vaccinate against
these viruses and while one generation (twenty years) is not
long enough the virus and associated cancers can be much reduced
over the next 60 years +/- in rich nations.

Globally the issue is more tangled. It is clear that the lesions so
common with HPV are opening the body for HIV and other long
lived infections. These generational virus infections which includes
Herpes Zoster are an interesting future target for research that may
have great quality of life implications.

Comment Service in SV is terrible.... (Score 1) 1

For those in other parts of the world.
Cell service and high speed internet in Silicon Valley
could be classified as the worst in the nation vs. education.

For some silly reason towers are impossible to get approved.
For obvious reasons the last mile to homes is a locked
in monopoly.

I have no idea what this will service beyond "whisper net"
type Kindle devices or more interestingly NSA/FBI/CHP/DEA/DHS
tracking devices.

Time will tell.

Comment Re:Next target, please (Score 4, Insightful) 626

The war on drugs has turned large areas of the US into war zones
and that is not a good thing.

It is for the companies that are profiting by it.

Well it is more than just companies looking for profit.
It is a collection of interests that all profit one way or another
from a common outcome.

The ones that bothers me most are the morally correctitude driven folk that
want to save a soul by outlawing sin.

Comment Re:Next target, please (Score 1) 626

Hopefully people will come to their senses and outlaw tobacco and alcohol while simultaneously legalizing marijuana.

well there someone who hasn't a clue about what the effect on an outright ban on alcohol does....ever heard of prohibition and what happened there in America??

it created a massive criminal industry along with masses of violence and death... mostly from bullets but also from VERY badly made alcohol which poisoned people.Which is to say it created FAR MORE pr4oblems than it cured... in fact it cured NONE....

  so perhaps before opening your sanctimonious mouth and letting your belly rumble... know what you are talking about first.

Yes,,,, it is not that alcohol, tobacco and marijuana are bad for you (they are not good for you)
the important point to keep focus on is that the war on drugs, alcohol etc is worse.

The war on drugs has turned large areas of the US into war zones
and that is not a good thing.

Comment Re:Focus on your studies as much as possible (Score 1) 309

You are making a huge financial investment in both real dollars and opportunity cost.

......snip....

OK freshman+ do get a job any job that get you up in the morning
and puts some coin in your pocket.

Internships that do not pay are a scam in 99 44/100% of the cases.
If you sign an NDA and assign any rights to the company they need to pay
now$ or later$$$$.

Before you get much past your sophomore year do get a job in your field
of study. Too many students graduate and find that the job is not
what they expect. Switching majors as a junior is a lot easier
then the last semester as a senior or graduate student. It may be that
you will learn enough to make good decisions about electives or a minor.

So job yes. What it is, depends on where home is and what those opportunities are.

One turn on this is to get some company to finance a project that you can get
done in a summer. Write up a proposal and a compensation contract
and see what you can sell. As a freshman this is hard as a junior
this is very possible.

Comment Well sure.... (Score 2) 347

This is to be expected.... what is the real scope of this?

I believe that a router on the way to a German auto maker is not targeted. OK I want to believe.

I believe that a well managed site will audit and reload software. I believe that additional system admin audits behind and in front of the
hardware are justified.

For the NSA (Never Say Anything) to snoop does not bother me but they are not the only TLA in the game today.

The internet has not been friendly for a gosh long time nothing has changed.

Submission + - Security Vendor Snake Oil

snydeq writes: IT security expert Roger Grimes provides real-world tales of security vendor snake oil, spelling out seven promises and technologies touted by security companies that don't deliver. 'If you're a hardened IT security pro, you've probably had these tactics run by you over and over. It's never only one vendor touting unbelievable claims but many. It's like a pathology of the computer security industry, this all-too-frequent underhanded quackery used in the hopes of duping an IT organization into buying dubious claims or overhyped wares. Following are seven computer security claims or technologies that, when mentioned in the sales pitch, should get your snake-oil radar up and primed for false promises.'

Comment Re:Camera gun (Score 1) 765

Disabling shots are irresponsible, unsafe, and ineffective.

......

AND open the shooter up to litigation.

The reality is a disabling shot is not a design goal and a disabling shot
does not "stop" the other bad person from returning fire in most cases.
No weapon is designed to disable today.....

My personal pet solution to this is portable shields. Too often "peace" officers
are taught to fire in defense for fear of their life and limb because they have
no "safe" place to stop and assess the situation. A shield not too different
from a riot shield should be quickly available, doors of police vehicles should
have layers added to protect from ballistic small arms fire. A shield can fold
or unroll to be about 1meter by 2 meters. An unroll design could be like
a carpenters tape where it has a curve and snaps straight but rolls up. Folding
designs are obvious and many. Storage can be in or on the deck of the british boot,
on the door or behind the seat. Body armor is nice but less effective in many
situations.

Comment Re:Motivated rejection of science (Score 1) 661

It's called 'motivated reasoning', but I doubt these idiots have ever heard of it.

Must be a conservative state, because this peculiar strain of stupidity is generally right-wing in nature. It's all about me! me!! me!! and screw the consequences, especially for the environment, our grandkids, or poor people.

Someone is winging it here. Right-wing left-wing it is necessary to read the 400+ pages.

I am only half way into this and it carves out an agenda ignoring any dialogue.
Many of the statements of fact are the current conclusions of science in progress.
As works in progress the conclusions should not be so boldly presented as fact.
This alone will cause people that know or think they know to reject the agenda.

Remember correlation is not proof of causality.
http://io9.com/our-new-favorit...

Omitted in this is a solid anchor to mathematics which is covered by others.
There is a bit of hand waving about iterative modeling and CO2 cycles,
weather and more but after discussing iterative modeling some conclusions
become fact.

I happen to be old enough to have been taught "geosynclinal theory of mountain building" as if it
was fact. Yet in the afternoon of my final exam I sat in a seminar by J. Tuzo Wilson and some
of his students on Plate Technics. I am also old enough to recall when 1inch was defined
as 2.54cm EXACTLY and the difference between the old and new can matter.

An old boss of mine (in Wyoming) kept a cartoon behind clear plastic on his desk. It had
one man with a gift package labeled "Truth"... the next panel had the same character
with a gift package labeled "New Truth". Stuff changes....

There is an interesting management problem that may apply to this. In an exercise
teams are given topics to advocate for and against. Then the team that "wins" gets to
debate another team up a ladder. The observation and point of the exercise is that
as an agenda moved up through the process the position gets less and less flexible.
In as little as three cycles some "managers" in this class got so invested in the position
they were given that fists get brandished.

The further folk get from the sciences and more invested they get with a position
the sillier they can appear to someone looking at it with the eyes of a child.

Watch the old and new Cosmos -- Neil deGrasse Tyson is MUCH more invested
in the same positions that Carl Sagan was. Neil transforms conclusions into facts.
Conclusions that I agree with but facts.... no.... the "New Truth" beckons tomorrow.

Enough rambling.
The US coal and natural gas resources are large. Ignore this and people will
die of heat or cold or lack of water (pumps, desalination). Other nations will
be happy and aggressive in their exploitation of fossil energy and climate
will be impacted no matter what this 400+ page document authors think they
know. I know that some of the computer codes involved use "PI=3.14" and iterate
for months on many cores to get a result to 19 places to the right of the dp.

Comment Re:Legacy Programmers (Score 1) 634

The software in particle physics is almost exclusively C++ and/or Python.

Not so long ago, I talked to a guy whose software was mostly Fortran, with Python as a glue. Apparently the FFI on both ends is good enough that hooking this up is no less complicated than it is with C. That was fluid dynamics.

Among other things, they used Python for unit tests...

The interesting bit about tossing Python in the mix is Python is a rich
collection of C, C++ and other code. The interpreter is only a small
bit of what runs in most cases. Time after time when some
interesting bit of Python was found to be a hot spot it would be coded
in C (or any language) with the correct link-to-it bits to to cool off the hot spot.
As long as the linking bits are correct any compiler can be used as
well. Consider that those that find clang.llvm to be a winner over gcc
can use the compiler that is the bake-off winner (there can be large differences).

This relentless hot spot removal by the Python community has
greatly increased the value. Even R bindings exist.

FORTRAN, Fortran and fortran all have clear regions where symbolic
math can rule. Math types have gotten very good at correct symbolic
transformations and machines can automate the transformations.
For example the compiler can discover a constant expression and evaluate
it once inserting the answer into the code. If you run the program 10,000
times on 5000 machines this constant evaluation by the compiler takes
time Tr=Tc/(10000*5000) and at runtime has an answer latency of near zero.

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