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Comment Re:UAC - A Double Edged Sword (Score 4, Insightful) 187

As others have said...the "problem" you're describing is *exactly the farking point of UAC* - it's *intentional*. of course the context is different - that is almost completely the entire design concept of UAC, and as an infosec and 20+ year UNIX guy, I personally appreciate UAC in windows when I'm forced to use that OS (which is all too often). UAC isn't a bad thing, it's a *good* thing. And if you can't get your program to work with UAC, either you're bad at design, or your program shouldn't exist.

Comment Re: The future of console games (Score 1) 249

So you don't have any games like Bioshock (1, 2, infinite), Mass Effect (1, 2, 3), Dragon Age (origins, 2, inquisition), Witcher (1, 2, upcoming 3), etc? For games like those, it would be like saying you own a few movies, and you think they're just fine to watch over and over. In a RPG like Mass Effect, where it's like being an interactive movie that plays for 24-36hrs. No matter how great such games are, there's a limit to the number of times one can play it - mostly *because* they're so engaging. A simple game like simcity or such, of which you don't become a part? Sure, play it daily for a decade. Not all of us like the same type game as you, perhaps.

Comment for a moment there... (Score 5, Funny) 40

for a moment there, my brain processed the headline as "Michael Stonebraker passes Turing Test." Given how forgetful my wife claims I am, I then wondered if perhaps I had forgotten a couple of decades, and we were in some sort of future where we couldn't tell the difference between androids and humans anymore.

Then I took my second sip of coffee. I think today might be less productive, yet more entertaining, than I had predicted.

Comment Re:You are to uber (Score 1) 120

"This isn't being forced on anyone" - because it's in pilot phase, and they haven't yet had their lawyers and PR folks work out how to slip it past people without them knowing/caring. They're also trying to float the idea of it being a "feature" temporarily, to try to come up with a way to convince people it's a value-add (much easier than hiding it). Eventually though - maybe in as little as 6 months - it will be forced on everyone. Of that, you should be certain.

Comment Re:Read between the lines though. (Score 2) 111

Do you *need* beer? Do you *need* steak vrs a bowl of red beans and rice? A nice bed in a comfortable house, instead of some straw on the floor of a cave? 99.99% of your life is "luxury." That said, I have had the Samsung Gear Fit since last fall (my previous phone was stolen just days after the S5 Active came out, so I got it and the Gear Fit). I've found the watch to be extremely helpful in many ways, and have even regained my very lost habit of occassionally checking my watch (I went what, almost 15 years without one) to actually know what time it is. Then there's the sleep patterns, exercise tracking, etc...

Comment Re:Weak, sentimental, nonsense. (Score 2) 172

It has *everything* to do with the complaint. They certify a breed. The clone is *not* a perfect equivalent, and will have problems that the parents did not impart, and that the original did not have. The primary (secondary, and tertiary) point of having a certified bloodline is to be able to have certainty of particular traits, and consistency. A clone won't have that - they'll have new, unique problems. Or maybe they'll be ok, but their children will have problems. Allowing them in as equal status *does* go against the entire (ethically highly questionable) purpose of the breed registry.

Comment Re:Weak, sentimental, nonsense. (Score 4, Informative) 172

"(i.e., a perfect copy of a previous, 'natural-born' horse)" - it's not that. Not at all. Even if the horse lives, and seems to have a healthy life, and breeds...its children could have problems. Or maybe the clone will just be fine for 5 years, and suddenly have problems.

Your dna /ages/ in a sense. Unless you're cloning an infant, there are differences...and even then really, since even an infant has lost telomeres, and a variety of other things. If you cloned a blastocyst, it would probably be ok. Anything after that...problems occur, and we don't yet fully know why. More importantly, we don't know how to test for the potential problems, since we don't have a complete picture of what causes them. It is correct to exclude clones, in as much as it can be correct to worry about breed purity in the first place. You do understand that fields such as epigenetics and cloning in general are pretty much in their own infancy right now, right?

Comment Re:But if you look at unemployment... EEs beat CS (Score 1) 154

in all other engineering since the dawn of time, the engineer was presented a set of requirements, they then drafted a design they felt described the fulfillment of those requirements and presented it to the interested parties. Those parties agreed to it, then the engineer set to work completing the design documentation. Then junior engineers and workers would fulfill that design documentation. Then someone would make sure that the finished product still met the original requirements. Then everyone would go home.

Nowadays, CS grads are told that code writers are the only people who need to know anything about the product - they can start their own products, imagine new requirements along the way, document little to nothing, and never actually release something - just have snapshots of the code base they at a whim bequeath to the mere mortals scrambling at their feet.

Whenever I'm in the hiring seat, I give *substantial* preference to those who have done real things in their lives - things where communicating and meeting expectations were key, and where your efforts would be judged and evaluated. Anything from bar-tending to construction, really. Or maybe organized team sports, acting, music...? But a person that has done nothing other than flit around SF after a CS degree? No way in hell. So an EE over a CS? Heck yeah. Easier to teach a couple languages to a person who understands how to design things, than it is to un-teach stuff.

Comment Re:Old News (Score 1) 99

"read only" on those floppies was accomplished via a little plastic (physical) tab that could be toggled back and forth. A hole was either present, or not present, when a light attempted to shine through it and be seen on the other side. That mechanism was also hacked and subverted early on in floppy history

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