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Submission + - Brazil Sues Samsung Over Work Conditions (ft.com)

Submitted by konohitowa
konohitowa writes: The Financial Times is reporting that the Brazilian government has filed a lawsuit against Samsung for working conditions that put workers' health at risk (both through repetitive motion injuries as well as excessive consecutive work days). While Samsung has "promised to conduct a thorough review and fully co-operate with the Brazilian authorities once it receives details of the complaint", the article also points out the following:

The prosecutors’ office in the Amazon said that it started legal action against Samsung on August 9 following three government inspections at the plant, the first of which started in May 2011.

Perhaps Latin America won't be quite the easy alternate to China that manufacturing corporations had envisioned.

Comment Re:He just redifined everything. Its a strawman. (Score 1) 381

by konohitowa (#44126139) Attached to: Dr. Dobb's Calls BS On Obsession With Simple Code

Defining efficiency would be a first step. Self-scavenging and self-modifying code fits into limited resources, but it's still complex. I once asked billg why the MS BASIC interpreter didn't tokenize numeric constants. He claimed that they pulled out the code for that to fit into 4k ROMs. So integers and reals that were encountered by the interpreter had to be parsed at each and every occurrence. The workaround was to create variables for all constants (I'd call them named constants but they were rarely longer than 2 letters). This is an example of being efficient with ROM usage and inefficient with storage (numbers represented in ASCII rather than machine) and inefficient with CPU (the constant reparsing).
Stats

Excel Error Contributes To Problems With Austerity Study 476

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the canada-isn't-real-anyway dept.
quarterbuck writes "Many politicians, especially in Europe, have used the idea that economic growth is impeded by debt levels above 90% of GDP to justify austerity measures. The academic justification came from a paper and a book by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. Now researchers at U Mass at Amherst have refuted the study — they find that not only was the data tainted by bad statistics, it also had an Excel error. Apparently when averaging a few GDP numbers in an excel sheet, they did not drag down the cell ranges down properly, excluding Belgium. The supporting website for the book, 'This time it is different,' has lots of financial information if a reader might want to replicate some of the results." The Excel error is making the rounds as the cause of the problems with the study, but it's actually a minor component. The study also ignores some post-WWII data for countries that had a high debt load and high growth, and there's some fishy weighting going on: "The U.K. has 19 years (1946-1964) above 90 percent debt-to-GDP with an average 2.4 percent growth rate. New Zealand has one year in their sample above 90 percent debt-to-GDP with a growth rate of -7.6. These two numbers, 2.4 and -7.6 percent, are given equal weight in the final calculation, as they average the countries equally. Even though there are 19 times as many data points for the U.K."

Comment Re:Half the length of a novelette (Score 1) 224

by konohitowa (#42180371) Attached to: Adobe EULA Demands 7000 Years a Day From Humankind

Don't you think your example is specious? In the case of the product, the exchange requires that I give them $50. If I do so, then they allow me to take the product out of the store. In the case of an EULA, the exchange requires that I a click on a button. If I do so, then they allow me to use the software.

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