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Comment Re:IBM no longer a tech company? (Score 1) 283

by drinkypoo (#48233717) Attached to: Ballmer Says Amazon Isn't a "Real Business"

IBM isn't anymore. I know this from inside source from different fronts: IBM buys companies, then squeezes the lemon. Then dumps it.

Yes, but everyone does this, at least, of any size. IBM at least seems to get a product out of it.

For years, IBM has taken over departments of companies tired of "managing IT", rehired the people who were fired on worse terms. while they are declined training or any other investment. "Take it or leave it".

It's not IBM's fault if you don't leave yourself some breathing room, though I agree that is shitty. Still, if the going rate is falling, I'm going somewhere else.

They have one huge battery of dusty old consultants, who have been unmarkettable. IBM itself isn't anything progressive from themselves anymore.

They truly do have a massive stack of useless consultants. That's not to imply that the majority of them are useless, although I suspect that's the case. I've simply met several of them.

Dusty, clunky legacy pile of shit software.

The thing is, that's often what's called for. Except the pile of shit part, but seriously, old doesn't mean bad.

Comment Re:Ugh! (Score 1) 308

by drinkypoo (#48233495) Attached to: Days After Shooting, Canada Proposes New Restrictions On and Offline

Anyone who thinks that we should be ashamed of our war dead doesn't have a CLUE as to what they did to ensure our freedom.

Anyone who thinks we should be proud doesn't have a CLUE as to why we were in those conflicts in the first place. Even WWII, which we should have probably been in, we deliberately delayed our entry so that our "allies" would get their asses pounded so that we could come out ahead economically. Proof? We were selling war materials including Alcoa aluminum and of course fuel to the Third Reich. We knew it was going on, and we let it continue and then seized the assets. But that didn't stop vital war supplies getting to the enemy.

I agree that war should be vilified

Obviously not.
Star Wars Prequels

Jedi-ism Becomes a Serious Religion 268

Posted by Soulskill from the still-no-match-for-a-good-blaster dept.
An anonymous reader writes: 390,127 Brits declared their religion as Jediism in their last census — many as a joke, but some are quite serious, the BBC reports. Cambridge University Divinity Faculty researcher Beth Singler estimates at least 2,000 of them are "genuine," around the same number as the Church of Scientology. The U.K. Church of Jediism has 200,000 members worldwide. Their belief system has expanded well beyond the Star Wars universe to include tenets from Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism and Samurai. Former priest, psychotherapist and writer Mark Vernon finds real power in the Jedi story: "The reason it's so powerful and universal is that we have to find ourselves. It's by losing ourselves and identifying with something greater like the Jedi myth that we find a fuller life."

Comment It's the shades of grey in between (Score 4, Insightful) 158

by Taco Cowboy (#48233081) Attached to: The Problem With Positive Thinking

The negative thinkers/pessimists get all the work done, then the positive thinkers say "See, there was nothing to worry about" and take all the credit

In reality no one can be said to be absolutely pessimistic nor absolutely optimistic

Most often the one who truly gets the work done follows the "Expect the _worst_ but hope for the _best_" adage

Submission + - More babies died in US than in Japan, New Zealand, Korea, Finland or Israel (politicalblindspot.com) 1

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Of the 29 OECD countries the United States ranked the 26th in term of infant mortality, behind behind most European countries as well as Japan, Korea, Israel, Australia, and New Zealand

This means that in the United States, more babies die before reaching the age of one year than in the vast majority of OECD countries

The United States had the highest rate of death in the 37 week or later birth bracket. While the full term for a pregnancy is 40 weeks, at 37 weeks babies are sufficiently close to full term as to have the highest likelihood of survival. While the CDC report found that America did better than three of the 29 OECD countries, a report prepared by Save the Children in 2013 found that the United States at the highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world.

A chart is available @ http://politicalblindspot.com/...
Government

When Snowden Speaks, Future Lawyers (and Judges) Listen 221

Posted by Soulskill from the everybody-else-is-watching-duck-dynasty dept.
TheRealHocusLocus writes: We are witness to a historic first: an individual charged with espionage and actively sought by the United States government has been (virtually) invited to speak at Harvard Law School, with applause. [Note: all of the following links go to different parts of a long YouTube video.] HLS Professor Lawrence Lessig conducted the hour-long interview last Monday with a list of questions by himself and his students.

Some interesting segments from the interview include: Snowden's assertion that mass domestic intercept is an "unreasonable seizure" under the 4th Amendment; that it also violates "natural rights" that cannot be voted away even by the majority; a claim that broad surveillance detracts from the ability to monitor specific targets such as the Boston Marathon bombers; him calling out Congress for not holding Clapper accountable for misstatements; and his lament that contractors are exempt from whistleblower protection though they do swear an oath to defend the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic.

These points have been brought up before. But what may be most interesting to these students is Snowden's suggestion that a defendant under the Espionage Act should be permitted to present an argument before a jury that the act was committed "in the public interest." Could this help ensure a fair trial for whistleblowers whose testimony reveals Constitutional violation?
Government

Identity As the Great Enabler 58

Posted by Soulskill from the imagine-if-you-will dept.
New submitter steve_torquay writes: Last week, President Obama signed a new Executive Order calling for "all agencies making personal data accessible to citizens through digital applications" to "require the use of multiple factors of authentication and an effective identity proofing process." This does not necessarily imply that the government will issue online credentials to all U.S. residents.

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) is working towards a distributed identity ecosystem that facilitates authentication and authorization without compromising privacy. NSTIC points out that this is a great opportunity to leverage the technology to enable a wide array of new citizen-facing digital services while reducing costs and hassles for individuals and government agencies alike.

Submission + - Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime Required

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Theft by government: The IRS admits to seizing hundreds of thousands of dollars of private assets, without any proof of illegal activity, merely because there is a law that lets them do it.

Using a law designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking their cash, the government has gone after run-of-the-mill business owners and wage earners without so much as an allegation that they have committed serious crimes. The government can take the money without ever filing a criminal complaint, and the owners are left to prove they are innocent. Many give up and settle the case for a portion of their money. “They’re going after people who are really not criminals,” said David Smith, a former federal prosecutor who is now a forfeiture expert and lawyer in Virginia. “They’re middle-class citizens who have never had any trouble with the law.”

The article describes several specific cases, all of which are beyond egregious and are in fact entirely unconstitutional. The Bill of Rights is very clear about this: The federal government cannot take private property without just compensation.

Comment Is it really negative? (Score 2) 158

by Ol Olsoc (#48231851) Attached to: The Problem With Positive Thinking
The problem I see with positive thinking is that you'll be setting in a room with a group of people, and someone will have an idea. The the "positive thinkers all try to make th eidea sound like a great idea.

And negative thinking doesn't help all that much either. Negative thinking just assumes nothing will ever work.

Pragmatic thinking, on the other hand, asks "What might go wrong?" Pragmatic thinking says, "I want this to work well, but what would keep it from working?"

Pragmatic thinking ends up getting things right much more often than either positive thinking oe negative thinking.

People I worked with would always cringe when I'd say "Hold on a second!", until They found out how often I was right in the end. Eventually they'd bounce ideas off me for projects I wasn't even on to se if they forgot or didn't think of something.
Classic Games (Games)

Tetris Is Hard To Test 169

Posted by Soulskill from the deceptive-tetrominomic-compexity dept.
New submitter JackDW writes: Tetris is one of the best-known computer games ever made. It's easy to play but hard to master, and it's based on a NP-hard problem. But that's not all that's difficult about it. Though it's simple enough to be implemented in one line of BBC BASIC, it's complex enough to be really hard to thoroughly test.

It may seem like you can test everything in Tetris just by playing it for a few minutes, but this is very unlikely! As I explain in this article, the game is filled with special cases that rarely occur in normal play, and these can only be easily found with the help of a coverage tool.
Science

The Problem With Positive Thinking 158

Posted by Soulskill from the take-that-optimists dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times explains research into how our mindset can influence results. The common refrain when striving for a goal is to stay positive and imagine success — people say this will help you accomplish what you want. But a series of psychological experiments show such thinking tends to have exactly the opposite effect. "In a 2011 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, we asked two groups of college students to write about what lay in store for the coming week. One group was asked to imagine that the week would be great. The other group was just asked to write down any thoughts about the week that came to mind. The students who had positively fantasized reported feeling less energized than those in the control group. As we later documented, they also went on to accomplish less during that week." This research has been replicated across many types of people and many different goals.

Building on that research, the scientists developed a thought process called "mental contrasting," where people are encouraged to think about their dreams coming true only for a few minutes before dedicating just as much time to thinking about the obstacles they'll have to deal with. Experiments have demonstrated that subjects using these techniques were more successful at things like exercise and maintaining a healthy diet than a control group. "[D]reaming about the future calms you down, measurably reducing systolic blood pressure, but it also can drain you of the energy you need to take action in pursuit of your goals."

Submission + - When Snowden speaks, future lawyers (and judges) listen (youtube.com)

Submitted by TheRealHocusLocus
TheRealHocusLocus writes: We are witness to an historic 'first': an individual charged with espionage and actively sought by the United States government has been (virtually) invited to speak at Harvard Law School, with applause. HLS Professor Lawrence Lessig conducted the hour-long interview last Monday with a list of questions by himself and his students.

Some interesting jumps are Snowden's assertion that mass domestic intercept is an 'unreasonable seizure' under the 4th Amendment, it also violates 'natural rights' that cannot be voted away even by the majority, a claim that broad surveillance detracts from the ability to monitor specific targets such as the Boston Marathon bombers, calls out Congress for not holding Clapper accountable for misstatements, and laments that contractors are exempt from whistleblower protection though they do swear an oath to defend the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic. These points have been brought up before. But what may be most interesting to these students is Snowden's suggestion that a defendant under the Espionage act be permitted to present an argument before a jury that the act was committed "in the public interest". Could this pure-judicial move help ensure a fair trial for whistleblowers whose testimony reveals Constitutional violation?

Professor Lessig wraps up the interview by asking Snowden, Hoodies or Suits? “Hoodies all the way. I hope in the next generation we don't even have suits anymore, they're just gone forever.”

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