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Comment Re:Tax (Score 1) 534

Company tax is not based on revenue, it is based on profits.

And yet, all personal income taxes are based on revenue.

Sure, you might have some deductions from income, but unlike a business, you can't subtract all the money you paid for food, housing, and paying your "employees" (like babysitters, taxi drivers, etc.).

Comment Re:It's about time. (Score 1) 138

So, if Simon is at all offended by the new Star Trek as you are, he may bring this alternate Star Trek back to some semblance of the Roddenberry-inspired sagas.

How about writing his own character out of the next movie?

The problem with the "reboot" is that there are thousands of stories that can be told in the Star Trek universe without involving Kirk, Spock, McCoy, et.al., as proved by four television series.

Comment Re:pfsense (Score 3, Insightful) 403

Systemd is actually *really* easy to get rid of, you just have to be willing to do without Gnome and other packages that depend upon it.

Please provide a step-by-step list of the commands needed to remove systemd from CentOS 7 "minimal install", or a pointer to such a list.

I have now been told literally dozens of times that "you don't have to install systemd", but no one has yet to back that up with steps for an install without it, or how to remove it from an existing install.

Comment Re:Translation pls. (Score 1) 159

made that range public within the country.

The word you (and others) are looking for is "route-able", not "public".

There are a lot of IANA-assigned (i.e., "public") IPs that aren't routable from all other arbitrary IP addresses, while many places have made private IPs routable for some or all of their network, just like North Korea has done.

Comment Re:If you don't want to upgrade your box (Score 1) 100

That can significantly speed up tasks that are known to create lots of temporary files (e.g. compilation).

I set up a RAM disk on my Windows machine because of Audacity.

It creates temp files to store intermediate work (like the decode to PCM of a compressed format, or the output of a filter) instead of using RAM. Even with an SSD, this was not nearly as fast as it should have been, and a serious waste, since the total space used by the temp files is far less than the memory space available to the application. The RAM disk solved the speed problem quite nicely.

I also store things like Firefox's page cache on the RAM disk.

Comment Re:PCIe 3.0 availability (Score 1) 100

And yes, most motherboards have a "primary" slot where it's a real x16 slot, and 1 or 2 or more SLI or Crossfire slots which are x8 or even x4.

Actually, most motherboards today have auto-switching slots, so that they have 16 lanes assigned to 3 slots, and the motherboard and card negotiate so that each card performs as fast as it can regardless of slot, up to the total maximum of 16 lanes across the three slots. This means there is no "primary" slot any more, and helps you lay out cards where clearance is an issue.

What this means is that you can install that x16 video card in any of the three x16 form factor slots, and it will get all 16 lanes. If you install a card in another of the x16 form factor slots, it will get up x8 if it asks for it, and the first card will be dropped down to x8 as well. Install a third card, and you end up with x8/x4/x4, but again, no slot is "primary".

Comment Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device (Score 1) 391

I'd hope that you do in fact get higher quality DAC hardware, connectors, etc., so the actual sound quality is better. But the price is also "inflated" by the product being a niche, audiophile product.

No, it's inflated because it's Sony.

This player has a high quality DAC, etc., gets great reviews from audiophiles, and yet only costs $350. Sure, you need to spend an extra $100 for a 128GB MicroSD card, but that's still $750 less than Sony wants.

Comment Re:Is the NSA/FBI/Local Police on that partnership (Score 1) 163

I'm not typically a paranoid libertarian, but really, there are some things I'm 100% fine with handling on a closed network or with my own two hands.

Yeah, the hardware they are talking about is interesting, and if I could set up a local server to control it, that might be useful. But handing over information and control to someplace out on the Internet sounds like about the worst idea ever.

Comment Re:As expected... (Score 5, Informative) 400

This gets mentioned a lot on Slashdot but, in reality, the number of "good" movies has remained reasonably unchanged each year.

Here are the movies in the IMDB Top 250 grouped and counted by year:

IMDB ratings have a serious problem as far as new movies are concerned, as the latest movie of any reasonable quality tends to get many people rating it a "10" (which should mean it's perfect). It takes a while before a movie settles down to what its real rating should be. This is caused by the "aging" algorithm and number of required votes per year that IMDB uses. It means that a movie that has a lot of buzz will be listed until everybody stops caring about it and it drops out of the list, even if it has a rating that is technically better than movies in the list.

Likewise, there is no reason for movies in the top 250 to be evenly distributed by year. It's far more likely that good movies should be much older, as being evenly distributed by year implies that this year movies have been good enough to push some other movies out of the top 250, which means that the best movies are getting better, which most people agree isn't true. Even, then, there are a lot a problems with ratings being inflated as time goes by. As little as 5 years ago, a movie could crack the top 250 with less than an 8.0 rating, but now some movies are left off even though they have that same rating.

If you use IMDB info, the "Top 1000 Voters" and "Metascore" are far better indicators of the overall quality of the movie, especially if you take into account the number of "Top 1000" that entered a rating for the movie. Basically, these are people who see and rate a lot more movies than anybody else, so even if their score is high for the movie, if a lot of them never rated it, that says something by itself. For example, Star Wars and The Dark Knight are two movies that have both been around for long enough for everyone to get a chance to see them and vote on them, and have ratings of 8.6 and 8.2 from the top voters, with 930 and 898 votes. Both ratings are close to the overall ratings. On the other hand, The Hunt from 2012 (also old enough for such die hard movie viewers to have seen it) gets a 7.3 (considerably lower than the 8.3 from all voters), but only 421 bothered to see it. Django Unchained from the same year, OTOH, gets 710 votes for a rating of 7.8 (still lower than the 8.5 from all voters, but not as much of a drop). The confidence that the rating on Django Unchained is more accurate is much higher. Even using overall votes, Interstellar has less than half the votes compared to the average of the two movies immediately surrounding it on the list, and as such will eventually fall to where it really belongs.

Comment Re:you need to kill the botnets (Score 1) 312

How do you stop users from double-clicking miley_cyrus_nude.jpg.exe?

Microsoft could start by changing the default Windows Explorer settings to always show file extensions and not have a configuration option that turned off the display.

No, it wouldn't stop everyone from doing stupid things, but it might help a few people make better decisions.

Comment Re:Cheaper (Score 1) 349

Travel between the hubs (Let's use A to C for example) is cheap, relatively speaking, because of the constant demand. The airlines know their flights will always be full, so they can (and must) reduce their prices to a minimum.

This is counter-intuitive. If the flights are "always full" because of "constant demand", logic says the price can be raised.

Just like a restaurant with a one-month wait for reservations, the prices can be raised until the wait is as little as one day, but as long as the restaurant is still full every minute they are open, then raising prices will do nothing but increase profit. Likewise, as long as the same number of passengers fly per day between the two cities, then the airline would make more profit by raising prices.

Comment Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score 1) 292

Apparently there's hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash and the text of the book does indeed use the en-dash...and looks a little weird.

There's actually a lot more than just those, some of which render identically in most fonts.

I ran into a eBook that uses the n-dash correctly when used a a modifier for compound words, and it does look weird (which is what alerted me to it in the first place), but after reading the rules, I left them that way.

Comment Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score 1) 292

There is nothing simple about typography, and a script such as you describe would cause more damage than it would fix.

In this case, the script would be simple, since the book isn't about math. Replace all U+2212 characters with U+002D and you've fixed the problem that Amazon has with the book.

Although U+2010 is called "Hyphen" and U+002D is called "Hyphen-Minus", either works in this case, with U+002D the most common.

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