Exactly right.

Why the fuck is *NASDAQ* promoting this program? They're a stock exchange. Let them do that. Let someone else write and sell garbage like this.

Security breaches like this taint NASDAQ's reputation. And for what? The amount of revenue this could have generated is peanuts compared to revenue from running the exchange itself.

Oh, for the good old days, when "heads will roll for this" was meant literally, not figuratively. Just think of it as a little chlorine in the gene pool.

I haven't studied the case in enough detail to have an opinion on whether there is barratry or contempt. But I will opine that you don't want to piss off a Federal Judge. This isn't traffic court. This isn't a smart move by Righthaven.

How the fuck did this drivel get modded +5 insightful??? Anyone who considers that comment +5 insightful is either a total imbecile or has never used both an iPad and a laptop. I've used both. Extensively. They're not equivalent. Not even close. They each have their place.

This drivel completely misses the point of the iPad. It's *not* a laptop. It weighs a third as much as much as a small laptop. It has a much better display than the typical budget laptop. It exits standby instantly, quite unlike a typical laptop. It's much more secure and easier to use than the typical laptop. It can easily run on a single battery charge for a full day, most laptops can't.

And there's more wrong with the second half of that sentence. E.g why does the typical middle school student need to lug around "a bigger screen"? Why does he need "more ram"? Why does he need "more hdd space"? Now you're out of the range of a small laptop. With the bigger-is-better mantra, a 12 y/o kid should be lugging around a 6 lb laptop? Add how much more weight for a case and a charger?

I think we can debate whether middle school students even need an iPad. Without reading TFA, my initial reaction is *no*. But certainly middle school students don't need a laptop to drag around all day, every day. I can't even begin to imagine how many laptops would be broken by the end of a school year. My SWAG would be: more than 70%. The iPad is much more robust, but still would have a hard time surviving a year of daily classroom use by a typical middle school student.

You're not alone in your despair. Categorizing the new discussion system as a clusterfuck doesn't begin to describe how badly broken it is. The slashdot "editors" must never read any of the stories, because, as you point out, it's been *months*, and yet nothing much seems to have changed.

Of course, the whole hierarchy viewing mechanism is also totally fubarred, so you'll probably never even be able to view this response.

I see it as a positive. I'm now wasting much less time on slashdot.

The info in the App store is a little misleading. If you search for the NYT app it says April 1, 2010. But if you actually click for more details, you see that it was updated to version 2.0.4 on December 23, 2010. So it's not as out of date as it appears to be at first glance.

Not sure if you'll ever see this, the newest /. discussion system is a total disaster. Anyway, here goes ...

Pilots are getting "dumber" because planes do so much for them now. But, in order to save lives, I want pilots to be dumber still. I want them to have an "Easy" button, like Staples advertises.

When the situation is totally fucked up, and the pilot can't stabilize it, the pilot hits the Easy button. Then the plane does what it has to in order to at least stay in the air. E.g. in the case of pitot tube failure causing loss of airspeed information, software sets IIRC 85% thrust at a specified AOA. Then at least the plane doesn't drop from the sky. Software can use info from sources that are still available. E.g. if altimeter isn't trustworthy, maybe GPS is valid, so use altitude from that (in case thrust setting varies with altitude). Or if no GPS, then use the radar altimeter. Or maybe the inertial nav system has an idea of the current altitude. Etc. In other words, do whatever you can to keep the plane from crashing. Also, if the plane is already in a bad configuration or even in a stall, then do whatever is possible to recover. A computer should be better at that then a "data entry operator".

This is an incredible can of worms to open. But, given how so many pilots are now "data entry operators" (see a comment below, and see lamentations on various pilot forums), it might actually save lives.

I predict, that ten or twenty years from now, most pilots will be next to useless in emergencies, and something like what I suggest will be de rigueur. Yes, the autopilot can disengage when it can't handle a dynamic situation. But then, after the pilots also can't handle it, there needs to be a "last ditch" computer on board. Given my druthers, I'd rather have Sully fly the plane. But I'd trust a computer over a "data entry operator" any day.

C did not even exist when the first two volumes of TAOCP were published. I'm not at all crazy about MIX, but Knuth can't be criticized for not "simplifying" a language that hadn't even been invented at the time.

Plus, MIX isn't completely "imaginary". Emulators actually exist for it.

You're exactly right, if society valued engineers they would be paid better. It's an imperfect method, but it's the best we've found in many years of trying.

Too bad you're only at +2, many people won't even see your comment.

And you probably won't even see my comment, /. is totally fucked up since the recent change to the discussion system.
 

Back in the old days when Pud ran FuckedCompany.com, he would love to post stories about Accenture. He'd always say: Accenture (pronounced ass-enter).

I currently have mod points, but I'm responding anyway. Two reasons
1) it's already +5 funny
and even if it wasn't, then
2) the new discussion system is so borked that I don't want to moderate: I can't in good conscience do it, because I simply can't follow all the hidden posts and confusing nesting to make sure I'm doing the right thing.

I haven't had mod points in about 6 months. Once my karma went from positive to good they just disappeared. Before that I had them pretty much every week. Things must be desperate, maybe nobody wants to moderate. Currently there are very few highly rated comments in the posts. So now slashdot is scraping the dregs (e.g. I have mod points again)!

I agree in principle; I'm sure there are many difficult implementation details.

Heck, even charging $1 per IP address per year would free up vast numbers of addresses.

E.g. here's a thought example: MIT gets a bill for $16,277,216 for the use of their IP block for the next month. Think they'd pay? How about $16,277,216 for the next year? I don't think they'd pay that either.

But there are far too many sacred cows out there for something like you suggest to be practical. As someone else said just below: "Internet does not work like that. Not even close". So we'll instead spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the switchover.

Thanks for writing that. History was never my strong suite, and they don't usually teach real history in high school anyway.

I'd like to rephrase your analogy a little:

I'd say it's the computer equivalent of encountering a random whore, checking a list of names of infected whores that you carry with you, and then deciding to have unprotected sex with this whore. After all, her name isn't on your list.

Unfortunately I didn't work on my rephrasing for long enough to completely maintain the spirit in which your original was written. E.g. I didn't include the colorfully descriptive phrase "disease-ridden cheap whore". But you get the idea.

Tang. Don't forget Tang.

OK so far.

That's where you are wrong.

And you're wrong again. Waddell & Reed, the "fundamentals trader", was not selling stock. They were selling E-minis. Why? Because it's much more "productive" for them (and for the market in general) to sell a single contract than to sell the corresponding 500 stocks. E-minis, or similar instruments like the SPY (for smaller investors who can't play in "futures"), are very "productive" as part of a well executed investment strategy. It's much more cost effective for a smaller investor to buy and sell SPY than to buy and sell 20 or 30 stocks.

Clearly, things went wrong. But demonizing E-minis (and the corresponding stock hedging that goes along with them) is the wrong takeaway.