Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:It's the end of the world as we know it! (Score 1) 307

What do you think would for instance GE do if suddenly some quite important addresses within the 3/8 IP space are no longer reachable from the outside, because ARIN reassigned them to someone else? Who will survive the lawsuits for damage and loss of business? What will happen if the oncall GE technician who administers some important GE serviced equipment at some hospital site can't get to it remotely after a break down, and thus the small glitch gets out of hand, and some people depending on the GE equipment on site die?

ARIN will never reassign a GE owned block without clearance beforehand from GE. Too dangerous.

Comment Re:Makes sense. (Score 4, Informative) 278

Even with a lot of questions surrounding the IQ, the generally understanding of intelligence and the importance of it, one fact is quite undisputed:

If controlled for social factors, IQ is by far the best prediction of your future educational performance. So the chance of becoming a scientist is directly correlated to your IQ.

The original IQ test, as invented by Alfred Binet, was created to determine in what class to put children who started school. In 1882, France introduced compulsory education, but many children in France had no or questionable birth certificates, and when they were about to start school, it was not clear what their real age was and which class would be suitable for them. And then there were the children who required special care, and until the beginning of the 20th century, it was up to the subjective judgement of the respective teachers to determine which children should get it. Thus Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon developed a test to more objectively assess the educational potential of a child, the Binet-Simon-Test, which was to calculate something called the "intelligence age" of a child, and which was used as a criterion in what class to put a child.

It should thus be expected that the IQ as measured by the Binet-Simon-test (and the later development Stanford-Binet-test and all subsequent IQ tests) is quite predictive for your educational career, because that's what they were invented for.

Comment Re: From TFA: (Score 1) 213

It can, but you have to have at first a clue of what you are doing. To know how to scale back a 100 MByte code base, you have to know the 100 MByte code base first, and you have to have lots of experience from coding within the 100 MByte code base, or from coding in a similar environment and with a similar goal.

To know how to scale back a large government, you have to know first what the government is doing, how it is doing what it does and why it does what it does, at best from your own experience in this government, or from working in another government.

Some outsider with big words but no experience is very likely screwing up big time, because he has no clue about most of the very important details. Yes, sometimes you find that wunderkind who is able to pull the stunt and get a new new code base working. But it surely has coded before, it has a general idea what's the point of the whole thing, and it is able to fastly get a strong team together pulling in the same direction. And sometimes you find that person who is able to redo a government as a relative outsider, but that person needs strong experience in how to govern something, and it has to be able to get a strong team together which pulls in the same direction.

And here the parallel between the government and maintaining a code base ends. Because you can create a new codebase while the old is still running. But you can't start a new government and get it up to speed while the old one is still running.

Comment Re: From TFA: (Score 1) 213

A president who runs on a "massively cut government" platform is like the junior coder who claims to be able to redo the whole 100 MByte source code project in his spare time, and cut it down to 1.5 MByte in size.

If his spare time project will ever be more than some example routines of peripherical functions and a completely overengineered interface full of place holder code and TBDL comments, then it will take 10 years to get some preliminary modules in production, and you will end up with two codebases of 150 MByte each, partly incompatible, but so interwoven that you can't never get rid again of at least one of it.

Comment Re:More bad science journalism (Score 1) 29

This just in: the difference between a just formed, new planet and a planet that got hot stellar matter from its central sol is much smaller than the difference between a newly formed planet and one that circles around the quiet central star for some billions of years.

And thus it is a rejuvenation, as the planet gets more similar to its primordal state than before.

Comment Re:Totally worth it. (Score 4, Insightful) 80

And we managed to expose hypocrisy in all other governments too, as for instance the U.S. was assuring everyone: "We don't spy on friends".

And in general, I think: Let the governments spy on each other. That's fine with me. Let them play their games with themselves. Hey, even government agencies of the same government spy on each other.

What I am not ok with is if spy agencies that are not allowed to spy on their own population do it via agencies in other countries. The german BND is not allowed wholesale data collections of german people, thus they just ask the NSA to filter it for them. On the other hand, the NSA sends the BND a list of keywords, and the BND uses its investigative power to hand the matching data over to the NSA.

In some way, all legislation around spying powers gets made obsolete if you just have that befriended agency in that befriended country which just happily will provide you with all the data you are not allowed to collect -- they are not subject to your legislation, they don't have to report to your appointed watchdog, and they will not obey the will of your people. All the bad things that are illegal for your people are just outsourced to others, to the mercenaries somewhere else, to the foreign torturers and to the shady deals everyone can deny if they grow sour.

Comment Re:ALPR is legal in Europe and already deployed (Score 2) 131

At those places, you get warned that your license plate gets read and stored if you cross a certain line. If you are eligible to enter the restricted traffic area, you have signed a contract and opted in to have your license plate scanned, and if not, you are not allowed to drive there anyway. You still can choose not to drive there as those places have large parking areas outside, and good public transport.

It's quite different to secretly scan the license plate of everyone and compile a database.

Comment Re:The cognitive dissonance ... (Score 2) 131

As an European, I don't understand what you want to say, because an automatic license plate reader would be illegal in most places in Europe anyway. Automaticly compiling a database about the movements of people is mainly illegal as it runs afoul most Data Protection laws.

If you call the ability of the government to put everything into large, databases shared between all government agencies "socialism", then the U.S. is much more socialist than any EU member state. Even the data retention directive had to be pulled after the European High Court called it unconstitutional in 2014.

Comment There once was a clear distinction. (Score 1) 345

When people are learning a craft, there are certain levels of knowledge:
  1. The apprentice.
  2. Has little to no experience, learns the first tasks. Every step he takes has to be supervised and controlled.

  3. The journeyman.
  4. Knows how to do things, you can give him a list of task, and he will work on them until they are finished. Can supervise an apprentice.

  5. The master.
  6. Knows his trade. Knows how to organise task. Is able to split a project into several tasks he can either work on himself or give to a journeyman or even to an apprentice. Knows how to teach an apprentice. Knows how to differentiate between a well finished task and one you have to do over again.

What we have here is the question what you have to know in C++ to be on journeyman level.

Slashdot Top Deals

Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker

Working...