A tree can't very well wash away an infection that has invaded its leaves.

The only real way is to drop its leaves.

If you've walked in the woods often enough, you'd see this.

--
BMO

Share with who, exactly?

There were no qualifiers to the message I originally replied to, only students mentioned.

So whatever, man.

--
BMO

>postal service loses money

But then the Congress and the Bush administration in 2006 forced the USPS to pay for all of its retiree health benefit payments for the next 75 years in 10 years. NO BUSINESS, PUBLIC OR PRIVATE, DOES THIS and it has created an untenable position. It's like the whole concept of proper amortization and actuarial tables never existed.

Prior to that, the USPS was profitable.

Republicans: "If it works, fuck with it anyway. Point at it when we've made it fail and say 'government sux' but it's not our fault - it's the fault of those liberals, over there, like the teacher's unions. Yeah, they made the USPS fail. That's the ticket."

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BMO

Oh look, he thinks that IT is programming/comp sci.

How cute.

I don't expect the IT guy to be able to write a damn line of C code, but I have also run into plenty of programmers that can't remember why you have to "safely eject" a USB drive in Windows.

"Uh, hey, I can't find my stuff...can you get it back?"

IT is to comp sci as plumbing is to hydrology - I don't expect the hydrology prof at URIGSO to know how to hook up plastic pipe to copper, and I don't expect the plumber to tell me anything about the Ogallala Aquifer.

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BMO

>Don't straw man me

You said, and I quote accurately:

All these people who go to college for the piece of paper are turning colleges into half-assed trade schools

If those aren't students, then who the fuck are they?

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BMO

Ivory Tower Mentality right here:

If that leads to a job, great, but that shouldn't be the point.

6-figure debt makes it the point. A debt that you cannot refinance makes it the point. A debt you can't escape through bankruptcy makes it the point.

A trillion dollar debt problem in the US makes it the point.

HR departments requiring a BA for the most menial of office tasks makes it the point.

Requiring a fucking MA to work in a library as a salaried employee and not a volunteer (the US is the only country I know of that does this) makes it the point.

But sure, it's /all/ the student's fault for expecting something in return for all that money. /sneer

I have nothing but contempt for you.

--
BMO

FTFA:

Why would a plant evolve a method that cleans the under-side of its leaves?

Come on, man, THINK for a second. What *else* might stick to leaves that the plant might not want? What about fungal spores? You know, organisms that might *eat* you if you were a tree? If you thought about it for a second, deciduousness in itself is a scheme to battle fungi too.

This really is "missing the forest for the trees" or in this case, leaves.

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BMO

Perhaps, it has something to do with the high failure rate of such research. Would you pay a salary to 1000 employees, of which only one employee gives you solid results and the remaining fail?

>implying that this is bad

Typical bean-counter/MBA attitude.

That's not very business friendly.

Companies like HP, Xerox, etc, built empires on that kind of research.

They declined when they spun off or closed their research divisions because management failed to see the value/use the output of the research labs. The HP example is particularly striking - they went from an advanced technology company to a schlock printer seller, one that is sneered at and loathed, in a handful of years. Xerox is also striking in that PARC laid the foundation for a lot of modern computing but management only saw money to be made in copiers and filing paper and thusly ignored most of PARC's output, ceding the computer revolution to other companies.

It is also part of a larger problem. Because of the emphasis on short-term profits (quarters are too long!) at the expense of everything else, we in the West are so enthusiastic at shoving all our production to the Chinese and others saying "We can't be arsed to get our hands dirty; we want to just do the high-level stuff like design and company management" totally ignoring the fact where the production goes, so does the engineering development, science research, and eventually even upper-management. This was learned by Samuel Slater, Francis Cabot Lowell, and others who founded the "silicon valley" (Blackstone Valley) of the Industrial Revolution. A lesson forgotten through complacency, greed, and snobbery.

Alexander Graham Bell is shouting at you from his grave calling you a moron.

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BMO

Because a "data compression algorithm" is more than a mathematical equation.

You can't be serious.

Indeed, outside the material scope of a computer it has no existence,

IN TYPING CLASS 30(mumble) YEARS AGO we had this "game" where you were basically given a sheet with LZW compressed data and when you typed it out, you got a pretty picture. No computer used at all. Indeed, they were manual typewriters, except for the single IBM Selectric in the corner of the room.

Shut the fuck up. Seriously, shut the fuck up. You are wrong in every possible way.

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BMO

I still put horse shoes on my horse (actually, I get the cobbler at the stables to do that).

No you don't.

If you did, you'd call him/her a farrier.

You don't own a horse.

--
BMO

Let's see what happens before we pass judgment though.

No, let's not.

They are totally incapable of following the law, as written, nevermind the spirit of the law.

The NSA has proven that it cannot be trusted with a single penny. Merely telling them "don't do that" with money doesn't change the fact that the NSA leadership doesn't give a damn what the law says.

Federal agencies can have you disappeared and you can't do a damn thing about it.^1 You think a little thing like funding is going to change things in the surveillance/police state?

Years ago, I would have said what I just wrote was paranoid nonsense. The past year has disabused me of that kind of thinking.

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BMO

1.http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/06/17/judge-finds-courts-cannot-protect-us-citizens-tortured-by-us-government-officials-abroad/

Yeah, a lot of savings can be done by not doing anything at all. /sarcasm

A lot of the value of the postal service is that you can send stuff from the sticks to the cities and back again. You propose cutting out half of that. Go look up "network effect."

You must be an accountant.

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BMO

No, I'm not kidding.

I use g+ to follow Linus and others.

Wait, are you one of the guys who started putting X-NoArchive in the text of your usenet posts when DejaNews showed up?

>putting google in 0.0.0.0

There's being judicious about what you post, and then there's paranoia.

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BMO

which include using your real, verifiable identity

Pray tell, which ones? None of the ones I use. Even online services that "require" a cell number really don't - they put in grayed out text a clickthrough to skip it, even Facebook.

If you're talking about banking and payment services, they've required your real identity in meatspace for hundreds of years, so it's not the same thing as what we're discussing here. All online services have unenforceable and unconscionable terms and conditions. I can require your first-born male as payment, but that doesn't mean it's legally binding, and such terms should be ignored as a matter of course. I do. If you don't, you're a fool.

The last time an online service required my meatspace identity, it was the Chebucto Freenet back in the early 90s that wanted a photocopy of my driver's license. But that was a different time and you could actually trust admins (that weren't Simon Travaglia) back then. It was also a different time back then when your domain record had your real name tied to it and you didn't have to worry about stalkers, idiots, and loons. Anyone who does that these days not hiding behind even a "paper" company name, is quite frankly a victim waiting to happen.

And lastly, the whole "we require a cellphone" nonsense can be worked around with stuff like this:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/to...

Good fucking luck tying identity to SMS.

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BMO

Those who call for an end to privacy, usually have something to gain from it.

Except that a lot of people who call for an end to privacy have nothing to gain and actually lose. ESR is one of those people, and I had to drop him from my G+ circles because I just couldn't stand the cognitive dissonance (doublethink, if we're going to use Orwell) any longer.

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BMO