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Comment Re:Failed CEO and Gubernatorial Candidate (Score 1) 553

Uh, no. Fiorina ran for US Senate. You're thinking of Meg Whitman, who tried to click "Buy It Now" on the California Governorship ($150 million campaign). But your confusion is understandable, since they're both from the tech sector, and they both spout buzzword-bingo gibberish.

Whitman lost to Jerry Brown, BTW, thus earning Brown the singular distinction of having to clean up the mess left by a B-grade movie actor twice.

Republicans

Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Announces Bid For White House 553

seven of five writes: According to Reuters, "Former Hewlett-Packard Co Chief Executive Carly Fiorina announced on Monday she is running for president, becoming the only woman in the pack of Republican candidates for the White House in 2016. ... Fiorina registers near the bottom of polls of the dozen or so Republican hopefuls and has never held public office. But she has already attracted warm receptions at events in the early voting state of Iowa where she is positioning herself as a conservative, pro-business Republican highly critical of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Fiorina was forced by HP to resign in 2005 as the tech company struggled to digest Compaq after a $19 billion merger."

As part of her announcement, she said, "I think I'm the best person for the job because I understand how the economy actually works. I understand the world, who's in it, how the world works." I'm sure we'll soon begin hearing from all the HP employees, current and former, who have nothing but love for Carly F.
Programming

Bill Gates Owes His Career To Steven Spielberg's Dad; You May, Too 171

theodp writes: On the 51st birthday of the BASIC programing language, GE Reports decided it was finally time to give-credit-where-credit-was-long-overdue, reporting that Arnold Spielberg, the 98-year-old father of Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, helped revolutionize computing when he designed the GE-225 mainframe computer. The machine allowed a team of Dartmouth University students and researchers to develop BASIC, which quickly spread and ushered in the era of personal computers. BASIC helped kickstart many computing careers, include those of Bill Gates and Paul Allen, as well as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.

Comment Re:No, his hack was successful (Score 3, Insightful) 246

He issued an HCF instruction.

Shame I didn't have mod points- not just for the joke itself, but because- in a discussion thread that could otherwise have been mistaken for one on Fark or whatever- it says something that this is by far the most reminiscent of the traditional Slashdot audience and style.

Comment Re:How I manage these calls (Score 3, Insightful) 227

Sounds like my algorithm.

Very very occasionally, if the description sounds interesting, I'll paste the description/requirements into Google. Most of these spamming third-party recruiters just copy-paste from public job postings, so Google can usually find the original posting on the employer's Web site.

Comment Re:danger vs taste (Score 1) 630

Sales of diet Pepsi are falling because half of them are buying Pepsi Max instead. Not sure how it differs from the diet option. They both taste equally bad to me.

Depends which one you mean- apparently there's a "Pepsi Max" (nee "Diet Pepsi Max") on the US market which has more caffeine than regular Diet Pepsi. The "Pepsi Max" sold in the UK since the early 90s is really just... Diet Pepsi marketed towards men instead of women.

About 15 years ago, I tasted some (UK market) Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max side by side just out of curiosity- the difference was minor at best.

The reason for having the two was- I assumed- more to do with marketing. Diet Pepsi and diet drinks in general were marketed and perceived as "girl" drinks, which probably put off male consumers. Pepsi Max launched with (very) 90s male-oriented advertising. (*)

What surprises me is that Coca Cola took around 15 years to do the same marketing trick with Coke Zero. That- at least- has the excuse of being a clearly different product from Diet Coke. (It sucks because it follow's Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max's nasty over-intense "sweetness" rather than Diet Coke's less intense but more unpleasantly "hollow" sensation (**)).

On the other hand, it means that some men (e.g. my boss) might still have a legitimate reason to buy Diet Coke instead of Coke Zero, which he doesn't like.

Personally, I think almost all diet soft drinks are horrible, except Sugar Free Irn Bru because it's one of the very few- if not the only one- that avoids both the above pitfalls if it's properly chilled. Plus, it's not over-sweet, it's got caffeine in it, and IT'S SCOTTISH! (^_^)

(*) What's weirder; the fact that with the wonder of the modern Internet YouTube (cough) I can find obscure twenty-year-old adverts in under a minute, or the fact that that advert still seems familiar to me after all that time. (I remembered the annoying "ooh" at the end even before watching it).

(**) You might recognise this as "my mouth thinks this is sweet, but some part of my reptilian brain knows damn well this is carbohydrate-free chemical-flavoured water and is refusing to give me any sense of satisfaction in drinking it").

Comment Re:Not a Piece of Shit (Score 2) 128

One of the requirements of PCI compliance with the credit card companies is that you don't use default passwords in any equipment tied to the card transaction.

Which makes this even more interesting. Based on the password and the fact that a paperclip is required I know the specific vendor and equipment to which the article refers, despite the authors going to great lengths to omit that information. The vendor is a big one and their equipment is involved in millions of electronic payments made every day. You could even say they are "the way to pay." In fact, they are involved in PCI certification for most production deployments involving their hardware: most, but not all, because certain deployments using default configurations do not need additional certification, just a quick verification that IP addresses and the like are properly configured.

I understand the need for a default password, but it really should be changed. That being said, the encryption keys are not accessible using that password. They are stored in a hardware module that self-destructs if you tamper with it. They can only be set in one of two secure locations both controlled by the vendor: if you attempt to use any other means to mess with the keys, bye-bye memory card that stores them. This is bad, but not as bad as it sounds at first.

Comment Re:280km (Score 1) 189

For the Osaka-Tokyo route, the Shinkansen made the difference between an overnight business trip or return the same day. That made it insanely popular. With the new train, you can not just make a set of meetings; you can do a full days work and still get back the same day (even more so for Nagoya of course).

Many people here get stationed at offices in other cities for months or years, and leave their families behind. They effectively do a weekly commute, and come home only on weekends. For a lot of people this would let them get home more often or even stay home and make this a daily commute. Expensive, but on the other hand the company doesn't have to pay for a second short-term apartment and the other costs of two households.

The Courts

FBI Overstated Forensic Hair Matches In Nearly All Trials Before 2000 173

schwit1 writes The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000. Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory's microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country's largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence. The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.

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