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Comment Maintenance (Score 1) 237

This is exactly why NYC ordered individual cars last time around. They wanted to be able to scavange good cars into a train if maintenance fell behind. They had been forced to do so in the 1970's and 1980's. In practice they have married sets of cars together and maintain them as a set.

Articulated cars were run on the NYC subway from 1925 to 1965, google D-type Triplex, but each car needs to be shorter. I don't think anyone knows what the impact of running articulated cars again would be. It is worth an engineering study.

Comment Does it really matter? (Score 1) 668

The Koch brothers, aka Tea Party, don't really care about science as such. All they want is to not pay taxes or get EPA fines for pouring toxins into the environment. If you tell them that their actions kill people why should they care if science or the tooth fairy tells you so? They just don't care. They simply want more money for themselves and they believe selfishness is the only ideal. Caring about the suffering they inflict on the world would be a sign of human frailty.

Comment Finance? (Score 2) 105

I don't work in finance, but I'm surprized not a single hedge fund made the list. A big part of their compensation is in the bonus, but still you can't live on a base of $130k in Manhattan, kindergarten costs $38k per year per kid, not to mention a place to live, etc.

Is it just that you need to have 10,000+ employees before 50 of them post their salary on glassdoor?

Do hedge funds actively discourage their employees from posting?

Comment Re:India's developers are largely of poor quality (Score 2) 157

India today is more akin to Japan in 1945 than Japan in 1975. I've worked with a dozens of Indian developers when some shops in India reported to me. Only a few were worth their salt. With few exceptions those were western trained developers that were forced to go back to India by family obligations. Of the good ones, one was a woman who I think was later fired for being a woman (after I left) and the other never got the training he needed but was boosted to Sr. Dev prematurely. On the other hand, great developers in the US of Indian extraction are very common and a fair percentage of the sysadmins I met in India were pretty good. I don't think it is fair for me to speculate as to the why's; I'm sure there are plenty of people from India that can speculate.

Comment Tackling patent fraud is a problem now? (Score 1) 134

Take, for example, another (short-lived) attempt to exploit the law for unjustified gain: the (now amended) statute on false marking of patents.

I think most Americans think we should have more enforcement against criminals fraudulently claiming an item is patented when it is not. Civil enforcement of the law was starting to work, but the patent bar complained and congress acted within months to protect patent fraud perps.

Patent trolls aren't the main problem. A Sony, Microsoft or IBM at the door of an innovator is a much larger problem than a patent troll. Trolls mostly attack companies already profitable enough to put up a fight. The main problems are 1/ that the patent office hands out too many patents by an order of at east 10,000x, and 2/ there is not compulsory licensing at a reasonable rate. Both problems could easily be addressed, but we have serious regulatory capture going on in the patent industry. The USPTO today exists to benefit patent lawyers at the expense of all other industry. Since the greater economy is the last thing on most politicians' to do list I don't have much hope that the problem will be addressed anytime soon.

Comment Unusably slow, UI provides no feedback (Score 4, Informative) 384

When I click on something it takes forever for the UI to respond. There is no visual feedback so until I realized that the new UI was just 200x slower than the old one I clicked on the things 5-10 times thinking the clicks just didn't take the first n-1 times.

I've obviously switched back to using the desktop site on my mobiles, but there is a popup on every page load asking me to try the mobile site! Sheesh!

You need to fire the contractors involved and hire some people who know what they are doing.

Comment Re:Horribly Unfair (Score 1) 472

Since 1933 you are always permitted to discuss your own salary with fellow employees in the USA, even on national television or in the boardroom of your employer's fiercest competitor. But employers may have employee contract terms prohibiting their employees from discussing their salary. These terms are already null-and-void in 99.9999% of cases, but employees mostly don't know this and assume all the crazy terms in their employee contract are binding. My guess is the law being discussed is most likely meaningless, but possibly it provides some type of fine or penalty for employers that try to intimidate their employees with these types of contract provisions.

Comment 70k/yr in 2013? (Score 1) 133

That is less than I was paid as an intern at a tech company in 2001, when you could still buy a coffee for 50 cents! I was a higher paid intern at the time since I already had some degrees, but not by a whole lot.

I thought most tech companies paid interns about the same as an employee with a roughtly equivalent background... I guess not.

Comment Signals and slots (Score 4, Informative) 161

You can now use any C++ function as the target of a signal using the new QObject::connect() syntax. This is a huge win because with the new syntax the compiler and linker can check that the connections are valid instead missed connections just causing a run-time error.

The moc preprocessor is still required for QObject derived classes, mostly for the translation framework and also to provide support for the old signal/slot syntax which is still allowed. Qt5 doesn't require a C++11 compliant compiler, which is a good thing since there aren't yet any fully compliant compilers. I'm sure if there is a Qt6 it will require C++11 and use those features.

Some of the really cool C++11 features like move constructors aren't necessary with Qt because it's containers implement reference counted copy-on-write, so when you assign a QMap from another QMap no copy is made, and if the old QMap was an rvalue then there is never a need for the copy to be made when the new QMap is modified. One of the big improvements Qt4 made over Qt3 was to make container assignment atomic so this mechanism worked with threaded code and defensive deep copies weren't necessary anymore.

Submission + - Seas rising faster than projected (reuters.com)

zenyu writes: IPCC's 2mm per year sea level estimate rise at current CO2 levels proves way too optimistic. Sea levels have been rising 3.2mm per year in the last two decades. The IPCC's 50 cm — 100 cm projection for the next century may prove equally optimistic.

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