Why bother with the shotgun and waste the rounds conducting this worthless experiment.

Because it's fun.

You must be loads of laughs at a party.

--
BMO

QFT:

Kay Sievers sucks. Now, if we can just ban Lennart Poettering's code too, we can start getting back on track. They both suck. Most of their contributions are ungainly, ugly abominations and Systemd is the suck on the suck of it. These guys are from the first wave of Winblows lusers getting involved in Linux and beginning the great ruination. The first wave of people to get involved with Linux (e.g. Alan Cox, Donald Becker, etc.) were all Unix people, and they did things gracefully, as god wanted. Then these fucking Philistines came along and started ruining everything. They don't care about Unix and they do shit work. They make Linux suck like Winblows more and more. Good riddance! Good riddance! Good riddance! Systmed is NOT a drop in init replacement. It sucks to high heaven. I've watched presentations with Sievers mocking the idea of making sure it works with other Unices (what a parochial minded fucking luser). I could write a book on how these guys, their ilk and all their shit is suck, suck, suck.

--Kyle Neoprint

>get rid of both GNOME and KDE,

Really? You lump these two together? One is designed to be opaque to user preferences, and the other is obsequious to the user - there are so many "knobs and levers" that I can get KDE to work for me instead of against me easily.

That and Qt is the cat's balls.

inb4 "b...but Qt is C++!#@!$!#@%$!$^%"

There are bindings even for BASIC if you want. I haven't looked, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could use Brainfuck.

>XFCE

Let me know when Thunar becomes usable, if ever.

--
BMO

Which, I'm sure, is a great comfort for that now-crippled or -deceased driver. The guy with the license plate frame is probably very sorry after the fact, and would probably do things differently in retrospect. Meanwhile, the guy who lost his legs doesn't want a million dollars; he wants his legs.

In occupational health and safety, it is generally and widely understood that serious or fatal accidents seldom occur out of the blue. A fatality will nearly always be surrounded in time and space by a cloud of (usually unrecorded or unreported) near misses and minor incidents. Relatedly, there is the concept of "normalization of deviance". Essentially, the idea that if you let your standards slip a bit and nothing bad happens, the tendency is to allow that lower level of vigilance to become the new acceptable standard. Lather, rinse, repeat until a major failure occurs. (The Challenger disaster is an oft-cited example.)

Coming back to the licence plate frames, I don't care whether or not someone gets a fine for speeding. I do care that we've created a pool of privileged drivers who are no longer receiving any feedback when they engage in higher-risk driving behaviors. "Go ahead and drive as fast as you want; we'll trust your judgement on that until after your first high-speed collision..." probably isn't a real solid basis for road safety.

Depends on the tickets, perhaps. Shaving a $400 'big' ticket down to a $200 'small' one, or even down to a warning--that can add up. Remember that nominally-small tickets often have a large number of fundraising surcharges and taxes from different levels of government piled on top.

And the tickets themselves aren't always the greatest cost. Insurance companies will bump an owner's rates substantially after a couple of tickets (sometimes after one ticket), and those higher rates will linger for years.

Between two and four moving violations in a 12-month period will get your license suspended in California, with all the personal and financial costs associated with resolving and working around that.

Finally, this 'charitable' donation is tax deductible--so the effective price tag on this bribe is lower.

Why not use a mass transit service like subway or tram?

I suspect you meant that tongue-in-cheek, but if not...

The nearest subway stop to me: 213 miles.
The nearest passenger train stop: 90 miles.
The nearest bus stop? 24 miles.

Hell, the nearest taxi service won't even come to my house unless I prepay by credit card.

And although you could fairly say that I live in the middle of nowhere, I actually live in a fairly densely populated region of the country, just not inside an actual city. The US just plain has fuck-all for realistic public transportation.

Sure, management wouldn't let him make the change and that is bad.

With this going so high that congress dragged the CEO in to lie to them that this involved anything more than "cheaper to let you die", by naming these two engineers, GM has just given them the power to completely ruin the company.

"We tried to do the right thing and management thwarted us at every turn". Done in one, the CEO just perjured herself before congress, and the class action liability suits put GM (back) into bankruptcy (where they belong).

Unfortunately in this case, engineers tend to have too strong of a "boyscout" streak in them, and the ones implicated here will probably just do their best to ignore the fact that GM just threw them under the bus for following orders.

Or put another way - I don't work in an industry that seriously puts people's lives in danger, and legal would goose-step me out of the goddamned building before they let me do something like GM claims these two engineers did "on their own". So an entire multinational supply and manufacturing chain of command just quietly went along with the whims of two peons that massively violated protocol? Bullshit.

I don't know about California, but in Oklahoma a speeding ticket is going to cost you at least $200. If you avoid two tickets a year, it would pay for itself in 12.5 years.

No one really cares about the tickets themselves. For someone making $200k a year, they would gladly pay $200 every week for the right to zip through crawling traffic.

The real problem comes from getting "points" and the eventual loss of your license. And once that happens, you have drive like a frickin' choirboy or they start giving out real punishments, like spending weekends in a cage (c'mon, let's not pretend people actually stop driving when they lose their license - In 99% of the US, "not driving" amounts to a sentence of death-by-life-on-welfare).

For some reason, Windows admins have been trained to reboot immediately when things don't work well rather than to figure out why something is failing.

Because in the Windows world, I usually don't have the luxury of digging into the kernel's or driver's source code to figure out exactly why it has stopped behaving correctly. If it doesn't log any errors, doesn't export any useful diagnostic messages, doesn't outright crash on reproducible conditions, and just stops working "right", your avenues of further inquiry get very very ugly, very fast.

I can reboot a VM in well under a minute. For any nontrivial problem that happens roughly twice a month and a reboot makes it go away, it would take twenty years of rebooting to justify spending an entire eight hour day diagnosing the root cause.

And I say that as someone who (in the Linux world) has written his own kernel patches to work around buggy hardware. In Windows, just not worth the time; because even if you do successfully diagnose the problem, you may well have no ability to correct it.

I'm pretty sure that you can't teach politicians to code either, they just don't have the intellectual capability to handle such a task.

The bigger problem I see with teaching politicians to code comes from their comprehension of boolean logic. In computer science, we constantly evaluate the truth of various simple expressions. In politics, their entire career depends on their ability to obfuscate the truth of insanely complex issues in such a way as to make them look true (or false) based on the interest of their highest bidder. ;)

More seriously, though, I have to agree with Bloomberg. Not everyone can code, and of those who have the raw capacity to learn it, many of them would hate actually doing it. Coding requires going into an almost trancelike state for hours at a time, sitting motionless while visualizing the flow of data through complex control structures and eventually interacting with some form of I/O. You try to stick a traditional manual laborer (I mean that in the good way - The kind of guy who enjoys nothing more than an honest day's hard work) into that seat for ten hours, and watch him slowly go crazy.

Personally, I find it just hilarious that TFA fails to recognize two points:

First, that our inability to live long enough to win a prize that takes a 150 year career directly highlights a domain of science that we still have some pretty amazing leaps left to take.

And second, that a NatGeo author of all people would dare to write about another discipline running out of material - How many indigenous tribes do you have left to exploit for stories, NG? And will you do the honorable thing and close up shop when you finally run out, or will you just turn into yet another travel-n'-tourism rag? ;)


We can talk about this again when a human born on Earth can someday physically walk on another habitable planet. I can think of three completely-physically-possible ways to accomplish that, without even giving it much thought: Living forever (with enough energy and the right tools, we can repair anything); near-infinite free energy (fusion) combined with time dilation, uploading your consciousness to a clone made, at the receiving end, from your own digitized and transmitted DNA. Any combination of just those alone would completely reshape human existence, and don't even require getting into the "maybe but probably not" methods like FTL travel or wormholes.

This really doesn't take much effort, you poor uncreative bastard (not you, parent poster - the TFA author). Pick something you can't do that the laws of physics don't outright ban (and even some of those might have a way to "bend" them, if not outright break them). Pick something obvious we have almost no understanding of - gravity; what your dog really wants for dinner; the size of the universe (the Hubble Radius merely describes our causal universe - We actually can't tell whether or not we live in an infinite universe); how to feed everyone in a world that throws away more food than it actually needs; fuckin' magnets (as Hofstadter said, "greenness dissolves" - You can't explain macroscopic effects with turtles all the way down); why hot models like ugly singers; what "causes" radioactive decay; why writers in a dying genre feel the need to prove their inadequacy in other domains of knowledge - And you'll have a breakthrough just waiting to happen.

a bog-standard usb/spdif dongle that I own and use from time to time won't work on win7/64. no driver on earth for it. 32bit, yes. 64, no.

So to keep a $30 USB audio dongle working, you plan to forgo all the advantages that come with more than 4GB of RAM?

And you realize, of course, that within the next year or two you'll start seeing more "can't live without it" software no longer releasing 32bit builds?


throwing away working hardware is a sin.

Ever heard of the Sunk Cost fallacy?

Do these updates look like they'll solve Tesla's problems?

Since Tesla's biggest problems come from buggy whip... I mean, car dealership... protectionism, combined with a dislike bordering on zealotry from a media that still considers the Chevy L88 as the engine to beat for every compact sedan they review?

No. No, these updates will not solve Tesla's problems.

If you think that the computing field is somehow exceptionally divisive regarding the two sexes, think again.

Sometimes I think it's worse now than it was in the 60s, when men were programmers and women slammed the keys on the keypunch.

--
BMO

BMO was rather obviously trying to answer the implied question (that needs to be solved if the issues are to be addressed) "Why (are) women apparently (...) unable or unwilling to following a career in the computing fields".

Winner winner chicken dinner.

I'm as guilty of it as most, I'd guess.

As am I, but I have been making an effort to be less so, sometimes.

There is much said about how the IT and computing fields are meritocracies. Recent articles even here have put the lie to that.

--
BMO