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Comment LEDs (Score 1) 278

I bought two cases of LEDs for $2.99 each at Costco (one 60W equiv, one 75W) . Yep, $2.99. I replaced every bulb, inside and outside my house and it's really nice. The color is the same all over the house, and knowing I won't have to change one till I'm well past 60 is VERY Cool.

Japan

How Japan Lost Track of 640kg of Plutonium 104

Lasrick sends this quote from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Most people would agree that keeping track of dangerous material is generally a good idea. So it may come as a surprise to some that the arrangements that are supposed to account for weapon-grade fissile materials—plutonium and highly enriched uranium—are sketchy at best. The most recent example involves several hundreds kilograms of plutonium that appear to have fallen through the cracks in various reporting arrangements. ... [A Japanese researcher discovered] that the public record of Japan’s plutonium holdings failed to account for about 640 kilograms of the material. The error made its way to the annual plutonium management report that Japan voluntarily submits to the International Atomic Energy Agency ... This episode may have been a simple clerical error, but it was yet another reminder of the troubling fact that we know very little about the amounts of fissile material that are circulating around the globe. The only reason the discrepancy was discovered in this case was the fact that Japan has been unusually transparent about its plutonium stocks. ... No other country does this.

Comment Re:Not new (Score 3, Interesting) 253

I've been doing technical interviews for 15 years. And any day of the week I'd take someone with a degree over someone with 5 or 6 years more experience without one. Oh, I'll miss a few good hires that way, but I'll miss out on more bad ones. And that's what far more important- its better to miss making a good hire than make a bad one. In those 15 years I have seen perhaps 4 people without a degree have even a basic knowledge of the fundamentals of the craft-- and 2 of those I'm thinking of dropped out their senior year of college for medical or family reasons. The rest have all been language of the week cruft who I wouldn't hire to write webpages. I won't even interview them anymore- too many have failed, the small percentage of useful hires you'd find aren't worth the time.

Comment Re:Not new (Score 4, Informative) 253

But equivalent work experience is a lot longer. I might believe that someone with no degree and a decade plus of experience is as good as someone with a degree and 3-4 years, but he'd have to prove it. I find almost nobody without at least 3 years of college has a decent grasp of the fundamentals of computer science- data structures, algorithms, critical thinking and design. The people without degrees tend to just know how to google for answers and copy the results, and god forbid you change frameworks or languages on them- they're hopeless. Its to the point that no degree and less than 6 or 7 years of experience isn't going to get an interview over a guy right out of college because the odds favor the college grad having a higher ceiling.

Comment Re:What's the point (Score 1) 353

Really, the best thing we can do now is to make sure everyone is healthy and educated and happy.

If the idea is to make people healthy so premiums go down, Obamneycare is a complete failure in that aspect since the smokers, obese, alcoholics and drug users don't have to change. They can continue doing what they're doing, secure in the knowledge that someone perfectly healthy, such as myself, is forced to cough up their money to pay for the bad choices these people make with their lives.

So, what other excuse are you going to use to try and justify having the government reach into my bank account if I don't pay for someone else's medical insurance?

Comment nice tech, dubious products (Score 1) 150

IMHO all this tech is basically good, but I should point out that I also consider a large wooden horses to be basically good things, too. (They can be neat works of art, or convenient sources of fire wood.) That doesn't mean I'm saying you should wheel all the ones you find, through your city gates! There are other issues besides the utility value of wooden horses. It's the tech that should be celebrated, not necessarily all the products that use it. Tech and products are two very different things, even if related.

There's a pretty easy way to judge the ads for this stuff: what protocols does the product speak? Do you already have software in your repo that speaks that protocol?

And of course, you don't necessarily have to use someone else's service to get the device to work, right? (I'm not even saying you necessarily shouldn't use their service, but if you have to then the product is almost certainly garbage.)

Comment Re:Actually makes good sense (Score 1) 702

Nice. "Darn it, this amusingly tiny-capacity obsolete tape drive isn't powering up. I must have forgotten to bring its .. uh .. [glance around suspiciously] battery. But I paid $800 for it in 1996! *sigh* Ok, TSA agent, you can have my tape drive.. and .. oh no! My ink jet printer isn't working either! You mean I forgot both batteries!? Dammit! So much for printing those colored pie charts on the plane for my .. uh .. presentation. Boy are your kids going to be happy Xmas morning. [glare slightly unconvincingly at TSA agent]"

[Later, on Xmas morning] "Here you go, Billy. You were a bad boy. I never loved you."

[But Billy turns out to be cool] "Whoa! I can salvage the head servo and reel motor from this tape drive, and build something nifty with my Arduino! OMG, does this printer have a stepper motor?"

I think this idea is getting up into the "three birds, one stone" territory.

Comment Re:Custom ROM? (Score 0) 129

Not the Play Store, Google Play Services. Totally different things. Google Play Services is a bunch of functionality like maps, geofencing, fusion location detector, activity detection, etc that they only license for a fee to OEMs that agree to a large list of terms they have to agree on. Google Play Services is basically the carrot they use to force OEMs to play by their rules.

Comment Re:Tits and swords (Score 2) 153

Tried to read the first book. Barely literate drivel.

Sometimes people need a little help. Often (but not always!) they'll half-suspect the problem, and will prefix their remark with "is it just me, or..."

You didn't do that, but I'm going to be a pal and pretend you did, and then answer the question for you:

Yes, it's just you.

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