Comment Re:"there's not much to indicate difficulty" (Score 2) 278
I wouldn't simply assume that it's easy because it looks that way.
Agree!....I despair of ever managing to lay a good caulk bead.
Comment Re:Wisest quote I saw from the pundit class (Score 1) 410
The dirty little secret that neither Haycock nor Sotommayor (sic) want to acknowledge is that "racially sensitive admissions policies" only get the student through the door -- they do nothing to address the significant gap in minority student retention and graduation
You misread the quote...Haycock is agreeing with you.
Comment Wisest quote I saw from the pundit class (Score 4, Insightful) 410
Wisest quote I saw from the pundit class:
“I just keep wishing that the people who spend so much time trying to end racial preferences in higher ed would work to end the racial differences in the education we provide K-12”
--Kati Haycock, Education Trust
Comment Re:HRBlock (Score 2) 386
However some states were able to implement their own systems separately...which is why sites like HR block don't offer free filing in Illinois. Illinois hosts it's own solution, on it's own website, very easy and totally free and no upsell.
I have such complicated taxes that I need to buy a "Premier" edition of TurboTax. It comes with "free" state, but what they mean is that the computations are free but they demand serious money to e-File.
Illinois website is so awesome that I simply use it despite the free state addin. TurboTax does the computations with almost no extra effort, so I use it for a sanity check, but there's never been a difference.
Comment Re:Paper and US Postal Service (Score 1) 386
The K-1 definitely provides another order of magnitude of complexity beyond the forms you cite here. I would say that and tracking asset depreciation are the two big things that make spreadsheets unwieldy....particularly because values start to carry over from year to year.
Comment Re:damn right, the system is crap! (Score 1) 529
I am not familiar with financial aid at 2-year programs, but find your account plausible. On the other hand, 4-year colleges tend to have considerable need-based aid available even for non-minorities; in many cases it's even grant rather than loan-based. I am curious -- why didn't you either choose one at the outset or transfer into one after your 2-year degree? I know of some superb success stories following the latter pattern.
How Do You Backup 20TB of Data? 983
Sean0michael writes "Recently I had a friend lose their entire electronic collection of music and movies by erasing a RAID array on their home server. He had 20TB of data on his rack at home that had survived a dozen hard drive failures over the years. But he didn't have a good way to backup that much data, so he never took one. Now he wishes he had.
Asking around among our tech-savvy friends though, no one has a good answer to the question, 'how would you backup 20TB of data?'. It's not like you could just plug in an external drive, and using any cloud service would be terribly expensive. Blu-Ray discs can hold a lot of data, but that's a lot of time (and money) spent burning discs that you likely will never need. Tape drives are another possibility, but are they right for this kind of problem? I don' t know. There might be something else out there, but I still have no feasible solution.
So I ask fellow slashdotters: for a home user, how do you backup 20TB of Data?" Even Amazon Glacier is pretty pricey for that much data.
Asking around among our tech-savvy friends though, no one has a good answer to the question, 'how would you backup 20TB of data?'. It's not like you could just plug in an external drive, and using any cloud service would be terribly expensive. Blu-Ray discs can hold a lot of data, but that's a lot of time (and money) spent burning discs that you likely will never need. Tape drives are another possibility, but are they right for this kind of problem? I don' t know. There might be something else out there, but I still have no feasible solution.
So I ask fellow slashdotters: for a home user, how do you backup 20TB of Data?" Even Amazon Glacier is pretty pricey for that much data.
Comment Not quite the same (Score 2) 794
Dumb question: it's about the actions of the believers. That's why the anti-vax kooks (whotends to skew left) gets a similar reaction to the creationists and climate wackos.
Granted that homeopathy stuff is ridiculous pseudoscience, but the difference is that nobody is trying to push it as a driver of public policy. When I shop at Whole Foods, it's for the tasty, tasty bread and local salsa and nobody minds that I walk right past the snake oil. I don't have a problem with creationism, I have a problem with it being forced on others. That's why we perceive it differently.
Comment Scum have more BTC now (Score 1) 465
So, an even higher proportion of bitcoin owners are dishonest jerks than I had previously thought, having cleaned out a bunch of honest-but-naive Mt. Gox clients.
This makes me want to do anything in bitcoin even less than before -- why should I muck around with such counterparties?
Comment No deal at all (Score 5, Funny) 822
This guy cost the government untold fortunes -- not only in dollars but in goodwill. He poisoned relationships with the international community, undermined the confidence of the citizenry in our institutions and ignored the democratic process. He should be in jail, no question.
Oh, whoops! I thought you were asking about Dick Cheney!
Does Anyone Make a Photo De-Duplicator For Linux? Something That Reads EXIF? 243
postbigbang writes "Imagine having thousands of images on disparate machines. many are dupes, even among the disparate machines. It's impossible to delete all the dupes manually and create a singular, accurate photo image base? Is there an app out there that can scan a file system, perhaps a target sub-folder system, and suck in the images-- WITHOUT creating duplicates? Perhaps by reading EXIF info or hashes? I have eleven file systems saved, and the task of eliminating dupes seems impossible."
Comment I like the open plan (Score 4, Interesting) 314
> Is it just me or do the people who want you to work in open offices sound like the nobility in Downton Abbey?
It's just you...here's my anecdote from which you can synthesize data.
I've had an office. It was lonely and I got sleepy. Give me an open plan any day, where I'm more productive and learn more about what's going on.
(And for what it's worth, in the last few places I've worked, the multimillionaire bosses have always sat right in the middle of the open plan with everybody else).
Linus Torvalds: Any CLA Is Fundamentally Broken 279
sfcrazy writes "The controversy over Canonical's Contributor License Agreement (CLA) has once again surfaced. While Matthew Garrett raises valid points about the flaws in Canonical's CLAs, Linus Torvalds says 'To be fair, people just like hating on Canonical. The FSF and Apache Foundation CLA's are pretty much equally broken. And they may not be broken because of any relicencing, but because the copyright assignment paperwork ends up basically killing the community. Basically, with a CLA, you don't get the kind of "long tail" that the kernel has of random drive-by patches. And since that's how lots of people try the waters, any CLA at all – changing the license or not – is fundamentally broken.'"
Comment Superhero (Score 1) 253
I sense a superhero origin story in this. Part-human, part-nanobot.
Experiments Reveal That Deformed Rubber Sheet Is Not Like Spacetime 264
KentuckyFC writes "General relativity is mathematically challenging and yet widely appreciated by the public. This state of affairs is almost entirely the result of one the most famous analogies in science: that the warping of spacetime to produce gravity is like the deformation of a rubber sheet by a central mass. Now physicists have tested this idea theoretically and experimentally and say it doesn't hold water. It turns out that a marble rolling on deformed rubber sheet does not follow the same trajectory as a planet orbiting a star and that the marble's equations of motion lead to a strangely twisted version of Kepler's third law of planetary motion. And experiments with a real marble rolling on a spandex sheet show that the mass of the sheet itself creates a distortion that further complicates matters. Indeed, the physicists say that a rubber sheet deformed by a central mass can never produce the same motion of planet orbiting a star in spacetime. So the analogy is fundamentally flawed. Shame!"
