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Censorship

Peoria Mayor Sends Police To Track Down Twitter Parodist 169

New submitter rotorbudd (1242864) writes with an article at Reason about Jim Ardis, mayor of Peoria, Illinois, who ordered police to track down whoever was responsible for a parody Twitter account mocking him."Guess the good Mayor has never heard of the Streisand Effect. 'The original Twitter account had a total of 50 followers. The new account has over 200.'"
Power

MIT Designs Tsunami Proof Floating Nuclear Reactor 218

First time accepted submitter Amtrak (2430376) writes "MIT has created designs for a nuclear plant that would avoid the downfall of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The new design calls for the nuclear plant to be placed on a floating platform modeled after the platforms used for offshore oil drilling. A floating platform several miles offshore, moored in about 100 meters of water, would be unaffected by the motions of a tsunami; earthquakes would have no direct effect at all. Meanwhile, the biggest issue that faces most nuclear plants under emergency conditions — overheating and potential meltdown, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island — would be virtually impossible at sea."

Comment Put your suit on for a meeting or sweatpants at... (Score 1) 139

...home?

Most people will put more effort into something that will be public (both out of positive motivation and the negative motivation of shaming.)

Open Source will always, in general, be better than closed source. Again - in general. There are people who will engineer things properly irrespective of whether or not someone will be browsing your github account or checking it out of the company's private server... Too bad there's not more of them ;).

Programming

Code Quality: Open Source vs. Proprietary 139

just_another_sean sends this followup to yesterday's discussion about the quality of open source code compared to proprietary code. Every year, Coverity scans large quantities of code and evaluates it for defects. They've just released their latest report, and the findings were good news for open source. From the article: "The report details the analysis of 750 million lines of open source software code through the Coverity Scan service and commercial usage of the Coverity Development Testing Platform, the largest sample size that the report has studied to date. A few key points: Open source code quality surpasses proprietary code quality in C/C++ projects. Linux continues to be a benchmark for open source quality. C/C++ developers fixed more high-impact defects. Analysis found that developers contributing to open source Java projects are not fixing as many high-impact defects as developers contributing to open source C/C++ projects."
Businesses

Survey: 56 Percent of US Developers Expect To Become Millionaires 467

msmoriarty writes: "According to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S.-based software developers, 56 percent expect to become millionaires in their lifetime. 66 percent also said they expect to get raises in the next year, despite the current state of the economy. Note that some of the other findings of the study (scroll to bulleted list) seem overly positive: 84 percent said they believe they are paid what they're worth, 95 percent report they feel they are 'one of the most valued employees at their organization,' and 80 percent said that 'outsourcing has been a positive factor in the quality of work at their organization.'"
United States

Study Finds US Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy 818

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Princeton University and Northwestern University have concluded, after extensive analysis of 1,779 policy issues, that the U.S. is in fact an oligarchy and not a democracy. What this means is that, although 'Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance,' 'majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.' Their study (PDF), to be published in Perspectives on Politics, found that 'When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.'"
The Almighty Buck

IRS Can Now Seize Your Tax Refund To Pay a Relative's Debt 632

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Just in time for the April 15 IRS filing deadline comes news from the Washington Post that hundreds of thousands of taxpayers expecting refunds are instead getting letters informing them of tax debts they never knew about: often a debt incurred by their parents. The government is confiscating their checks, sometimes over debts 20—30 years old. For example, when Mary Grice was 4 (in 1960), her father died ... 'Until the kids turned 18, her mother received survivor benefits from Social Security ... Now, Social Security claims it overpaid someone in the Grice family in 1977. ... Four years after Sadie Grice died, the government is coming after her daughter. ... "It was a shock," says Grice, 58. "What incenses me is the way they went about this. They gave me no notice, they can't prove that I received any overpayment, and they use intimidation tactics, threatening to report this to the credit bureaus."' The Treasury Department has intercepted ... $75 million from debts delinquent for more than 10 years according to the department's debt management service. 'The aggressive effort to collect old debts started three years ago — the result of a single sentence tucked into the farm bill lifting the 10-year statute of limitations on old debts to Uncle Sam.'"

Comment Re:Modern audiophiles are no different. (Score 1) 469

There are people who insist that they can hear the difference between 320kbps mp3s (using the highest-quality available compressor) and their uncompressed counterparts

So you can't? And hence you conclude no one can?
Sorry, that is bullshit!

Science and math proves all of these things wrong, yet people still insist they're right.

A contrair! Sciense and math exactly proof that. You have a braindead idea about math and sciense.
You can only hear up to like 20k Herz.
But there are so called overtones, multiples of the base frequency. In this case 40k, 60k, 80k 100k etc.
No human is able to hear 40k and above frequencies, but we all can hear if a 20k frequency is combined with an 40k overtone, or an 100k overtone even. Modern lossy compression algorithms cut off these overtones (as the overtone itself is unhearable) ... nevertheless we can hear if it is 'there' or not.

You, again - quite clearly, claim that "Sciense and math exactly proof" that people can high quality compressed audio and uncompressed audio.

You then claim you can hear frequencies outside of the human range of hearing because they are "combined".

You do not seem to realize that you are, at this point, arguing that you can hear overtones through what you refer to as being "combined" but that compression algorithms cut off these overtones.

As per your usual method of discussing with people you insinuated that the person you were replying to was "braindead" (your other preferred term is "idiot".) I applied your own negative terms to you because you used the non-sensical "combined".

Reading all of your posts it is clear that English is not your first language and that you don't understand that when you talk to other people who are detail oriented that it isn't their responsibility to figure out what you meant to say but simply to deal with what you did say.

I did not say anything about mp3s.

You didn't say anything about hearing the differences between "320kbps mp3s (using the highest-quality available compressor) and their uncompressed counterparts"?

Well, we know that isn't true.

And I told you that three or four times now.

Are you a crazy person?

Comment Re:Modern audiophiles are no different. (Score 1) 469

Even you hear the difference between a simple 16kHz wave and one that is accompanied by a 32kHz and 48kHz overtone

Of course you do, and as usual, you're making an "idiot" out of yourself for everyone to see by claiming that you're hearing is "beyond human."

You DO hear when there's an overtone, but you don't hear the overtone, you hear the effect the overtone has on the audible range frequencies. See the "scientific facts" relating to destructive/constructive interference. This effect IS captured by the ADC, but can be filtered depending upon the overtone.

You can easily Google for it.

Google

Mr. Schmidt Goes To Washington: A Look Inside Google's Lobbying Behemoth 128

barlevg (2111272) writes "In May 2012, in the midst of an FTC investigation into Google's search practices, the law school at George Mason University in Northern Virginia hosted a conference attended by congressmen, regulators and staffers. The topic: competition, search and social media. What none of the attendees of the conference knew was that Google was pulling many of the strings behind the event, even going so far as to suggest invited speakers. This event, as documented in The Washington Post is just a snapshot of the operations of one of the largest and highest spending lobbying entities in DC, a far cry from the one-man shop it started out as nine years ago, from a company "disdainful" of Washington's "pay-to-play" culture."

Comment Re:Perhaps you should abstract your persistence mo (Score 1) 272

Your talking about abstractions really makes not much sense, so I pray for the entroneurs you consult, good luck.

I'm sure it doesn't, because you have demonstrated quite clearly that you don't understand abstraction.

How can you be a competent architect when you don't understand abstraction? LOL.

In any case, you're a programmer, right?

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