Comment Re:And often not that useful/needed (Score 1) 390
EXACTLY
Comment Re:Grad school is voluntary... (Score 1) 390
It's your choice, which would you prefer, the "hardships" of graduate school (LOL) or flipping burgers?
Hell, if you're worried about eating, be a bartender. I tended bar on weekends in school and the kitchen staff hooked me up all the time.
Comment Grad school is voluntary... (Score 4, Insightful) 390
...if you don't have the means and/or resources necessary to live comfortably during that period AND you're not willing to make the sacrifices necessary otherwise - then don't go.
Seriously, wtf is up with people thinking that they should get everything they want all the time?
Ask Slashdot: Hungry Students, How Common? 390
Gud (78635) points to this story in the Washington Post about students
having trouble with paying for both food and school. "I recall a number of these experiences from my time as grad student. I remember choosing between eating, living in bad neighborhoods, putting gas in the car, etc. Me and my fellow students still refer to ourselves as the 'starving grad students.' Today we laugh about these experiences because we all got good jobs that lifted us out of poverty, but not everyone is that fortunate. I wonder how many students are having hard time concentrating on their studies due to worrying where the next meal comes from. In the article I found the attitude of collage admins to the idea of meal plan point sharing, telling as how little they care about anything else but soak students & parents for fees and pester them later on with requests for donations. Last year I did the college tour for my first child, after reading the article, some of the comments I heard on that tour started making more sense. Like 'During exams you go to the dining hall in the morning, eat and study all day for one swipe' or 'One student is doing study on what happens when you live only on Ramen noodles!'
How common is 'food insecurity in college or high school'? What tricks can you share with current students?"
How common is 'food insecurity in college or high school'? What tricks can you share with current students?"
Comment Re:Isn't this story ancient? (Score 2, Interesting) 165
Agreed, this is known to just about anyone with an interest in nuclear proliferation issues, or the history of post 1948 Israel.
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.'"
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
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."
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.'"
Comment Re:Actually the correct fix is far fewer words (Score 1) 1633
Actually the correct fix...
Instead of applying revisionist views that have no Constitutional basis.
Oh, the irony...
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.'"
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
*that people can hear the difference between high quality compressed audio...
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)
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?
