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Comment Re:The commits are funny into themselves. (Score 2) 379

I'm wondering what is supposed to be mysterious about that code. The "/* increment */" comment seems to apply to the code inside the loop, not what is being done to the i variable, so I don't think that's it. Is it because the loop goes from 7 down to 0 instead of the other way around? I remember reading a programming book back in the 80's that advocated doing that for better speed since the assembly code generated to compare to 0 was faster than comparing to some other integer (which seems to no longer be the case, and I suspect could even cause cache misses for a bigger loop, although I don't know enough about how CPUs fill the cache to know for sure).

Comment Re:Wake me up when any flavor of OO has outline mo (Score 1) 285

Yes, XMind allows you to grab any node and drag it (with the hierarchy under it intact) into any other part of the hierarchy. That was one of my requirements, which a few other mind mapping tools I tested didn't seem to support (or, at least, I couldn't find a way to do it with other tools with just a few minutes of poking around). You can also collapse/expand any node.

Comment Re:Not even much money (Score 1) 423

Good point. I looked at the Q4 table and thought the original poster got "couple billion per year" by multiplying the revenue by four. I didn't scroll down, so I didn't see that there was a full-year table available showing that they are profitable (but not justifying the "couple billion" number). Thanks for the correction.

Comment Re:Not even much money (Score 4, Insightful) 423

To be fair, that's billions in revenue, not profit, so I wouldn't say they "make" a couple billion per year. In fact, the source you linked to shows that their operating income is negative, so after subtracting expenses from that revenue they are losing money. So, they don't have a few billion in spare cash sloshing around -- that $2.6 million is not a negligible amount of money for them. The fact that they still think it is worth spending on lobbying when they don't have a lot of spare money is perhaps an even stronger statement about how effective lobbying dollars are.

Comment Dr. Oz (Score 1) 408

I've seen two episodes of Dr. Oz. In the first, he talked about treating a jellyfish sting. Knowing nothing about jellyfish stings, I assume his advice was legit. The second episode he talked about homeopathic medicine and all of the wonderful treatment options it provided. He didn't laugh when he was saying that. I never watched again -- can't trust anything he says to be valid.

Comment Re:Sponsored Links are now MORE obvious (Score 1) 187

I'm in the test group, too. The very first time I saw it, for a split second my brain wanted to think the ads were part of the organic results due to the lack of background color differentiation. Since then, I've not been at all tempted to accidentally click the ads, so I think it will make no difference a few days after they transition people over to the new layout (if they ever do).

Comment Re:FTL Faster Than Light (Score 1) 669

I think the riddle he/she was trying to remember was this one:

There are two people, one always lies and one always tells the truth, but you don't know which one is which. What would you do?

The answer: Pick one, and ask him/her which way the OTHER person would tell you leads to riches and power, then go the opposite way.

Comment Dear Dice (Score 0, Offtopic) 65

Three VIDEO ADS on the homepage, and for FASHION THEATER (whatever that is), no less? Are you completely out of your minds?

And, where is the link allowing people with good karma to disable ads? I've always tolerated the ads in the past to support the site, but this nonsense is ridiculous. I cannot have a bunch of worthless video ads sucking bandwidth away from my VoIP. Either get rid of this nonsense or I won't be coming here anymore.

Comment Re:Ya-what? (Score 2) 123

There still are a few things they do well. For example, their Finance feature is among the best in class of financial information (IMHO).

Except that their charts show the price of the stock/fund without adjusting for dividends, i.e. there is no way to graph "adjusted price" or "growth of a $1000 investment." So, when a mutual fund makes a big capital gain payout, which has no economic significance (they hand you a check for $X per share and the share price drops by $X), the chart shows a big dip. If you try to chart two securities together to compare them it is totally misleading because of the economically meaningless dips when there is a dividend or capital gain payout. They have the data to do this right, it is displayed as the "Adj Close" in the "historical prices" table, but they don't make it available in the charts. When they've been doing something that dumb for over a decade in spite of complaints, how can you trust anything they do?

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