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Comment Re:I have said it before (Score 1) 384

Nuclear power is less expensive than wind farms, solar panel fields and large hydro-electricity projects. Coal, natural gas and oil are less expensive and they are the main reason why the nuclear power industry is struggling these days. You obviously don't know anything about the electricity industry in the world. It is a shame people marked your comment as insightful while it is not.

Comment Re:Krebs (Score 3, Interesting) 230

Having written the on-line banking communication protocol of a bank back in 1995 I can assure you they were not taking security seriously. I explicitly asked about requirements for encryption and they had none. They didn't want to bother with encryption because the infrastructure was running on dialup lines connected directly to their infrastructure and they wanted to be the first bank to make on-line banking available to its customers. At this time, the internet was in its infancy, hence the choice for the dialup infrastructure, and everyone was subscribing dialup lines for the Internet access DSL and cable-modem was still waiting to be invented. It was even Windows 3 and OS/2.

Comment Re:New jobs will be created. (Score 3, Interesting) 266

You are about right. Considering there is actually many jobs even higher paid than tech and programmers' jobs, then why this exact rational from TFA hasn't yet been applied to these jobs since the savings will be much greater? Many diagnostics and prescriptions from omnipraticians doctors could be replaced by automated systems with higher success rate and lower error rate in prescriptions and much lower price than the average or even expert doctor these days. These doctors essentially measure a small amount of physical characteristics, pulse, blood pressure, temperature and ask few questions to finally reach a diagnostic. This can be automated for the vast majority of common diseases. And when the application cannot reach a diagnostic because the case is too complex it could even ask for more information, blood analysis, CT-scan, bacteriological culture, etc. Which a nurse can take a sample as required of the tissus needed or the blood sample to be sent to a lab for analysis and the results being returned back to the automated system for further analysis. If at the end, the program cannot reach a diagnostic with a high probability, then the case can be refered to human doctors and probably to a panel of experts because at this point it is very likely the regular average doctor will not be able to do better.

Comment Re:But CNN Said... (Score 1, Funny) 266

Economics isn't pseudoscience. Would you say sociology, psychology,etc are not science just because your narrow definition of science is exact science, those fields like physics, chemistry and mathematics which are leading to one single unambiguous answer? As soon as humans are involved the complexity is many magnitudes of order higher than the most complex physics theory, hence the results cannot lead to a single and well defined answer. Economics is about humans and humans' behavior. Even meteorology and climatology which are base on science first principles and formalized mathematics models are failing to predict the future and you are not rejecting them as scientific fields. Why do you expect a science dealing with a much more complex organism than fluid dynamics to lead to exact results?

Comment Re:What's "darker" about privizing services? (Score 1) 65

Are you kidding? The government is getting half my pay each year and they do not leverage anything. They are employing a lot of people which have almost zero incentive to improve anything. Whatever happen, they will get paid and they will get their retirement allowance and pension which is above what most people in private sector can dream to have when time of retirement will come. The inefficiencies of the governments are costing manifold the profit CEOs and shareholders are pumping from the private ventures. You are living on another planet.

Comment Re:"risks serious damage to the system" (Score 2) 138

NVidia was even hammered when they released a chip on HP and Lenovo Thinkpads that was overheating and resulted in a significant reduction of the lifetime of the laptop and never took responsability for it. So, this is half bullshit since NVidia never replaced all the chips and never paid the cost of replacement to HP and Lenovo for selling these chips to them. The customers did complain to HP and Lenovo, and only a bunch of them got a replacement. They used the serial number and expiration date of the warranty to design their replacement policy in order to minimize their costs and took the risk of having a few disatisfied customers, those knowing the chip was the problem for their laptops stopping to work after the warranty has expired. They saved a load of money this way.

Comment Should we really allow... (Score 1) 291

... stupid questions to make their way to /.?

What do you expect from such a discussion?

Should we try to teach everyone their mother tongue? Should we try to teach everyone history? Should we try to teach everyone mathematics, economics, physics, litterature, arts, poetry and so on?

Of course we should. Learning about history doesn't make everyone an historian and everyone doesn't pretend to be one neither. So, what is the problem with coding? It doesn't mean you want to turn everyone into a professional programmer.

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