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Comment Re:Administrators (Score 4, Insightful) 538

In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.

You beat me to it. It's time for adjunct administrators and more full time professors.

Comment The disease spreads.... (Score 1) 389

. Mitt Romney takes advantage of loop-holes in tax laws to hide his money from US taxes by shuffling it around shell corporations in the Cayman islands. Mitt pays accountants and lawyers to set all that stuff up. The whole reason the US produces so many lawyers is to help rich people and corporations walk right up the the often fuzzy line between what is legal and what isn't.

Oh, look, it's a 'Take every chance to blame an enemy of the left whenever possible even though it's not remotely connected to the topic at hand' post. I thought these were confined to fark.com; it appears I was mistaken, and it also appears there are moderators on board. Perhaps your very own sock puppet moderators.

Comment Re:Well duh (Score 1) 477

Then there's the DRM. "That wouldn't affect you unless you are a pirate!" you say? Bullshit. .

There's an Anime series (a remake of Neon Genesis Envangelion) I would have purchased by now, except it's coded in a different region. That means I have to want to watch it enough to not only pay for the discs, but a region-free player as well. So I haven't purchased anything, when they could have had my money already for the discs.

Comment Re:I love start ups but they're not for everyone (Score 1) 274

....which, btw, doesn't just happen in startups. I'm working in a company that's been in the tech industry since there was a tech industry and we still do the "OMG! Trade show coming up, better be able to code quickly!" thing all the time, complete with other, competing deadlines. The only difference is the ending. In the established company, you get laid off with maybe a severance.

Comment Hmmm... (Score 3, Interesting) 89

I think it makes sense if you consider that Microsoft and Google are starting to make peace with each other. Microsoft recently officially gave their blessing to using office.com on Chrome and ChromeOS. So, imagine now that maybe you'll be able to save and edit actual word docs in Drive using Office and that perhaps Microsoft will also be opening its own Skydrive (or whatever they're calling it now) up to other document types? I admit it's a stretch, but given the new focus on the cloud from Microsoft, it could happen. This also makes more sense from the "merging Android and Chrome" point of view as well as mobile tends to favor smaller, single purpose apps.

Comment Re:Punishment fits the crime (Score 1) 1198

Taking someone's life through a death sentence or a whole-life prison term will never bring restoration to the family of the victim.

So do away with most whole-life sentences. Restore decent parole opportunities. That's what happens in almost every other civilized country, allowing almost all prisoners an opportunity to reform.

The rise in supermax prisons has way more to do with the potential profit for the commercial prison industry than it has to do with crime.

I never said anything about life in prison or a death sentence bringing restoration to the victim's family. I'm concerned with getting dangerous, extremely violent people away from the living permanently. A dog gets rabies. Am I mad at the dog for getting rabies? No. Does it matter how he got rabies? Only insofar as we can eliminate the source; for the fate of the dog, it doesn't matter one wit. The dog is put down because it is simply too dangerous to be allowed around the living anymore. So it is with death row inmates. As for what 'civilized countries do', kindly provide some stories of comparable murderers who were successfully re-introduced to society.

Comment Re:Punishment fits the crime (Score 1) 1198

> 20 minutes of semi-conscious agony ending in a heart attack vs. breathing dirt

False dichotomy. Everyone reading this would not be effected by either, as long as he's behind bars.

Cue the madding crowds telling me why I'm wrong to hold my opinion

He'd still be there to torment his prison guards and fellow inmates. The decline of the death penalty matches up nicely with the rise in supermax prisons.

Everyone who brings up your line of logic imagines that the most base, vicious members of society will sit in prison for the rest of their days reading books and reflecting on their life's choices. It isn't so.

Take a good look at how these life sentence crooks entertain themselves when they have nothing to look forward to but decades of confinement. Then decide if you still think lifetime imprisonment is irrelevant to the living, and to lesser criminals.

Comment Re:Let me tell you about stealing dirty bomb mater (Score 1) 72

So, you don't actually steal it. You blow it up, along with the site itself. Cause safety system failure and cause a meltdown. If you don't plan to survive the attack, you can certainly use a nuclear plant itself as a sort of weapon.

You say it like that would be easy. It wouldn't. Nuclear power plants have significant numbers of armed guards who run drills against adversary teams trying to do just that sort of thing; a factor that's very important, but omitted due to the nature of my previous point.

I'd also like to point out there is a short supply of suicide attackers who have any sort of real capacity to run a mission. 9/11 was the last time anyone with more than five brain cells willingly died in an attack. There's been the occasional unwilling but reasonably intelligent suicide bomber, but a guy like that ain't doing much besides driving a car up to a target.

If you have proof to the contrary, I'd like to see it.

Comment Let me tell you about stealing dirty bomb material (Score 3, Insightful) 72

You die. Seriously, the stuff that's radioactive enough to make a dirty bomb is radioactive enough to kill you before you get offsite. New fuel (less than 5% enriched uranium) is not particularly radioactive. It's perfectly safe to stand next to it; to inspect it before you put it in the nuclear reactor. On the other hand, spent fuel is incredibly radioactive, and when it's being handled it's kept under 30' of water so it doesn't kill everyone in the building.

Now, let's assume you had access to the fuel long enough to get it out of the pool. You would receive a lethal dose of radiation in 36 seconds; enough to kill you within a month. Even if death doesn't come for weeks, you would be rapidly debilitated- which of course would leave you immobile next to something giving off massive amounts of radiation, so I imagine you'd be dead-dead within a half hour. Probably much less.

Now, there is spent fuel that's had several years to decay sitting in dry storage on most nuclear sites, but they're kept in casks and bunkers which are so robust, you're not going to be able to steal or breach them in less time than it takes for three states worth of Law Enforcement and FBI to come crashing down on your party.

That fuel in dry storage would still kill you, but it would take longer.

Comment Re:As a 40 something programmer recently interview (Score 1) 379

I always thought a better, and in some cases, more real life test for a programmer would be to hand them a chunk of someone else's code, something real and in house but obviously not something that is proprietary. Ask them to recommend ways to improve it if possible, or explain why it is good, sound code if not. Good programmers will recognize good code (even in languages they haven't worked in) and recommend fixes where they see problems. Someone you want to hire will be honest about whether or not they've worked in the language and will almost immediately spot things like potential null pointer exceptions, potential leaks of connections, unhandled exception possibilities, etc. or even just poorly structured code.

Comment Re:No Offense (Score 1) 379

No. You don't have to be a manager, but you do have to do more than sit in your office and code your little chunk of the universe because any kid out of college can do that. Heck, an awful lot of people out of high school can do that and don't necessarily require even a living wage. Older programmers should be mentoring and leading. You don't have to have "manager" in your title to do that. The best programmers are the ones who can lead teams of more than 8 programmers, orchestrating the whole product life cycle. Generally, they contribute code too, but they also worry about repeatable testing, providing a release plan, code hygiene and standards, integration and customization points, and testing. I've been on both sides of the fence, hiring and looking for work as a programmer. This has always been the reality. Your skill set should be commensurate with the years of experience you've had, which means that you should show a certain professional maturity. If you haven't advanced your skills beyond code monkey in 30 years, you've got a problem.

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