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Comment Re:Get used to it (Score 1) 215

Until then any talk of "ending the war" is as silly as claiming you can tear down a dam because the river stopped flowing. It stopped flowing because of the dam.

Eh, the idea was that once the Iraqis had built up their own dam, slightly downstream from the US-built temporary dam, that we could remove the US dam and let the Iraqi dam take over.

Unfortunately, it looks like the Iraqi dam was made out of paper-mache... :(

Comment Re:so (Score 1) 150

these are from the government officials who answer to people who were telling us a few years ago that the VA was the model of ideal healthcare delivery

The problem with the VA is that it had to handle a large influx of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and there was no corresponding influx of resources to handle them. I don't know if the VA model was 'ideal' or not, but any system will hit the wall at some point if you keep increasing the load factor and never increase its resources.

Comment Re:Great idea at the concept stage. (Score 1) 254

This. There's likely trillions of dollars invested in IPv4 that is going to be around for decades. Consider the Internet like highways and train track widths - we're stuck with it for a very long time.

I'm probably missing the point, but isn't NDN just a way to do content-addressable lookup of data? And if so, why would we need to throw out IPv4 in order to use it? We already have lots of examples of that running over IPv4 (e.g. BitTorrent, or Akamai, or even Google-searches if you squint).

Comment Re:Hmmm ... (Score 1) 194

Between companies using 10 year old Linux kernels, to having unpatchable systems, or just having really bad understandings of security, I've come to conclude this is the norm.

... and a hacked prosthetic arm is the worst possible kind of security breach -- the hackers could literally hold your neck for ransom.

Comment Re:Bets on first use (Score 2) 233

Besides, weren't there apps that do this that folks could purchase of their own free will?

There are, but the feature doesn't work as a theft deterrent unless almost everybody has it. If only a few people have it, thieves will steal phones anyway, because the likelihood is they can resell most of the phones they steal. If/when we get to the point where almost all phones auto-brick after they are stolen, cell-phone thieves will lose their profit incentive and move on to something else.

Comment Re:What's the point? (Score 1) 511

So if we do something in C++ then there's an added 50% "C++ Tax" just to find the 500,000 memory leaks and such.

Just wanted to say that if you are careful to use a smart-pointer class (e.g. shared_ptr) rather than raw C-style pointers to hold dynamically allocated objects, 99% of your memory leaks (and other object-lifetime-managment related problems) will "magically" go away -- and without the overhead or random execution-pauses seen in languages that rely on a garbage collector.

Comment Re:Adding Politics to Engineering Decisions (Score 1) 173

Would 2014 America hold up seat belt installation for ten years just to make sure they are totally, exactly, 100% safe?

Really, you're don't see the difference in added risk between (a computer taking over sole responsibility for the control of a 2500-pound, 65-mile-an-hour car, in all possible traffic conditions), and (adding a strip of reinforced fabric to the cockpit)?

When was the last time your seat belt stopped working due to a buffer overrun? Contrariwise, when was the last time your home computer did something wrong or unexpected?

Comment Re:Time to build a cruise missile and send it over (Score 1) 134

And remember their bible demands the murder of the Infidel there is no well maybe it can be read this way or that way. It black and white demands it.

First of all, [citation needed].

How does one fight against someone following their religion and teaching?

Did you know that the Christian Bible also "black and white demands" that anyone caught working on a Sunday be put to death? (citation). And yet somehow we don't see a lot of killings of Sabbath-breakers. So most clearly people can distinguish between the applicable and non-applicable parts of their holy texts. (Those who cannot we call "fundamentalists", and they are the problem; not every religious person in the world)

Comment Re:Pick a different job. (Score 1) 548

Do you understand the benefits of a union?

A union is most beneficial when workers are easily replaceable -- because if management can replace worker A with worker B without a lot of overhead, management can (and usually will) use that to drive salaries down, approaching the lowest salary that they can find at least one worker to accept.

The trick in programming is to make sure you are not so easily replaceable -- if the company knows that it would take 6-12 months to get a new hire up to your level of productivity, they will not be so quick to "value engineer" your salary and benefits. Then you don't really need a union to stand up for you, because you have leverage to stand up for yourself. (The right way to do this is to know the company's software inside and out; the wrong way would be to make the software so convoluted that only you can understand it... ;))

Comment Re:NIMBYs? Crackpots? (Score 1) 521

According to the gov, 33% total efficiency for coal.

Of course if you take into account the energy expenditure it will take to pull the excess CO2 and other chemicals back out of the atmosphere, that number goes down a bit.

(Impractical to do, and therefore will never be done, you say? Okay, take into account the costs of living with a permanently impacted atmosphere, instead)

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