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Comment Re:Under what authority? (Score 0) 298

In this case, you need a permit to use the park. Their permit said that they would not have this wanted fugitive perform. They violated the terms of their permit, so were shut down.

But that doesn't answer the question: what right does the city, which manages public spaces such as parks on behalf of the public, has to put arbitrary conditions on their use by said public?

Comment Re:RMS Says I Told You So (Score 1) 317

This is yet another an example of the industry trend to make all personal computing devices, from desktop workstations to wrist-band gadgets, merely "dumb terminals" that are completely beholden to a distant server. Software will inevitably become a service that will be metered out by a distant authority like water or electricity.

It's not limited to software but is the whole idea of an economy built on disposable products: since nothing lasts, you are effectively renting everything and since you're renting everything, you can't build up wealth except in the form of "financial instruments" who's demand - and thus value - is thus artificially inflated.

Comment Re:Pure undulterated bullshit (Score 1) 204

Or you could run the software in a VM and have the host OS capture the screenshot, if they manage to implement invasive DRM.

Or you could simply not run the software at all and only lose messages even the sender's drunk ass knew they would be ashamed of in the morning. And possibly the occasional extortion scheme.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 1) 480

Clothes don't make the man. Put an idiot in a $1000 suit and you have a well dressed idiot. Clothes make an impression on the viewer - and sometimes, they affect the behaviour of the wearer.

But people are not defined solely by their core attributes, but also by their social relationships. That well-dressed idiot might be attractive enough to make their approval socially valuable to a not-so-attractive genius, who's advice and support in turn boosts their performance above average. So in this way clothes do make the man by partially determining which paths are open for the man to choose.

Comment Re: So what? (Score 1) 480

Business casual doesn't even require suits. A shirt or even a polo shirt is fine.
All it requires is basically that you don't look like a hobo.

Technically speaking, if you've ever moved for a job you are a hobo, so not looking like one would require you to wear an identity-concealing costume. In other words, a Batman costume both counts as and is required by this definition of "business casual".

And that's a brilliant strategy: a company staffed entirely by Batmen is going to kick ass in the marketplace. And what suicidal criminal would even dream of cracking their hardware? Yes, this is clearly the turning point of HP's fortunes: it's time to take Gotham - no, the World!

Nananananananananana HP! HP!

Comment Re:um...yay? (Score 0) 480

PC always had a "you're screwed if you don't toe the line" attitude.

It was never fine and cute. It has always been about social control.

So how is that different from every other aspect of employment? Do you obey your boss because they're a great person or because you'll be fired if you won't? Political Correctness is simply insisting you leave your Klan robe at the door, which is a perfectly reasonable demand.

But hey, all we have to do to make the issue go away is make employment optional, for example through unconditional basic income. If you no longer need to work for a living you can wear the Southern Flag as a toga all day long, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. But of course it also means other people are beyond your ability to control and "keep in their place", too.

Comment Re:um...yay? (Score 0) 480

Who fired a Nobel Prize laureate over a joke and why does he still have a job? Whoever fired him should be fired for damaging the company.

Humans, even Nobel Prize laureates, are mortal and will eventually leave, taking their talent with them. On the other hand, their influence will remain in the corporate culture, potentially forever. Apart from being less efficient overall - people are less likely to voice their good ideas or call out bad ones if they need to worry about being the next target - based on current trends it seems likely that it will also repulse future talent (and even current talent) as the world continues growing more inclusive. So cutting their losses seems like the rational thing to do.

Even special snowflakes are still just snowflakes.

Seriously, Political Correctness is fine and cute, but when it gets to getting shit done, it's time to stop the silly games and concentrate on what really matters.

So stop playing them. Stop wearing sexists shirts, stop telling racist jokes. Stop insisting other people endure you shoveling crap on them. But if you can't resist playing a power game, don't complain when other people - including your employer - refuse to let themselves be victimized.

Political Correctness is about focusing on the job, it's opponents are about forcing other people to eat their shit and pretend to like it. Stop being a gaping asshole and the whole issue won't have any effect on you, apart from making your environment less smelly.

Of course it hurts to give up a part of yourself, even if that part is composed of the leftover garbage from civilization's startup process. But the alternatives hurt even more. Sucks, but the prize is beating the odds and taking the stars.

Comment Re:Here's a thought: Just freeze the project (Score 2) 58

Who is demanding zoomable magnification? The game uses icons.

Bitmap icons, which always end up looking like shit in a couple of years. How about turning all graphics into SVG? It would instantly make the game zoomable, ensure nice sharp visuals on every platform, benefit future OSS projects and give obsessive micro-optimizers something useful to do - or at least I've never seen a fast SVG implementation.

Comment Re:SanDisk sells a 512TB 3U shelf... (Score 1) 219

$1/GB, which is a ton cheaper than building a SAN of that capacity,

The marginal price of HDD storage is about $0.05/GB. Maybe double that for higher density, maybe double it again for redundancy. That's a maximum of $0.2/GB for the disks. There's some fixed overhead for a large disk farm plus some more per-byte overhead for the controllers and interconnects. Hard to believe that really adds up to much more than $1/GB. We're talking half a million dollars for 500TB.

Daydream on. Big cluster of mid-tower PCs. Six 4TB drives per tower, for a total of 20TB with 1:6 redundancy. 25 of those towers would give you 500TB. 150 drives at $150 each = $23K. 25 server-grade PCs at about $1000 each = $25K. Networking? No idea, maybe another $2K? So we're looking at about $50K for 500TB. Obviously there will be some overhead for a managed commercial "enterprise" level system from a big vendor. But more than 10x the price? Really? Seems like there's room for a little more competition in that business.

Comment Re:Spreadsheets (Score 2) 144

Any place where you have to take a number of observations and perform statistical analysys on the data. A lot of yield analysis in agriculture is done this way; remember, agriculture was the mother of statistics. Then you branch out to the other hard sciences and a spreadsheet is the right tool for the job. Once you learn the limitations of the tool (precision, range, accuracy) it can slash effort to a fraction of other methods.

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