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Comment Re:No thank you (Score 2) 203

There's no subways to JFK either, really. Yes, yes, you can transfer to the Air Train, which is better than the bus. But honestly, there's no subways to any of the airports. No matter what, you have to transfer to some other train or bus or something, or else take a car.

And sure, JFK may be more convenient for you, but it's less convenient for other people. I can spend over an hour transferring trains trying to get to JFK and pay $2.50 for the subway and $5 for the air train, or spend $50 for a car to JFK and take god-knows-how-long depending on traffic, or I can spend $20 on a car to LaGuardia and be there in 20 minutes. Guess which option I prefer.

Comment Re: not outside the jurisdiction of the NSA (Score 1) 135

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. My understanding is that the NSA officially claims not to collect information on US citizens when the data resides solely in the U.S. However, they do monitor data going in and out of the U.S., so if you're an American located in the U.S., then storing data outside of the U.S. seems to open you to monitoring.

On the other hand, I also thought part of what Snowden released showed that they didn't exactly stick to their own rules, and they were collecting all kinds of data that they weren't really supposed to. I could be wrong about that, though. Reporting on the issue has been terrible.

Comment Re:I'll bite (Score 1) 265

No. A shell that has an IDE to aid formulating godforsaken scripts that mere mortals can't even remember.

What about an IDE for formulating normal scripts that mere mortals can even remember?

I don't see what the objection to an IDE is. If I'm writing anything more than the simplest script, I find it helpful to have some kind of debugging tools.

Comment Re:I'll bite (Score 1) 265

It's not really fair to say that Powershell is, "a kludged attempt to bring CMD.exe to something closer to bash.... 20 years later." You can argue that it's kludged (I don't think it really is) or that it's late to the game (it is), but it's not really like Bash. Bash treats everything like text, whereas Powershell treats everything as an object. Bash relies on a lot of stand-alone applications being chained together, whereas Powershell tends to have more built-in functionality which is supplemented by various extensions.

Whether you like those differences or not is a different issue, I suppose, but it's not like Bash. It's not even trying to be like Bash.

Comment Re:Bad title (Score 1) 416

That's cool. Sounds about like what I said: We don't really know if warp drives would be possible, or if they are, exactly how they could work. We don't really know that this drive does anything (though it seems to), and if it does, quite how it's doing it.

But if this drive does work, and it works the way some people suspect it does, and warp drives are possible, and they would work the way some people suspect they would, then this drive might be doing something like what a warp drive would do, supposing that the measurements are all accurate.

Or any number of other things could be going on. We don't know.

Comment Re:Measurements (Score 1) 425

Those conflicting motivations could easily create a bimodal distribution (between programmers who are passionate, and those who are just doing a job). I don't know if that's happened because I haven't measured, but it seems plausible to me.

That would be a great argument if you're talking about measuring programmers' attitudes, or maybe even the quality of their code. It seems that what's being talked about here is "talent", which is often (generally?) thought to mean a kind of innate ability.

Comment Re:Proxy? (Score 1) 323

On the other hand, my work has 30,000+ computers that communicate through no more than ten public IP addresses, so if we weren't using a corporate solution for Windows activations then we might pop up in much the same way.

The summary makes it sound like Microsoft is suspicious just because there are hundreds of activations from the same IP, but I don't think that alone would have attracted the same kind of attention. Because you're right, it could simply be a company with incompetent IT people, or even just a computer fix-it shop that is installing and activating Windows for people. The article says:

Microsoft says that the defendant(s) have activated hundreds of copies of Windows 7 using product keys that have been “stolen” from the company’s supply chain or have never been issued with a valid license, or keys used more times than their license allows.

So it's not an issue of "Microsoft thinks these activation are suspicious because they all come from the some IP address," but rather, "Microsoft knows these activation are suspicious because they're using faked/stolen license keys. A lot of them are coming from the same place, which makes Microsoft want to know what that place is."

Comment Re:Bad title (Score 1) 416

I don't know. The first article I read quoted some scientist saying something to the effect of, "The effect is consistent with what we might possibly see if it were a warp drive, according to what we guess a warp drive might possibly do, which is all kind of cool. But I don't actually know what's going on here." I thought that's where all the talk of warp drives came from.

But it didn't sound to me at the time like the guy who said it, whoever that was, was even really positing that it was a warp drive. Just more like, "Well the whole thing is kind of neat. We don't really know how warp drives would work, if we assume they're possible, and we also don't know how this thing is working, if we assume it's not experimental error. However, with as little as we know about warp drives and as little as we know about this thing, this thing could technically be a warp drive. It's total bullshit speculation, but fun to think about."

Comment Re:Bad title (Score 3, Insightful) 416

It's premature to throw a Singularity party but it's definitely premature to declare the device to not be a warp drive.

I guess you're right in the sense that if we don't know what's generating the thrust, it's premature to declare it to be *not* much of anything. It's premature to declare it not-a-time-machine or not-a-perpetual-motion-machine. It might be premature to declare that it's not witchcraft. But on the other hand, it's a pretty safe bet that it's none of those things. If it really does work, it probably works via some very reasonable mechanism.

The author is right: we should reserve judgment until there's something more substantial. From what I've read so far, it sounds more like a couple of scientists played with it and said, "Huh, this is actually pretty cool. It does seem to generate thrust, and we're not sure how. Wouldn't it be cool if it was a primative warp drive? Yeah, that'd be cool. Oh well, we need to test it more before we're even sure that it's generating thrust." The whole warp-drive thing is wild speculation, picked up by fanboys who desperately want it to be true.

Comment Re:Outdated (Score 1) 211

Not sure why you're being dense. Both managers and project managers "manage", and so there's going to be some overlap in what they do. The biggest difference between a project manager and a manager in that a project manager has specific projects, with specific scopes of work, and essentially only has purview over those specific projects.

A manager may also manage projects. That doesn't mean it's the same job. If you treat them like the same job, you're going to do a very bad job at one of them, if not both.

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