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Comment Re:Exactly same situation... why do you need N? (Score 1) 427

g was good enough for me, but I bought an n anyway and was very pleased with the upgrade. Corners of the house that used to be spotty coverage became rock solid. The "yard range" went from near the house to almost 100' further into the yard. Sure, g was fast and reliable enough and covered what I needed, but n was a clear improvement and actually useful at times.

Comment Re:and now we just use H-1B they don't complain (Score 1) 268

There's a local shop that hires a mix of experienced developers, kids still in college, and H1Bs... they have horrendous turnover (average tenure 1 year is because the H1Bs stay put. The college kids bolt at first opportunity, and the experienced ones seems to find better things fairly often too...

Comment Re:WTF? Jailtime! Boycott violates Anti-Trust (Score 1) 268

The Clayton Act only applies when someone applies it. If you were wronged by these people, bring suit under the Clayton Act and have at them.

Unfortunately, if you're just a bystander, or the statute of limitations has run out, or you have accepted other settlement in the matter, you can't.

Comment Re:biased algorith (Score 1) 177

In this particular case, I'm not very impressed with a 70% prediction rate on a binary decision... you could get similar results by saying "Uphold" every time and ignoring all the data.

What would be more impressive is if the algorithm could predict (with greater accuracy) how theoretical courts would perform with new justices assigned to the bench. Say a seat is opening up and there are several candidates for the position, can the algorithm tell you what the outcome of an upcoming case will be with the various choices of new justices?

Comment Re:Bullshit. (Score 2) 140

The manufacturers think they can do it safely. They even have multinational conferences where they get together and the 2 guys from every company who would rather travel than work sit around and agree with each other that they have put in enough safety checks to protect their customers.

The problem is, most people can't mentally scale risk up to millions of copies. The basic engineer's metric is: "I tried it on my test rig as many ways as I can think of and nothing ever failed." Put this guy in a "world class" test facility with all the best toys money can buy and he'll write you all kinds of analyses "proving" that their accelerated degradation models guarantee a trillion hour MTBF. Problem is: when you put a million imperfect copies of a thing into the real world, with a million different people operating them in thousands of different use cases in hundreds of different environments, the "world class" test facility becomes a myopic little ivory tower by comparison.

One of the answers is "post market surveillance" - but that's expensive, politically unpopular, and logistically difficult to implement, though it is getting cheaper and easier, I don't think it's getting any more politically acceptable. Personally, I feel that the commercial arm of the corporations have corrupted the good in onboard diagnostics, putting up a little "feed my mechanics' and dealers' families" light on your dashboard that comes on for every little problem, but still managing to let you get stranded by the side of the road with little to no warning Why would I ever trust such a system to "phone home" with data about my driving habits?

Comment Re:Bullshit. (Score 2) 140

They've been playing at this since the 1970s. Scan code systems that sell for $50K. "Open" protocols that you have to be a member of the society to get a copy of, membership fee: $25K plus a reason they deem as valid to join. This was last century.

Just be glad that the OBD-III proposals with RFID communication requirements never got passed (or did they?) - with that, the same type of toll readers that are more and more common could as easily query your OBD port and read everything about your present vehicle condition - effectively making possible a "go directly to your mechanic and pay to fix your vehicle or get your license revoked" checkpoint anywhere desired, including across a 6 lane interstate where traffic moves at 80mph - yes, the protocol can query all the vehicles on the road simultaneously as they drive through a checkpoint.

Comment Re:This was Google at its worst (Score 1) 79

Yeah, that nutso fruity computer company had absolutely no business getting into music players, or phones, did they?

If 1 out of 100 of Google's crazy ideas take off on large scale, they stand to profit overall, and the 99 so called failures can also been called learning experiences, helping that 1/100 to succeed.

Comment Re:GUI = fail (Score 1) 402

My programming work takes me into systems land, maybe only 4 hours a month, but it happens - and being able to handle it myself means getting that work done in 4 hours, instead of spending 4 hours lobbying for the political capital to get the project approved in the IT department and then waiting a week or two (or more) for it to have it implemented, poorly.

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