OctoberSky - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Why is the NSF? (Score 2, Insightful) 57

by OctoberSky on Wednesday November 11, 2009 @08:24PM (#30067850) Attached to: Making Carriers Shoulder Smartphone Security

Spending money to facilitate better service for these private businesses who have not only made billions from customers, but took billions of tax dollars and screwed us as citizens.

NSF should not be paying a cent for this. The issues need to become prominent enough for the customers to demand better products from the oligopoly of telcos.

I'm usually quite on board with the government not paying money to help businesses further their own causes, but there are exceptions to every rule.

This should be seen as acceptable, just like it's seen as acceptable for the government to pay for the NHSTA to crash cars to test them. Those tests are given back to the manufacturers to make... wait for it... better cars. Sure it helps the manufacturers, but more importantly it helps the consumer, or more important to the governments cause, the citizenry.

No government can safely doll out money and not expect it to get back into the pockets of big business somewhere down stream in commerce. To think so is asinine (and I'm not suggesting that's what your suggesting). But there has to be exceptions, and this one, I think falls under such exceptions.

Slashdot's Disagree Mail 100

Posted by samzenpus on Friday October 17, 2008 @01:11PM from the good-things-come-in-small-packages dept.

Ernest Hemingway's micro-story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," is one of my favorite examples of how less is sometimes more. Sometimes a few sentences say it all; you don't always need a hundred pages to convey an idea. Most of the mail I get is brief and to the point. Others are just brief. To be honest, I appreciate the short, crazy email more than the long rants, and they can be just as funny. Read below for this week's mail snippets.

Submission + - I can count to Arnold. Or can't I?

Submitted by Confused Drunk on Saturday September 20, 2008 @12:20AM

Confused Drunk writes: Given the fact that numbers run to infinity and that each number will, at some point, be called upon (named, as in Million, Billion, Trillion, etc) is it possible that at some point there will be a number named Arnold? How about Bill? Qwunto? Beorjnahdslfah?

Speaking philosophically, if we can (read: if we could, in multiple life times) count past the known, named numbers, we will reach unnamed numbers. So it must be possible to count to Arnold when the numbers never run out and their names as identifiers never run out. To be even more obscure I argue that one day a computer will exist that can count to "side ways blue chair underpant knapsack" which, surprisingly, is simply Arnold to the 42nd power.

And for fun, the largest known prime is 2^32,582,657 1. But that's not exactly easy to reference. Did we stop naming numbers? Why can't I say the largest known prime is "316 X and change"?

Comment Re:Spilling the beans (Score 1) 799

by OctoberSky on Wednesday November 28, 2007 @04:26PM (#21509219) Attached to: How to Deal With Stolen Code?

In addition to asking how to deal with some previous dev copying web-published code, he also asked how he can tell his company, or if he should, or what might happen if he does/doesn't.

I pointed out a very harmless way to "spill the beans" if he so chooses.

The problem is not ratting out the former dev, the problem is that the former dev is now his superior. If he wants to point out that the code is copied to a higher up, yet not assign blame to his current boss, the way to do it is the old switch-a-roo. I laid it all out.

Slashdot Top Deals