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Comment Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS (Score 1) 349

Cite some sources? Because my state sure does not exclude basic groceries. When I look at my grocery receipt, it clearly states the tax percentage and is applied after everything is totaled up. If there is a state that does not follow this method, let me know.

Wherever you are (you don't say), I suspect your sales tax on groceries is more the exception than the rule. For just one example, Nevada doesn't tax groceries. If you're paying tax on a grocery-store purchase, it's for (1) non-food items (such as cleaning supplies) and/or (2) prepared, ready-to-eat foods (such as fried or roast chicken from the deli counter, vs. a box of frozen breaded chicken strips or a package of fresh chicken that needs to be cooked first and isn't taxed).

Comment Re:One more view. (Score 2, Insightful) 365

1. Kleiner Perkins freed of all charges. This highlights just how male-dominated and sexist the tech industry is.
2. Kleiner Perkins guilty of all charges. This highlights just how male-dominated and sexist the tech industry is.

It's kinda like "global warming," where any change in the weather (or any lack of change in the weather) is cited as proof. A Venn diagram of SJWs vs. warmistas would, I suspect, have a very high degree of overlap.

Comment Re:in further news show tanks (Score 1) 662

I think BBC may take the opportunity to just clean house and bring in a new set of 3 hosts. The chemistry that those 3 had was great, so just lugging in a new replacement with the 2 remaining would be a disaster. But it could work with a set of 3 completely new hosts.

Not likely. Consider The Man Show as precedent; it pretty much jumped the shark when they tried to replace Adam Carolla & Jimmy Kimmel.

Submission + - Finally, an energy drink for the rest of us: Sudo Drink (github.com)

rjamestaylor writes: The Cloud is powered by open source and energy drinks—isn't it about time that these come together? Some on Github think so and have started "sudo drink": "the basic concept is an open source energy drink. 25% (or some number) of the profit is donated to FOSS projects."

Comment Re:What's wrong with GLS (Score 2) 328

Besides which, an incandescent needs a bulb that can handle a hard vacuum, a machine to make a hard vacuum, and an entirely separate manufacturing line to all your other electrical bits and pieces.

Lightbulbs haven't used vacuum for decades. They're typically filled with an inert-gas mix (predominantly nitrogen or argon, possibly with small amounts of other gases) at atmospheric pressure. Not only does this allow use of a thinner, lighter envelope, it also makes the filament last longer.

Comment The problem is C++ instead of C with classes (Score 1) 757

C++ is a VERY powerful system, but it is too much. The C language has 90% of what you need. Any non-trivial C application will end up re-implementing basic features in C++. The problem comes when C++ becomes, in the eyes of its developers, its own language. If used as "C with classes," many of the problematic issues are gone.

All that being said, bad developers will find a way to write bad code.

Comment Re:Sure about the Louvre? (Score 1, Interesting) 183

Yeah, professional flash... professionals have those on their professional cameras. I've never had one.

If you've ever had an SLR (hardly the exclusive domain of professionals, though it does imply a familiarity with photography beyond snapshot-taking), you probably have a flash for it kicking around. I dug up my old camera bag the other day to test a K-mount to EF-mount adapter so that I might use my old lenses with my new camera. My old flash, a Sunpak Auto 222, still works. I've had it since I was 13 (just realized that makes it (and most of the other stuff in the bag) 30 years old). The new camera has a pop-up flash, but this one is probably a fair bit more powerful. It's definitely aimable from straight ahead to straight up, which is something you can't do with the pop-up flash. Put the camera in manual-exposure mode and the flash works the same with the EOS Rebel T5 as it did with the K1000.

Is this stuff common? Probably not. In the domain of professional photographers, though? Definitely not.

Comment Re:But why though? Math time! (Score 1) 275

I calculated this at 8 MH/s out of my memory and missed a comma but if it's 14MH/s that's only $3,534.62 per day. It's something like a 100:1 loss on electricity at $0.11/KWH by the way. Hurray for efficiency.

Of course, when it's your vict^H^H^H^Husers paying for the electricity and not you, you really don't need to care what it costs.

Comment sigh, boring (Score 1) 88

They have been doing this with sound for some time. Radio is just faster. (Yes, I know that is WAY oversimplified). At radio frequencies, any electrical engineer will tell you there is no such thing as digital. The edge of a square wave is not perfectly straight. It is a noisy curve based on the impedance of the circuit and the current used to drive the transition. There is inductance and capacitance in every conveyance of electricity. In a "clean" circuit, the effect of this parasitic L/C is either negligible or compensated for.

A radio antenna is, by definition, an analog part which electrically resembles a coil with some capacitance . So even the title misleading. The fact that they can us algorithms to control the digital signal in such a way that the antenna will smooth it out into a radio wave is kind of cool, but it isn't a crazy breakthrough. You can see almost every computer on a spectrum analyzer as radio wave source. This is just a neat trick, like getting the line printer to sound like music by sending the right stuff to print.

Comment Re:file transfer (Score 2) 466

The new machines lack LPT ports? WTF kind of machine did you buy without an LPT port? A laptop, sure, a desktop? You have to look hard, even today to find a machine that doesn't have a printer port.

Pretty much anything built in the last five or so years won't have serial or parallel ports. If you're lucky, you might have some headers on the motherboard that can be brought to the slot cage with connectors in brackets like what were common before ATX, but I've run across plenty of motherboards that don't even have those. Notebooks are even less likely to have them. This Dell Inspiron E1505 I'm typing on is a bit long in the tooth...main reason I'm keeping it going is its 15" 1680x1050 screen. No serial or parallel ports on it.

When I saw a sufficiently-old notebook come through my office a while back that had a serial port on it, I hung onto it for talking to our switches and routers. I forget what model of HP it is, but it's old enough that it runs on an Athlon XP. It's probably the better part of 10 years old at this point. The last emerge -uND world took a couple of days to run, but it's fast enough to run Minicom and Firefox, and to do traffic captures from the switch: serial connection to the management port to enable SPAN, Ethernet to the SPAN port for capture, and WiFi to talk to the whole thing from my office instead of the server room.

Comment Re:Fuck you Bill fucking Nye... (Score 2) 681

Hey Bill. Kindly go fuck yourself. Seriously. If you believe (and apparently you do), that only Ivy League universities can provide any education of merit, then you really are more of a mindless tool than I suspected.

QFT. Consider how well the Ivy Leaguers mismanaging the executive branch of the government are doing as further proof of the uselessness of credentialism.

Comment Re:Horribly misleading summary (Score -1) 681

He's using climate change as an example to demonstrate his point. (A near-unanimous consensus among scientists maintain that climate change is happening and is a serious problem; over 50% of the US population disagrees. This demonstrates that the US population is largely science-illiterate or science-hostile.)

O RLY? (The Google link should bypass their paywall.) In addition to "consensus" being inherently unscientific (was Copernicus "science-illiterate" when he proposed his heliocentric theory of the solar system when the consensus view was in favor of a geocentric theory?), there is much to suggest that the "97%" number is as overcooked as most of the recent temperature records have been.

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