Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Talk about biting the hand hat feeds you. (Score 1) 95

While the war in Ukraine is something that no one other than Putin wants, the scenario you describe sounds like the best of a bad situation: the U.S. replaces old hardware with more modern, capable hardware and Ukraine gets our aging equipment to fight against Russia's aging equipment.

And aging U.S. equipment is a lot better maintained and newer than what's left of Russia's aging equipment.

Comment Re: The statewide corporate commission (Score 1) 39

23 charges on just one person who is really close to the governor. And if that's not bad enough for you, there have been 576 federal corruption convictions in 10 years in just California alone. That makes my current state, that I live in, more corrupt than even Illinois, New Jersey, and New York.

Per capita? Assuming equal levels of corruption per capita, you would expect California to have three times as many charges per year as Illinois, twice as many as New York, and four times as many as New Jersey.

Never mind. I already know the answer. Per capita, California is one of the least corrupt states in the country, ranking at number 34 out of 50 (source).

Using corruption conviction rate per capita, Arizona is #9 in corruption, behind only Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, and Alabama.

Fun fact: Of the ten most corrupt states, six are red states, two purple, two blue. Of the ten least corrupt, three are red states, three purple, four blue. Statistically, you would expect 3.4 blue, 1.8 purple, 4.8 red. Interpret that as you will.

Comment Re: It isnt needed. (Score 1) 39

Because they grow very well there. The dry climate makes disease much less of an issue. This leads to higher yields and cheaper fruit in the stores. Of course it comes with externalities like subsidization of the use of a scarce and dwindling resource.

I mean, you can massively increase your water supply and reduce global warming all at the same time by covering the entire length of the aqueducts with solar panels.

And water isn't scarce and dwindling. It's just not local to that area. We have almost infinite amounts of water ready for desalination. Nothing prevents us from having as much fresh water as we could ever need other than us not being willing to spend the money to build desalination plants. Heck, we might even be able to do it passively with solar stills.

Comment Re:Still going? (Score 1) 26

Unions did a lot of good at one time for low skilled work. They gave us the 40 hour work week and weekends. But mid/high-skilled union shops quickly turn to shit. The quality goes out the window and there's no merit incentive for very merit based jobs.

Not inherently. Some unions do put in specific rules about specific job levels having specific pay, but not all. It just depends on what the union demands in their negotiations. A more reasonable approach would be to demand a certain minimum amount of wage increase each year. Even in that situation, if management isn't willing to give merit-based increases because the total dollar amount including the mandatory minimum for everyone else adds up to too much money, then it could still have that effect, of course. Either way, rigid pay rates aren't a hard-and-fast requirement of union workplaces.

Some union shops also have rules mandating that nobody do anything that is someone else's job. While theoretically intended to prevent consolidating and firing people, those sorts of rules often end up making life miserable by limiting opportunities for advancement and career growth. But again, not every union does things like that.

The real problem with unions is that they are basically doing what the government should be doing, were governments not hopelessly pledging fealty to industry. But because unions are too close to the problem, they see only the employees' side of things, and over the long term, their demands usually end up outpacing practical limits, and companies close the plants and move workers to another country. This is not to say that they would not have eventually done that anyway, but unions often exacerbate the problem and accelerate the job loss.

If unions focused only on improving working conditions, limiting working hours, requiring reasonable minimum standards for termination, requiring voluntary exit programs before any layoffs, and other largely cost-neutral demands, they could make life better for workers by being a check on penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions without causing long-term job loss or other downsides. But the temptation to always ask for more money is too great, so this almost never happens.

Comment Re:I'm still missing why Apple needs to bend the k (Score 1) 96

There's no obvious benefit to doing things in an app versus a website.

Clearly you don't understand how the app ecosystem works. These companies don't develop apps for nothing, they develop them because it gives them considerable boosts in market share.

I'm part of the app ecosystem and I *still* don't understand why people develop half the apps that they develop, rather than making their websites work like the app does and having a button to save a bookmark on the home screen.

Comment Re:I'm still missing why Apple needs to bend the k (Score 1) 96

There is, or at least, a eather large advanrage to having yje transaction going via an app. The apple wallet ( I cant remember if using wallet/apple pay from safari was avalable on ips from the start or mot.

Credit card autofill has worked in Safari since iOS 7 (before Wallet). Wallet added the ability to scan cards. I can only assume that the functionality was tied together from the very beginning, since Safari's feature predated Wallet by a year. For sure, the integration has worked in Safari for as long as I've used it, which would have probably been a few months after the Apple Card came out in 2019.

Comment Re:What was the test to say 27% was unreasonable? (Score 1) 96

The "actual costs" are all Apple's servers... so if Apple needs to segment these people into sandboxed physically separated servers for "security" then "reasonable" could be easily $100K / month.

Apple's servers aren't involved at all for in-app purchase payments through third party payment processors. And no sane person would consider such sandboxing to be reasonable for a server that just provides downloads of app binaries, because the server is not doing anything more than loading bytes from disk and sending them out over HTTPS. So that would get smacked down by the courts in a quarter of a second.

Competent lawyers do not play games like that, because they know that doing so is the surest way to incur treble damages for willful violation of court orders.

Blah, Blah, Bonk Bonk on the head!

Lots of blathering and convenient lack of detail; but no guidance.

You actually expect me to give actual guidance on how Apple could get away with violating antitrust law without getting caught? I use their devices. I have zero incentive to do that.

Comment Makes no sense (Score 1) 32

Rust's new status in Linux hints at a career path that blends deep understanding of C with fluency in Rust's safety guarantees.

It would seem that adopting Rust, which is supposed to be safe by design, would relieve developers of the duty to write safe code. After all, its Rust. None of these nasty null pointers and buffer oveflows are possible. Just like Python relieves developers from the duty of formatting readable code.

Developers should now be freed to make higher level, more difficult to find logic erors.

Comment Re:Crrot and Stick (Score 1) 117

We know enough about physics to say there isn't going to be anything as impact as entering the age of stream, or the atomic age again.

Thank goodness we made those leaps in microprocessor design and software back in the 1980s. So there's no need for further incremental improvements.

Typed on my $2500 IBM PC, with 640K of memory. Using MSDOS.

Comment Re:Crrot and Stick (Score 2) 117

Looks at the hundreds of billions being funneled into AI research with no profit in sight

My guess: It's a scam, built on pre-existing 'bot technology.

When it's all done with, the "investors" will have a huge tax write off for their losses plus some neat new data centers, high end servers and utility resources to go into Bitcoin mining big time.

Slashdot Top Deals

"The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was." -- Walt West

Working...