Comment Re:Science Fiction? (Score 3, Funny) 782
Forget predicting...I dare you to explain the end of Primer, even after seeing it.
Comment Negative LOCs (Score 2, Insightful) 597
Some of my most "productive" days have resulted in a net deletion of many hundreds of lines of code. Mostly this is cleaning horrendous cut & paste jobs, and refactoring APIs to dump buggy, unnecessary functionality. That one day of effort probably saves weeks of bug-hunting and spaghetti-unwinding further down the road. It would appear to be negatively productive by any naive metric.
I'd argue coder pay should be proportional to productivity. It's just that there's no shortcuts to measuring a coder's productivity.
Comment Re:Anonymous Coward (Score 1) 102
Please mod the AC up. I was exposed to someone with a confirmed case of H1N1 and came down with symptoms. I everywhere I've called tells me they are only testing patients at a high risk for complications, because otherwise they'd be swamped with people coming in for tests. Supposedly this is the government guideline. So how is the CDC expecting to actually track this thing if the government isn't allowing people to be tested?
Electricity From Salty Water 301
Comment largest marketing and branding opportunities? (Score 5, Informative) 443
"It could translate into one of the largest clusterfucks in history."
FTFY
Comment Re:There is a simple solution to this: (Score 1) 740
That is pretty much the way it works now. If you get hit by an uninsured motorist, your insurance picks up the tab. Then they go after the uninsured party. And if they are broke, or run, or lie about their identity, the insurance company is left holding the bag. They eat that expense as a cost of doing business. Which raises the rates for everyone who does pay. Which is why compulsory insurance is mandated by law.
Take a look at the line items on your insurance bill sometime. There's an "uninsured motorist coverage" item in there or something similar. The actual cost varies depending on the number of uninsured drivers in your state.
Comment Re:Bullshit (Score 1) 740
Great points. I'd mod you up if I wasn't the GGP
To the GP and others who are making a similar point: Believe me, I know the state of public transport in most US cities is terrible. But I don't see how that is a valid justification for breaking the law by driving an uninsured vehicle.
Comment Re:This is a Tax (Score 1) 740
Wow, trolled by a four digit ID. I wasn't expecting that.
If you hadn't botched your analogy, the statement would be "I don't care if a new accounting law disproportionately affects white business owners, if they are the ones disproportionately tanking the economy."
See the difference?
I'd support that law, too. But that wouldn't make a very good troll now, would it?
Comment Re:This is a Tax (Score 5, Insightful) 740
Screw uninsured motorists, IMO. If you can't afford compulsory insurance, you can't afford to drive, period. Take the bus. I don't care if this particular move disproportionately affects minorities, if they are the ones disproportionately breaking the law.
This is a good use for traffic cameras, much better than for catching red light running or speeding, because there's always room for subjective calls on what was safe under the particular circumstance of the infraction. If you are uninsured, that is just a fact and you should not be on the road in the first place. End of story.
I agree that this probably isn't much of a revenue stream, since if you can't afford insurance you probably can't afford the fine.
Comment Re:What an idiot (Score 5, Insightful) 539
I'd argue the Kindle will make more money for authors because of an inability to sell e-books secondhand. If the secondhand book market is larger than the audiobook market, the author's guild is coming out ahead.
Comment Re:Out of line (Score 1) 461
Har har, very original. I've been visiting
Keep the crass childish humor in the comments section where it belongs, samzenpus.
Comment Re:Out of line (Score 2, Insightful) 461
Absolutely agree. The pun in the headline is a bad enough, but that "joke" is the most juvenile and disgusting editorial addition to a submission I've seen on Slashdot.
Comment Re:Good luck with that! (Score 3, Insightful) 520
What about providing proof that it was the version of the source code that was made available for review that was running on the machine at the time the test was administered?