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Comment Profile of the dissenting commissioner (Score 2) 131

This seems like such an obvious improvement that I was curious about the one commissioner who voted against it. It turns out he, Andrew Ferguson, is expected to be nominated and confirmed to be the head of the FTC under the upcoming administration. Some info about the anticipated new head of the FTC:

* UVA undergrad and law degrees
* worked for private firms defending against anti-trust enforcement
* clerked for Clarence Thomas
* worked for Republican senators on judicial confirmations
* solicitor general for Virginia
* appointed to FTC in 2023

We will see how things change under his leadership.

Comment Stanford is not in Maine (Score 1) 22

Does anyone know why the Maine Attorney General is involved? Palo Alto is pretty fair from Maine and I didn't see any explanation in the article. Does Maine have better disclosure laws than other states? There is a filing which includes:

Total number of persons affected (including residents): 27000
Total number of Maine residents affected: 3
If the number of Maine residents exceeds 1,000, have the consumer reporting agencies been notified:
Date(s) Breach Occured: 05/12/2023
Date Breach Discovered: 09/27/2023

so who knows if anyone would know about this were it not for the involvement of the Maine residents...

Comment Donor potential (Score 3, Insightful) 62

People think of legacy as a binary input: is the applicant a child of parent (grandparent in some cases) who went there. It is far more graduated, and reflects the previous donations of the parent who went there. Consider three different alumni along a continuum:

1) An affluent alum who has already given generously, been active in alumni activities (fundraising, etc.), arranged internships for students, is employed in an industry (finance, law) where connections are extremely important, has been bringing their kid to reunions for years, and who may have been a legacy admit themselves many years ago.

2) An affluent alum who has not given generously yet but has some potential (admissions will have a least an estimate of amassed wealth) , is in engineering/software where connections are important but not as crucial, has some connection to the institution, comes to reunions, but does not have a track record already of generous giving.

3) An alum who is not affluent, works in education or public service, who has not had much to do with the institution since graduating, but has fond memories of the institution.

These would all three be considered "legacy" applicants but it is certain that the admissions office would regard #1 as a much better "fit" for the institution than #2, and #3 may as well be someone with no connection to the campus.

Comment Linux Router Project (Score 1) 100

There was an excellent Linux Router Project active around 2000, which ran on commodity PCs, booting from a floppy, running in RAM, no hard drive needed. For less than $50 (an old x86 box that someone would pay you to take off their hands, and maybe one or two ethernet cards) you could set up something that outperformed commercial routers that cost far more. I happily had a machine serving as my home router (named Wheezer after its somewhat noisy fan) for years but then it became common for wireless access points and routers to have that functionality.

Comment Re: This is shameful. (Score 1) 129

The average life expectancy for men is only a year or two less than for women. Many couples die within a year of each other, mainly because the second to die misses their spouse. The reason male expectancy is less is that men, especially young men, are more likely to die by accident, by homicide, or by war. Married men live about as long as married women.

Comment Re:Mathgen automatically generats mathematics pape (Score 1) 64

ps. The first Mathgen paper was accepted despite being written by "Professor Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople", which shows the level of scrutiny some journals give to submissions, see https://thatsmathematics.com/b...

Comment Mathgen automatically generats mathematics papers (Score 1) 64

Ten years ago, Nate Eldredge wrote Mathgen, a system for generating math research papers:

https://thatsmathematics.com/m...

These were pretty early efforts by current standards but some of the results have been accepted by journals, see https://thatsmathematics.com/b... showing that somehow not all mathematics research journals give the greatest scrutiny to submissions.

With the intervening advances, it seems likely that these will become more common.

Comment Because They Do (Score 1) 143

Anyone who thinks employees who "work from home" don't goof off is delusional. That said, any manager who can't monitor the employees work with goals/milestones shouldn't be in management. Give your employees a task, and deadline, if they're on or ahead of target, who gives a shit if they're goofing off. If not, then you can bitch about it, and hold them accountable.

FWIW, before retiring several years ago, I'd been on both sides of that equation since the early 90s.

Comment Multiple Choice (Score 1) 523

The first computer I used was in HS around '73. We had three teletypes with acoustic modems to allow us to connect to the local community college...did a year of BASIC on those.

In our electronics club (I was the club VP for a couple yrs), we built a Altair 8800 kit.

When I graduated HS, my parents got me a TI-SR56, 99 step programmable calculator. I still have it.

I worked on many computers for the next several years as a USAF technician, but didn't get my own until buying on e of the first 128k Macs. Had that for a while and upgraded to a 512ke, which I still have.

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