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CommentRe: Expel them... (Score 1)241

There was a news special several years ago, I think on ABC, about cheating in college and many students interviewed said all they cared about was getting good grades, so they could get a good job and make a lot of money. Actually learning things wasn't a big concern. Not sure how they thought that would work out in the long run, but they didn't seem to care. And in most cases, they weren't paying for college anyway, their parents were...

I have some skin in this game. I have a higher degree in Engineering that I obtained honestly by knowing things. Out of the pure knowledge game now, and knowing things has given me an absolutely eye-watering earning capacity.

But I taught undergrads for a few years (back before this "AI" wank was even a twitch in its daddy's hand).

Invariably, the students who cheated regularly were the ones from rich parents that came out of expensive private high schools. They had been indoctrinated to the mantra that success comes from who you know, not what you know.

It's not surprising in the least that the same incompetent turds are finding new ways to cheat and justify cheating their way through life.

CommentRe: Had this happen to me (Score 1)7

In the process of that now. It is an eye-opener to how many "tech" companies are full of completely clueless morons.

Do you know that about 30% of sites refuse to let you change your email address at all. Of them, about half make it virtually impossible to cancel the account.

In those ranks includes companies who should know better - including two big Linux vendors.

CommentRe: GitHub and other tools are flash without subst (Score 2)82

Let's see you do a meaningful diff in the command line or resolve conflicts. Not toy ones but actual diffs and merge conflicts.

Um, I have been able to do that almost daily for a large part of my career. It was possible before there were GUI tools for it. It's still possible over slow SSH links with no GUI available.

Any true professional will be able to do it with minimum fuss. It's an annoyance, but how exactly is it difficult?

It's only the ranks of amateur who seem unable to work a computer without Fisher Price colors and flashy interfaces. They're the same amateurs who whine "legacy" and blame the tools every time they fail because there's no way it's their limited ability causing the problems.

Sure, GitHub has its flaws. But it's difficult to call it "legacy" software. It's still currently active and receiving both maintenance and new features regularly.

CommentRe: Is it worthwhile? (Score 1)120

That's horse shit.

You can ask windows for the recovery key and use that to mount the disk in any other computer. Source: I mount the Windows BL partition on the Linux dual boot just fine without using the TPM to unseal it.

The default that MS forces on people (most people don't know better) is to back up the recovery key to their MS account, so you can usually ask there too

Just because you refuse to understand the technology doesn't mean it's bad.

CommentRe: Privacy concerns ? (Score 1)77

Voting rights for prisoners is the dumbest fucking thing imaginable.

Really? Care to provide a cogent explanation as to why?

Voting rights should be inalienable - even when talking about crimes like election fraud. Consider the following:

Systematically removing the voting rights from felons gives the government an incredibly powerful tool to maintain power - invent ways to turn dissenters into felons without voting rights.

CommentRe: Good intentions just can't keep up (Score 1)35

But vesting stock options are already a scam to keep you there and gamble about whether they will have to pay you. They also minimise things like payroll tax they the company pays.

They're handed out like candy instead of pay rises and performance bonuses. Half the time you wear the tax liability on today's price at grant time (and consequently your real take home pay is lower as a result). The fake income is counted toward lots of things like tax concessions, government benefits, etc, which means your out of pocket expenses can rise based on income you never earned this year.

If they dont increase in value you never make up that loss. If they increase in value then you wear capital gains tax on top of the income+benefits tax you already paid. At the end of the day, your take home pay for a bundle of stock options could easily be half or less what the equivalent cash amount would have netted you.

And adding insult to injury, if you quit or are laid off you lose the un-vested options but can't claim back the tax you got fucked out of.

Tl;dr: vesting stock options are a rort which only benefits the company. The employee doesn't usually see any real benefit from them unless the company is continuously wildly successful.

CommentRe: Does anyone believe them? (Score 1)41

There's a hugely important elephant in the room.

As far as the spooks are concerned, what you say is not nearly as interesting as who you regularly say it to.

I agree we should be securely encrypting even the most banal conversations so that encrypted communication doesn't paint a target on your back, but Encryption doesn't hide the who part.

They'll still be able to mine and build up their giant connectivity diagrams so they can decide who to target closer. Once that eye of Sauron is on you, good luck evading it.

CommentRe: Still bitter about the NT takeover (Score 1)284

"This stuff has no commercial value, they're not losing any sales, and it will barely affect their bottom line.

Really? We make a boatload of money supporting customers who use these "no commercial value" systems. A good chunk of my day job has become keeping our junk runniing on each new release of these "no commercial value" systems that are allegedly not being maintained or sold any longer.

CommentRe: Obvious question (Score 2)105

rying to explain what to do to a programmer who is not a subject matter expert is like trying to explain ray tracing to a chimpanzee.

In fairness, trying to explain programming to most of the chimpanzees who call themselves "programmers" is even more difficult than explaining Astro Navigation to Arnold Rimmer.

At least Rimmer could spell "fish"!

CommentRe: Lossless is still a reasonable goal. (Score 0)208

Bollocks. The delta is interestong in and of itself.

But it's already been done. It's how we generally measure the accuracy of the codec in the first place.

"Joe 'sister-fucker' dirt couldn't tell the difference" is a completely meaningless measurement, and that seems to be entire premise of the original article; "lossy isn't bad cos you can't tell anyway".

CommentRe: He is right (Score 4, Informative)208

No. Higher sample rates and bit depths exist to support less steep analog filtering, reduce aliasing, allow fixing up quantisation noise, and provide some wiggle room for the mastering engineer to work in.

It's trivially easy to build a steep filter in digital domain. It's frightfully expensive to build one in analog domain they doesn't totally fuck up the signal on its way through

There is absolutely no reason that 7.1 sound needs 192kHz sample rate on playback. But you were probably confusing bit rate for sample rate.

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