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Comment: Re: It's The American Drean (Score 1) 1313

by benzaholic (#42970639) Attached to: US CEO Says French Workers Have Three-Hour Work Day

Were the Social Studies books chosen for replacement first due to their condition, or was it due to politically-driven changes to standardized content, which tends to affect Social Studies/History/Some Sciences more than Math. There's much less idealogical stupid bickering about how to teach Algebra.

Comment: Re:When does AV become more risky than the virus? (Score 1) 92

by benzaholic (#42798073) Attached to: Kaspersky Update Breaks Internet Access For Windows XP Users

To some extent, that kind of verification is market driven.


Comment: Poor, unsuspecting lab rats, er, students (Score 1) 56

by benzaholic (#42764039) Attached to: Virtual Superpowers Translate To Real Life Desire To Help

So the real measuring point of the experiment wasn't until after all the VR stuff. The researcher would "accidentally" drop some pens. Interestingly structured.

Gotta stay hyperaware of everybody and everything these days. If, as I suspect without reading the article, the test subjects were a bunch of college students, then they were probably not yet sufficiently cynical to watch out for that kind of treatment.

Comment: Re:Cheap = shit (Score 1) 658

by benzaholic (#41660605) Attached to: $3,000 Tata Nano Car Coming To US

It's admirable of you to shill for Tata so aggressively, but this class of vehicle can only be successful where there is no vibrant used car market.
The changes necessary to make this vehicle acceptable to a sufficient number of buyers in the USA will ruin it's value position.

Even after Cash for Clunkers, we have an awful lot of used cars available here, many of which, believe it or not, have less than 100,000 miles on them.
Given that nearly all cars sold in the US in the last decade or so easily outlast 100,000 miles, there is just not enough space in our market for this.
People may gawk at it, but it will probably cost nearly $6,000 for a model without the amenities we have come to expect, and performance will be at a level that most American buyers (ignorantly) consider to be unsafe.

Comment: Risk Management, Baby (Score 1) 288

by benzaholic (#41437473) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Should Developers Install Their Software Themselves?
Deployability is part of maintainability, and this should have been at least touched upon in the Requirements. Since this is "enterprise grade" stuff, there is almost no legitimate excuse for not doing so. Plan it into the project, including finding appropriate development resources.

We'll assume for many reasons that this is not a Windows-based package, but it can still be bundled into versioned installable packages appropriate for the operating system, or at the very least use WAR packages to deploy web app updates.

If the standard production deployment technique is too complex, it becomes its own significant risk area in the product. It therefore requires that QA test the Dev-provided deployment, upgrade, and rollback procedures in test or staging environments.

Or you can just Cowboy it and take your chances.

Comment: Re:Wind Electricity (Score 1) 413

by benzaholic (#40832165) Attached to: Half of India Without Electricity As Power Grid Crisis Deepens
Not sure if you meant hell neighbor or hello neighbor. If the latter, on my block in a country town not too far outside of Austin, Texas, it's, "Howdy, Neighbor!" and we really do say it. Saves me from having to recall names when I'm too drunk or learn names for somebody that may or may not stay long.

Comment: Re:Now see, it's hyperbole like this (Score 0) 462

by benzaholic (#40769541) Attached to: Is There Still a Ray of Hope On Climate Change?

Once I saw that unqualified phrase about the 13 warmest years for the entire planet, I just could not bring myself to read any more of the post.

Either it is true but unsupportable by documentation, or it is false as stated. Either way, it grossly diminishes the implied accuracy of any additional claims.

Props for getting first post with an intelligent bitchslap of bullshit.

Comment: Re:best antivirus / firewall for Windows? Linux? (Score 0) 181

by benzaholic (#40416315) Attached to: Older Means Wiser To Computer Security
First, prepare to be flamed as a likely ideal representation of users discussed in the article.

Second, at least you're asking, so that's progress.

Third, ditch that bloatware McAfee, but don't think that Norton/Symantec will be any slimmer.

Fourth, there is no "best" choice. Each is a compromise between speed, size, price, frequency of updates, effectiveness at detecting a variety of categories of bad things, minimizing false positives (where it mistakenly tells you that a safe file is unsafe), supported operating systems, and on and on and on. There are likely a few that will suit your needs well.

When researching, which we know you intend to do thoroughly, be sure to note the date of any reviews or comparisons. There's lots of old info still online, and this industry can change very rapidly.

That said, I currently like and use Avast on Windows.

Comment: Re:They can't even "count" groundwater (Score 0) 244

by benzaholic (#40312281) Attached to: Why Groundwater Use May Not Explain Half of Sea-Level Rise
"These same people"? Do you mean all "scientists" look the same to you? Talk about hubris.... With that attitude, I guess I can see how people who think and who create and constantly refine mathematical models of real world effects in order to try to better predict them must all seem pretty alien to you. So sad.

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