VengefulCynic

14 ms·

91.
by VengefulCynic 16y ago
According to the WSJ, a big part of the problem is navigating the voluminous paperwork. Adding additional clerks and lawyers to go through the whole file would probably expedite things quite a bit.
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
Until you've been burned by technology lock-in or know someone who has, it's hard to really wrap your head around it. It's a lot like all of those people who you see interviewed after major disasters who say, "We didn't have insurance... we
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
You can't loudly proclaim that education is a complicated problem that defies simple solutions while at the same time oversimplifying the entirety of the nation's problems in false dichotomies, saying things like: The film has other flaws.
94.
by VengefulCynic 16y ago
Let's assume for a second that the author is correct and that correctly-executed HFT systems are generally a non-issue. Even with that core assumption, there is still the significant question as to what happens HFT systems misbehave (eithe
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
In the end, to my mind, the thing that pisses people off the most is the consistency with which tuition increases outpace inflation. ( http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml ) After that, all issues like out-of-control costs
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
As soon as there's a law about how to calculate square footage there will either be an agency to do the calculate the square footage, an agency to enforce it, or both. Oh, and some sort of tax/fee levied against commercial land-lords and th
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
Unfortunately, there's no incentive for the landlords to do this. That just leaves legislation or the sudden emergence of ethical competition. Oh, and don't forget that most of the larger commercial land lords have lobbying arms (at a local
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
It seems to me that the industries that trend to the most unethical (airlines, commercial real estate, cell phone carriers) also have the highest barriers to entry. Unfortunately, this only leaves cumbersome instruments like government regu
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
If you do a bit of digging around on the City of Philadelphia website, you will find the following text under the Description of the Business Privilege Tax section: "Every individual, partnership, association and corporation engaged in a bu
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
Sadly, it's the same people whining about the bank bailout who can't see why voting with their savings and loan dollars will do the most good. Sadly, most people are all talk.
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
The worst case is when the company is trying to push a relationship on you that you don't want. There are certain types of stores where the salespeople are commission driven (in the US, at least) and it is IMPOSSIBLE to get the salesperson
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
If Condé Nast thinks that they're going to be getting 50% of their revenue from consumer subscriptions, then they'd better start increasing the quality of some of their offerings. Wired comes to mind in particular with its terrible content
103.
by VengefulCynic 16y ago
An intelligent attempt to encourage amateurs to avoid speculating about things they know nothing about. As with anything vaguely complex or esoteric, the media talking heads are pretending that they can break down a complicated issue (like
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
Mandarin is spoken by roughly 1 billion people. Most Americans only speak English. Learning a second language, especially one spoken by that many people can only be a good thing. That said, while I certainly feel that any efforts to get Am
105.
by VengefulCynic 16y ago
Checking over at https://careers.microsoft.com/ there's no sudden flurry of hardware or low-level software engineering job postings to go with this announcement. Of course, it's not like M$ has a shortage of those types between their Xbo
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
While I find it encouraging that the Senator's letter seems to intelligently capture the crux of the controversy, I have to wonder if there isn't something slightly more pressing that Senator Schumer should be looking into.
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US Senator Charles Schumer's Open Letter to Steve Jobs(schumer.senate.gov)
2 points by VengefulCynic 16y ago|4 comments
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and there's not a much more extraordinary claim than that of government oversight with minimal impact. The editorial proposes to involve some government oversight commission or editorial b
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
Dear ASCAP, About that word "free" that you keep bandying about... I don't think it means what you think it means.
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
Reminds me of the "Blessing for the Czar" from Fiddler on the Roof - "May the Lord bless and keep the executives... far away from us!"
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
I agree. I would be interested to see some sort of analysis of quantity of fraud per thousand transactions on a country by country basis. I think it would be much more useful than the percentage of global fraud that each country is responsi
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
WSJ subscription required.
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
Duplicates http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490924
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
If we take the intended audience of this post and apply the assumption that the only reason they're staying in school is because of a checkbox that needs to be filled for future job prospects, I'd say they'd be better off taking the GED exa
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
In general, I think the problem here is that the post looks at one out of dozens of inputs into the educational process and concluding that an improvement in that one input is noteworthy and significant to the output. What's more disturbing
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
The only thing better than this would be if Woot took the AP to Small Claims Court over the bill.
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
The post takes for granted a huge piece of good design philosophy in eating your own dog food. Obviously it's a good sign that the author felt the need to point out that the programmer is (almost) never the typical user, but first being a u
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
Regardless of the return on the investment in Post-Modernist Humanities Professors, I still object to the fact that my tax dollars are funding them. I mean, if I can invest in good humanities profs that have roughly the same ROI, at least m
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
At publicly-funded universities in the US, tuition dollars are supplemented by tax dollars (plus endowments, grants, etc) to pay the total cost of education. This includes professor salaries. This is, of course in addition to Federal Studen
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by VengefulCynic 16y ago
I find interesting to note that Shostak doesn't take the time to debate Hawking on the potential dangers of extra-terrestrials but rather claims that deliberately attempting contact poses no additional risks. I will certainly claim no exper

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