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Comment: Re: Established science CANNOT BE QUESTIONED! (Score 5, Insightful) 718

by JWW (#48633603) Attached to: Skeptics Would Like Media To Stop Calling Science Deniers 'Skeptics'

My stance in AGW is that you can bitch all you want about climate change, but if you're not willing to build a bunch of nuclear power plants and shut down a bunch of coal plants, then yes you ARE arguing global warming to advance a political agenda and nothing more.

If you don't back real solutions that can yield real results then I am going to call bullshit on your advocacy.

Comment: Re: Supremes never said corps are people ... (Score 1) 586

by JWW (#48625853) Attached to: Top Five Theaters Won't Show "The Interview" Sony Cancels Release

Shit the government better fits you "aggregation of money" description better than big companies do. Hell it even prints its own money. Your use of the term capital gives away your commie sympathies.

So companies aren't people, but ginormous government is your mommy. Got it.

Comment: Re:2% is nothing (Score 1) 121

by JWW (#48572193) Attached to: NASA Gets 2% Boost To Science Budget

The real fact is that budget deficits in upcoming years will only be solved by cutting military, welfare, medicare, and social security spending.

The fact is that basically all other spending is a rounding error compared to those big four items.

People are exactly right. Even completely zeroing out NASA funding would have, in practical measures, absolutely NO impact on the national debt.

The other ironic thing is that NASA, by far, is one of the few federal agencies that actually can lead to technology and science findings that truly benefit the American people.

But the idea that NASA is getting an increase, even though it is a slight one, is good news in my book.

Comment: Re:I have nothing better to do... (Score 1) 545

by JWW (#48538687) Attached to: Should IT Professionals Be Exempt From Overtime Regulations?

Exactly. This idea has infected the entire modern American business world.

I work as a contractor for the government, I am required to post my time which is used for billing.

On the hard face of it all, I am not "allowed" to work more than 40 hours, I certainly won't be paid for them, and my company can't ever invoice for them, without prior agreement from the customer.

However, whenever we interview people to come in and work here, certain folks on the interview committee pretty much require the applicant to genuflect to the common "whatever it takes to get the job done" belief that over 40 hours is no big deal and that they do that "all" the time. Even though that is technically completely against the rules for contracting.


by JWW (#48432587) Attached to: Coal Plants Get New Lease On Life With Natural Gas

You say that and you are correct, but when the best solution we have right now, nuclear, is mentioned the greenies freak the hell out and star screaming and running around in circles. Until we actually embrace what is possible to do and stop wishing on new technology to catch up, we'll be stuck here for a while.

Comment: Re: Stupid, trucks cause the problem (Score 2, Interesting) 554

by JWW (#48391619) Attached to: The Downside to Low Gas Prices

Yeah, but the trains are all to busy hauling oil because Obama won't let the pipeline be built. There's no extra capacity on trains right now.

Oh and for all the greenies worrying about the pipeline causing environmental damage, the pipeline is orders of magnitude safer for the environment than train cars. It's not a matter of if but when there will a catastrophic fire from hauling all that oil by rail.

Comment: Re:type of assignment (Score 1) 320

by JWW (#48370369) Attached to: Duke: No Mercy For CS 201 Cheaters Who Don't Turn Selves In By Wednesday

The thing that gets me most is.

Don't these students have any idea how diff works??

If you modify variable names, the diff will gladly show me, line by line, how amazingly similar two programs are. The first step to being caught is using the copy command on the computer and then modifying the program. Unless you really, really mash up the structure of the program diff is going to be enough to bust you on small changes (even to every line in the program).

You are better off, if you are going to copy a classmates program, to print it out and then manually type it back in.

This way you can move functions around, modify indents and formatting, change the order of statements where the order isn't terribly important. If you do that, diff won't bust you.

And the real secret is: I have 29 programs to grade for each assignment, I will only ever really catch cheaters if their programs have identical operations when run (or the same bugs, having identical bugs is a big flashing red light) and when I run them through diff it show me you took no effort AT ALL to obfuscate your copying. If you do this you deserve to be caught and punished because you didn't do the assignment, you just edited some text.

Note that, yes, I am saying that if you at least read the code with enough understanding to type it back in, you'll still get credit for the assignment. But if you are an extremely lazy cheat, you get caught.
