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Comment Nothing new (Score 1) 112

Over 20 years ago the company I worked for (now part of a much bigger company) did this, and a simple spreadsheet made it clear that I'd benefit for about 3 years, but because the base raises were slashed, I'd be behind after 6 years (As it is, the merger laid me off after 4).

And the company can basically avoid paying bonuses - the goalposts move, and are often based on corporate metrics that are opaque, and way out of your control. So you can with your butt off, exceed every target, and never see a bonus.

Comment Pasted text can still crap on your document (Score 3, Interesting) 80

There are still a lot of ways pasted text could crap all over your document, mainly having to do with styles. Note in the linked article this only affects text pasted in from other applications -- that sounds like if it comes from Word, you're still subject to the old rules.
If the text you're pasting in has the SAME styles as your document, you're golden: Heading 1 in the old doc should get formatted like heading 1 where you paste it. That's good.

But if you're using a custom template that uses "PDQ Heading 1" and "PDQ Body" and what you're pasting from uses "WWF Heading 1" and "WWF Body", you're going to have those styles contaminating your document. If the text you're copying has corrupt style names, e.g. ",,Chapter,Heading 1" -- which admittedly doesn't happen as much as it used to -- that pink slime ends up in your document and is very hard to clean out.

I've written "Paste Safely" code (a couple times, each redeveloped from scratch) that looks at a list of known styles and how to translate them, pastes into a "quarantine" doc, translates styles, then copies pastes into your doc.

Comment Re:What could go wrong using the same biometrics? (Score 3, Informative) 72

Also please remember that police can demand your fingerprint and other biometrics, but currently do not have the right to demand your passwords.
I'm not a criminal, but in case I ever want to be one, I'd prefer not to make it easy to have my information accessed by The Man.

Comment TiVo OTA FTW (Score 2) 144

An over-the-air PVR is the best solution for network TV. TiVo's commercial-skipping feature is pretty darn good. It appears to use crowdsourcing or at least post-processing to figure out where the commercials are, because it's more likely to auto-skip a day or two later versus watching immediately. Some shows (e.g. Late Show with Stephen Colbert) gum up the works by having the band play over commercials, but you can still hit the 30-sec skip button.

On streaming, it's hit-or-miss. Some services only put ads at the start, some at "regular" commercial breaks.
Sling, the cable-like service owned by Dish, permits fast-forward through commercials on some shows, and doesn't permit any fast forward at all on others.

Comment For the survival of our economy... (Score 2) 110

a bill helping solo owner-operators of long-haul trucks finance upgrades to driverless, support open (vs corporate) driverless truck stops, etc.

Without that, trucking will overwhelmingly be taken over by big corporations that will price out the solo owner-operator (because of access to capital), and lock them out of autonomous refueling, servicing and recharge (for when the electric trucks come).

Solo truckers are a big piece of the small businesses in this country, and will be pretty much wiped out by automation without this.

Comment All too often, you need to burn it to the ground (Score 5, Informative) 160

One of the first projects I worked on, 38 years ago, was a nightmarish piece of Fortran, that looked reasonable, but had truly awful performance due to the use of a BACKSPACE command -- worked effectively on tape drives, but for disks it would go back to the beginning of the file and read forward one fewer records. I rewrote it (in VAX Basic, which at times was indistinguishable from VAX Pascal, but that's another show), and it was dozens of times faster, just by avoiding the BACKSPACE.

And years later, I was asked to help the Word Processing support group with some WordPerfect macros, was horrified at the half-recorded/half-authored mess, and said, "give me that, and don't touch it ever again!"... which eventually led to my being an expert in several generations of Microsoft Word VBA.

But I know there's stuff I wrote that I'd never want anyone to fix, only rebuild (some '90s cookie-driven shopping cart Perl code comes to mind).
It's not just "tech debt", it's learning, it's changing of standard ways of doing things, it's just getting better.
That works for utilities, small projects, but is obviously a nightmare for million-line projects.

Comment Re:Critical thinking. (Score 1) 676

Imagine living in a country that claimed to promote the general welfare, and didn't verify the safety and efficacy of medications.
See thalidomide, and all the snake oils of the early 20th century, and the ethics of testing on prisoners.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fda.gov%2Fmedia%2F1104... is a good read

Comment Without teeth, you can't eat (Score 1) 158

Without a dental plan, one of the more common causes of poor health is malnutrition: if you can't chew, you're not going to eat well.
Many seniors end up not replacing lost or pulled teeth, leading to worse and worse eating habits.
This isn't Dentalcare for All (but it should be), but it's' a good step.

Note that a number of Medicare Replacement Plans do include dental care, so if a private insurance can afford it, likely so can Medicare. Preventative care could save a lot of costs in the long run.

Comment Approved means "off label" use is possible (Score 1) 407

Once a drug is approved by the FDA, physicians may prescribe it for uses not listed by the agency (just like h*dr*x*q**n*l*ne was prescribed for COVID).
I don't think docs are likely to use it for things other than COVID, but there could be shortages if
a) Healthy people (non-immune-compromised) demand boosters
b) Doctors administer it to people under age 12 (there's Emergency Use Authorization for 12-15, the new approval is only 16+)
(I'm in favor of (b) so my grandkids can get immunized)

And to those who say it's "untested" -- it's been tested all right, the testing just hasn't been through all the reviews. There are other vaccines that were tested, and NOT submitted to the agency for approval because they didn't work well enough.

Comment Phones are too big... until you fold them in half (Score 3, Interesting) 100

Phones have gotten bigger and bigger -- yes the phablets have mostly gone away, but the flagships are all 6", and when the Pixel 5 is considered a "small" phone there's something weird going on.

My wife is looking for a replacement phone that will fit in her pants pocket -- very few do, most will stick out. This is, to a large degree, the fault of fashion designers.
The smallest phone T-Mobile was showing under $500 in their store was the OnePlus Nord 200, and it's too big.

The Galaxy Flip would be ideal, if it weren't over $1000. If this gets to be the standard, lots of people will buy them, just for portability.

Comment So that explains carrier/handset cruft (Score 1) 32

My first Android - an OG Moto Droid from Verizon, had so much Verizon and Moto junk I was regularly uninstalling apps I actually used in order to try something else (I occasionally had to uninstall something just to update apps. 8GB was not enough)

My next was supposedly going to be less crufty: A Nexus phone should have been clean, but the Galaxy Nexus again had Verizon and Samsung cruft.

But now that there are decent, unlocked, cruftless phones (e.g. Pixel, anything Android One like Nokia), how is Android making money now? I'm betting it's from the skim on the ad content present in so, so many apps.

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