Slashdot Mirror

People from different cultures might be extra careful, or they might simply blunder forth. There was a great livejournal entry about a westerners experience in Japan:

http://supacat.livejournal.com/111072.html

but the user has since protected it.

Can't they cut the funding until after both rovers become useless? Or cut when one breaks down to be useless? Very bad news indeed. :(

I wonder if both rovers know about the bad news. They haven't updated their blogs for ages (Spirit's and Opportunity's). They must be hibernating. :)

Can't they cut the funding until after both rovers become useless? Or cut when one breaks down to be useless? Very bad news indeed. :(

I wonder if both rovers know about the bad news. They haven't updated their blogs for ages (Spirit's and Opportunity's). They must be hibernating. :)

White LEDs aren't bad at all for plant growing, actually. Paul Riddell from the Texas Triffid Ranch (a most highly recommended blog) built an iMac-shell terrarium using a full-spectrum compact fluorescent, and only didn't opt for white LEDs because of price. He considered halogens, but they run way too hot. (Despite the light being excellent for carnivorous plants - we revived some abandoned Venus Fly Traps with 12 hours/day of a single halogen.)

White LEDs aren't bad at all for plant growing, actually. Paul Riddell from the Texas Triffid Ranch (a most highly recommended blog) built an iMac-shell terrarium using a full-spectrum compact fluorescent, and only didn't opt for white LEDs because of price. He considered halogens, but they run way too hot. (Despite the light being excellent for carnivorous plants - we revived some abandoned Venus Fly Traps with 12 hours/day of a single halogen.)

I did respond to the post, too. I hope somebody reads it -- this company seriously needs a wakeup call,...

My response:

Thanks for clarifying that. Although, from reading the slashdot article on this subject today, it's clear to me that your PR department is apparently in overdrive doing "damage control" on this. While you are asserting that you have "no plans" to monitor people's living rooms, the fact remains that the technology and the capability are there to do so, and it only takes a few maligned individuals (like the same people that decided to throttle customers' bittorrent traffic into oblivion, or the guys that oppose net neutrality) to implement something scary like this. If corporations want consumers to trust them, you don't accomplish this trust through your PR department posting on people's blogs on the internet. You accomplish this trust by your actions as a corporation. Consumers don't want to be ripped off by corporations that charge over $100 for cable television service, and then raise their rates every three to four months without any noticeable upgrade in service. Nor do consumers want to be accused of being thieves of "intellectual property", and have trade groups like the RIAA & MPAA spy on us daily because they think we might be stealing music or movies or something. And we certainly don't want people that are already stealing our hard-earned money on outrageously priced cable TV service accusing us of being thieves ourselves!

If Comcast wants my business (no, I am not a current Comcast subscriber), they need to demonstrate to me with their actions that they have integrity, and offer services that I am interested in at reasonable rates. I would also recommend a major overhaul in your corporate management. Why not start with the CEO? Methinks you also have a few too many lawyers -- you could probably get rid of a couple,... But these are just suggestions.

Of course, PBS also sets the broadcast flag on their digital transmissions.

Come now, without following American Pi Day, there'd be no ready-made yearly excuse to make Pi Pie.

This should help:

http://camwyn.livejournal.com/328358.html

AINULINDALE:

ILUVATAR: Ahem.
AINUR: Wow! Existence!
ILUVATAR: *blows pitch pipe* LA!
AINUR: LA LA LA!
ILUVATAR: LA LA!
AINUR: LA LA!
MELKOR: This sucks. BUM BUM BA DUM!
AINUR: Um. . . la?
ILUVATAR: Ahem. LA!
MELKOR: Boop bop-a-doo-bop!
ILUVATAR: LA, dammit.
MELKOR: Bwam bardle ningle boom.
AINUR: . . .
ILUVATAR: Right, you're out of the band.
MELKOR: Fine, I was leaving anyway.
AINUR: . . .
ILUVATAR: What are you waiting for?
AINUR: Oh. Right. Newly created world. Sorry. Great jam session, big guy!
ILUVATAR: Yeesh.

The arms race continues: http://jeffr-tech.livejournal.com/17426.html#cutid1

Yes; Jeff Roberson, the author of FreeBSD's new ULE scheduler, wrote a bit about it on his blog a couple of months ago.

Truth in Advertising laws. Consider this billboard, for example. Much more accurate!

this may be slightly off-topic, but if you like scrabble you should check out your local club or tournament! there is a large community of us that blog about tournaments, as nerdy as it sounds. here is my report about this past weekend's Vancouver Scrabble Tournament: http://cesarsalad.livejournal.com/105021.html as far as the whole scrabulous debacle is concerned, the vast majority of us support scrabulous and many believe the game should not be 'owned' by anyone.

Most public libraries don't have the staff to stay open later. You may say it takes 5 people max but continually library budgets are decreasing while all other costs are increasing (electronic database subscriptions, material costs, electricity, paying for fulltime staff while also reducing the number of fulltime staff in favor of parttime in order not to pay benefits, property taxes/rent, more computers/better internet connection, etc). If you wanted to pay more taxes or donate to increase the library opening hours, go for it but otherwise it just can't happen. As for the person who commented on libarians "not working for 15 minutes before closing" keep in mind they're not out the door the instant the last patron is out, nor do they just stroll in 5 minutes before the library opens. Also those who are there on weekends are usually there the entire time from open to close, if you're already spending most of your day at work on the weekend, you don't want to spend the entire time working and those extra hours make a big difference.

And on the same note, you may think it just takes a couple of people to check out books, but they have to monitor the activities of the library, because some people like to ruin it for others and the library is responsible if anything happens, aka the flashers/gropers, pr0n viewers, the people trying to steal movies, those who treat a library as a daycare for their screaming running around children while the parent ignores them while using the internet terminals, etc, if you want more examples of them look at "the society for librarians who say mfer" http://community.livejournal.com/library_mofo

Found the female slashdotters picture: http://userpic.livejournal.com/2694168/64905

Or a good swift kick in the nuts for being a plagiarizing prick. Original is : http://theglen.livejournal.com/16735.html

Then again, maybe he is the originator and I owe him an apology.

For example, the kid who wrote Chocolate Rain has a potential revenue stream from the YouTube advert. You can bet he wouldn't have guessed that he would get almost 15 million views - so he would automatically have ceeded his potential copyright into the public domain. Someone else who saw the potential could have stepped in, linked it to all the right sites, and took all the advertising revenue for themselves.

This is an issue which will resolve itself just as soon as the internet becomes the main (legitimate) medium for entertainment distribution. At this point all the money currently spent on old media advertising follows the shows to YouTube or whereever they are being distributed. This creates, in effect, a democratic marketplace which rewards creativity; which will allow viral video authors to generate a revenue stream and (if they wish) go mainstream. Well, that's the dream, anyway.. and at that point all the big copyright trolls can go fuck themselves as their precious content they horde will have become almost worthless.

Charter did it for a few weeks in the Madison, Wisconsin area over a year ago. Then sometime around the end of last year they turned it back on. The deal breaker was spending over an hour dealing with tech support to try and fix it, and never reaching anyone who understood my problem. So I bailed on Charter. My new provider (TDS) has far more clueful tech support who understand how their network is configured and can work off-script.

I was wondering what was happening with these two guys. Neither spiritrover nor opportunitygrrl have posted to their LJs for a while now.

I was wondering what was happening with these two guys. Neither spiritrover nor opportunitygrrl have posted to their LJs for a while now.

I've written up a little summary of my thoughts on Thrift and D-BUS that may interest you because I address exactly this issue. :-)

I have written up an answer to this question in my journal here: Thoughts on Thrift and D-BUS

In short, there are several features of D-BUS that combined with it's limited area of application make it really useful and not nearly as evil as most RPC-based technologies. But Thrift is both missing these features and operates in a much more demanding environment, so it's not nearly so nice. OTOH, a significant portion of Thrift is devoted to a language and architecture agnostic data description language, and perhaps that feature alone can be leveraged along with generous helpings of other stuff to make it useful.

The latest official word on this that I can recall says: "The main idea behind the Optimus Maximus key design is that the part with the display is fixed, while the transparent cap is moving, pressing a Cherry switch underneath[..]"

Teh Intarnets, that's why. You're posting this on slashdot, so obviously you're not retarded.

I dont know if It's the "best" way to secure a web browser but I read a few days ago on a Red Hat employee's blog about how Fedora 9 is going to have the browser confined by SElinux, the way its done is kinda clever in my opinion cause it confines the wrapper. Making plugins only allowed to write to .mozilla or .adobe, etc. I dont think it will protect against mozilla (yet) flaws itself but plugins are certainly more than half the battle.
the URL is http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/15700.html#cutid1 if you're curious.

Most people just don't have the time/energy to do everything they're told so they ignore most advise.

I would interpret that to mean that you need to choose your advice carefully. The best thing my dental hygienist ever said to me was, 'Floss while you're watching TV.' It was a perfectly simple and eminently practical piece of advice, and made me a flosser for the first time in my life.

<obShamelessSelfPromotion>I've been writing a series of columns about the issue of online privacy in a local weekly newspaper. Living as I do in a developing nation, I need to put things as simply as possible. Here are the last three:

• Privacy and Paper Walls
• The Coconut Wireless
• Oranges and Lemons

Most people just don't have the time/energy to do everything they're told so they ignore most advise.

I would interpret that to mean that you need to choose your advice carefully. The best thing my dental hygienist ever said to me was, 'Floss while you're watching TV.' It was a perfectly simple and eminently practical piece of advice, and made me a flosser for the first time in my life.

<obShamelessSelfPromotion>I've been writing a series of columns about the issue of online privacy in a local weekly newspaper. Living as I do in a developing nation, I need to put things as simply as possible. Here are the last three:

• Privacy and Paper Walls
• The Coconut Wireless
• Oranges and Lemons

Most people just don't have the time/energy to do everything they're told so they ignore most advise.

I would interpret that to mean that you need to choose your advice carefully. The best thing my dental hygienist ever said to me was, 'Floss while you're watching TV.' It was a perfectly simple and eminently practical piece of advice, and made me a flosser for the first time in my life.

<obShamelessSelfPromotion>I've been writing a series of columns about the issue of online privacy in a local weekly newspaper. Living as I do in a developing nation, I need to put things as simply as possible. Here are the last three:

• Privacy and Paper Walls
• The Coconut Wireless
• Oranges and Lemons

50 years from now we will find out that Stephen Colbert negotiated an end to the strike but did not want to take any credit for it just like his dad did.

An account from one of the London attendees

The linked article is pretty lame. Anybody got a link to better coverage of Phoenix?

There's an LJ Account from a participant in London that's a great read; sounds like something I would have been proud to participate in!

I did not say MySQL is falling like a drunken guy, but for sure it's not stable for mission critical stuff. If you want to use it for mission-critical data, feel free to do so, but be prepared to loose your data (keep backing up). And you should read http://drbrain.livejournal.com/61705.html and check your settings.

I'm not against using MySQL for several purposes, but dont use Google as an example for stability. It isn't for the reasons already mentioned. And I cannot call a database stable that allows incorrect data, especially MySQLs handling of NULL values is still broken in 5.x, even in strict mode. Stability is more than 99.99999% uptime.

This happened a while back with the book "Lisp in Small Pieces". This lisp community was thrilled and then shocked.

http://xach.livejournal.com/133661.html
http://jonphilpott.blogspot.com/2007/08/lisp-on-amazonca.html
http://constantly.at/blog/2007/08/14/i-see-no-reason-to-do-further-business-with-you/

Are you sure you don't have an OpenID? If you have a LiveJournal, you have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo! account, you have an OpenID. If you have an AOL account, you have an OpenID.

Watch this space: http://airlied.livejournal.com/

A friend of mine was in charge of the latest release of Gamma World, for d20 Modern. One of the suppositions they made was that, before the Crash, technology had advanced to the point where even AI was so cheap that it was added to absolutely everything, for no other reason than that they could. Hammer? AI. Light switch? AI. No one even thought about it; it was just done. It was funny, but also kinda scary, because ours is a civilization where I can definitely see that happening.

This reminds me of that, and may be the first step.

Plus, consider that our military during times of peace consists of volunteers. They're citizens, and people just as you are. You really think most of the armed forces are going to unload their stuff on their own people, because they're ordered to do so?

I don't worry about a military dictatorship in this country. But a Police State is another thing.

Police officers have already demonstrated a willingness to kill civilians over trivial matters, and then rationalize it afterwards. The prosecutors that are supposed to oversee the police do not hold them accountable for their crimes.

Radley Balko has been doing a marvelous job of researching and reporting about this.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476

http://www.theagitator.com/category/paramilitary-police-raids/

http://www.theagitator.com/category/police-professionalism/

http://www.reason.com/staff/hitandrun/143.html (scroll down)

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,193652,00.html

See also

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4203345.html

http://instapundit.com/archives2/2006/11/post_685.php

http://justiceforsal.com/

http://joelrosenberg.livejournal.com/

I don't know if things have always been this bad and if a communication medium like the internet is making it easer to report and read about these atrocities, or if things are genuinely getting worse. Probably both.

But it's telling that those who believe we currently live under a fascist regime are also proponents of gun control ( http://www.reason.com/news/show/117833.html ). I'm sure it's not fascism they oppose, as long as their guy (or gal) is in power.

I rememeber a Dilbert episode where the PHB was given your $10 laptop:
http://pics.livejournal.com/allah_sulu/pic/0002f3h8/g13

They did in 2006 and found about 0.224 defects per TLOC.

MySQL uses Coverity and Klockwork on their certified versions on several different platforms. The certified versions are based on the major releases of community versions, and are typically just more conservative in that they only make changes for critical and security bugs.

There's speculation that the community edition tested was actually an old report without a retest even back then, as the certified version based on that community version had zero defects reported and the bug count on the community edition was the same per TLOC as the previous report before those bugs were fixed in both versions.

Following this announcement, all BioWare and Pandemic developers were ordered to repor t to headquarters for a 10 digit tattoo on their arms and re-EAification. Prepare to learn how to saturate the market with your titles differing by only one digit!

Christ, for a moment there I thought EA's Battlefield, Medal of Honor & Crysis games were going to have to step it up a notch to compete with these new ... oh wait, nevermind, competition's been purchased. Whew! That was close. Ok, everybody resume average game ideas, and above all nothing risky or extraordinary! Remember, your ideas have to be approved through like seventy levels of command so don't even start with any out of the ordinary stuff we aren't sure will be an instant mediocre game netting us an average profit.

WoW, I can't wait for Mass Effect 2 through 5 and Mass Effect 2010, 2011, 2012 & 2013. Just imagine the rosters!

Full list of 1,025 (!!!) posted here and here.

Full list of 1,025 (!!!) posted here and here.

You can talk between Jabber services, as long as both sides support server-to-server communication. LJ Chat appears to support it, based on their own documentation.

1997

FAT GUY IN A SPIDER-MAN T-SHIRT: Dude, I found this awesome bust of Kraven, and a painting of some naked chick with pterodactyl wings.

GUY IN LEATHER TRENCHCOAT: Sweet. I bought this replica of the sword the black guy from "Serenity" used, and a bunch of useless shit with Jay and Silent Bob on it. It's a good thing we only packed one day's worth of clothing, or we wouldn't have any room to pack all this stuff for the trip home. I'm gonna put this sword in the tub, unless you need it.

FAT GUY: Nah, I showered the day before we got here, so that ought to do.

....

2006

FAT GUY IN A CROSSGEN SHIRT: And so I got George Perez to draw me a sketch of Donna Troy strapped to a gynecology table. Weird thing is he actually gave me a discount. Boy, there sure are a lot of girls this year.

GUY IN LEATHER TRENCHCOAT: Yeah, I noticed that while I was buying my Slytherin iron-on patch for my backpack. You remembered to pack extra deodorant, right?

FAT GUY: Sure did. And I brought my own soap, too. Those little hotel bars just don't cut it, I've found.

...

2012

FAT GUY IN A JACK SPARROW T-SHIRT: Great news, I finally completed my collection of Batgirl. Steph + Cass = Wibbles.

GUY IN LEATHER JACKET: That's such a great series. The artwork is sexy, but it's not TOO sexy, which is great. Also, Batgirl is such an empowered heroine, which is really admirable. Speaking of admirable, I bought this sketch by Phil Jimenez of Nightwing assf***ing Arsenal.

FAT GUY: Their love is so canon, thanks to the Federal Slash Canon Act of 2010. Hey, by the way, do you envy the dead as much as I do?

GUY IN LEATHER JACKET: If not more, old friend. If not more.

THE END (or is it?)

I think the first principle that needs to be applied is: The simpler the system is, the easier it will be to verify. This guy just wrote a thesis on the usage of prerendering each screen to get the code size down, and avoid all the complexity and nonsense of a full blown GUI framework: Pvote. I'd like to see someone pick this up and try it in a real voting machine.

http://spiritrover.livejournal.com/

I wonder if she still reads her LJ? :)

Yes, this was discussed in an earlier Slashdot story, " RIAA Argues That MP3s From CDs Are Unauthorized", and in a bunch of other places:

* Boing Boing p2pnet reddit Heise Online (German) Truemors BlogRunner/Digital Rights Hugh Casey IDG (Polish) Geek News Central CE Pro Gizmodo TechDirt Read/Write Web Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection TDPRI WhatReallyHappened.com Slyck Root.cz (Czech) Craigslist Forums Hard OCP Wired.com Uneasy Silence Overclock.net Wake World SpaceBattles.com Hydrogen Audio BrickFilms.com Hockey Zombie iLounge Zune Scene AllmanBrothersBand.com Golem (German) PC Magazin (German) Tweakers (Dutch) Mackauf (German) Wake Space Kino-eye.com Digital Copyright Canada Northwest Progressive Institute Louisville Music News Frant