I have noticed that motorized scooters have been granted a status in some places of "absolutely magical". It is apparently legal to park them at no cost at bicycle racks, even if they prevent actual bicycles from parking there. They are, by association, legal to ride (or at least, push) on the sidewalk as well. You can carry whatever or whoever you want with you on it, seldom need a proper helmet, and if you have enough power you can go ahead and drive on the freeway as well. They generally need less insurance and registration to boot.
Why bother with a bicycle at that point? We don't really embrace fitness in this country anyways.
I would pay money for a parking app that can tell me which towing company tows cars from there. Where I live, car theft is 100% legal if you are a towing company - it has been demonstrated repeatedly on camera and in court - and some companies are far more frequent offenders than others. I am willing to pay more to park in lots that are not patrolled by certain crooked towing companies.
CSci degrees, at nearly every university in the US, are programming degrees. If you aspire to do tech support (or really much of anything other than programming) you are wasting your time with a CSci degree. Don't get me wrong, it is a very useful degree to have, but it is not generally a path towards doing computer support (nor should it be).
Now, that said, a lot of support techs clearly would benefit from more formal schooling - but it could be done in a less cost and time consuming manner than a 4 year degree.
Language rules are critical to communication. Eventually if too many linguistic rules and word meanings are discarded, communication becomes essentially impossible as statements don't have the same meaning to both parties in the discussion. There are some rules that don't make a lot of sense, but they are what they are and mostly need to be adhered to in order to ensure that communication can happen.
Does the NSA really ask the President's permission to exploit any given loopholes in their work? If the President had to authorize all their auctions than this would seem to be both rather damning for the president and a bit of a waste of his time.
They said he is dropping the conservative character he portrays on The Colbert Report, but they didn't say if he will stop being the egomaniac part. That could make for good television. He could, after all, still be a liberal egomaniac...
(and I know, the slashdot chorus will chime in and declare that to be redundant)
The last time I used gogoinflight I was using it to search for and download freely available academic papers for work. I know I should be appalled at them giving up the data, but I wouldn't use a service like that for anything that I would be worried about the feds looking in on.
Since Toyota took a bit of a hit after the acceleration problems they were having, I expected Sony might come along to help them out. I'm just waiting for this collaboration to eventually yeild a power drivers seat with a memorystick slot in it that remembers the shape of your ass.
I know it sucks to see something go from free to not free, but a while ago I upped by agreement with them from free service to their most basic level. For me its worth the $25 per year. Others may feel otherwise, and their may be cheaper solutions out there as well, but it works pretty well for me.
I also like that someone wrote an auto-update utility (ddclient in FreeBSD) that I can run on my webserver as a daemon to keep my records updated should my ISP change my address on me.
I would argue this may be one of the largest reasons why we don't have more ISPs starting up any more. Now that the majority of people who have access to any kind of high speed connection have cable modem options it is incredibly difficult for anyone else to compete. For most homes, if there are options the options are cable or DSL. In most markets if you want to go DSL you have to contact your phone company to get the line set up, and then select an ISP. If you want a cable modem instead you have just one company to call. People will, in most cases, opt for the easier route of just one company.
Unless a new company can deliver a product on their own - without requiring the consumer to contact the phone (or any other utility) company - at a competitive price point, they will have an enormously hard time competing with cable. There is a reason why cable has become the largest ISP in the country in a rather short amount of time.
Whoever posted this summary really should have added that. There are other places where one might consider adding beer that would be less effective. You don't have to get past the paywall to find that.
Facebook has no future. Their business plan is to continue to get people to come and give up their personal information for free, and then sell that information for profit to everyone else they can think of. The well is already starting to dry up on that. Unless you expect the world to end in the next 5 years, saying that facebook will take over the future is ridiculous.
... will not appreciate this. You'll be lucky if you don't end up getting rear ended while driving with this technology. Yeah, it saves gas (and hence money) but the person who is 3 inches off your bumper is not concerned about your MPG, they just want to get to wherever they are going. You'll be lucky if you only get the finger from them.
And don't tell me about "no fault insurance". That is a giant load of crap. "No fault" is just a way for insurance companies to make even more money off accidents, by raising rates for both the person who caused the accident and the victim.
The low volume runs definitely increase the production cost. And as the other reply pointed out, the minnowboard also has a superior Atom CPU to the Dell tablet that you mentioned. If you could find a tablet with the identical CPU it would be a much better comparison.
Seems pretty expensive considering you can get a Dell Venue 8 with 2GHz dual core/2GB ram/32GB flash/battery/screen/case for $179.
That really isn't the point. The Venue 8 is a tablet while the minnowboard is made for building embedded systems. Places where the minnowboard would be used would often have no use for the screen on the Venue.
While they have vaguely similar hardware, they are really after very different markets.
Ford stopped being an American car company about when Mulally decided to eviscerate every single American car platform from the lineup, replace them with Eurotrash
First of all, most of those decisions were made before Mulally arrived at Ford (consider the Focus especially but the Fiesta and Fusion arguably go under that umbrella just as much). Second, those cars are better for driving, handling, and fuel economy than the mid size and smaller models that Ford had before then.
I will concede, though, that they really should have kept the Crown Vic (and Grand Marquis / Town Car) platform going longer. They really haven't done a very good job of offering alternatives for fleet vehicles. An excellent example of this is that the next NYC taxi is a Nissan something-or-other after having been the Crown Vic for decades.
and then put the abomination of Eco-Boost on every engine (including the Mustang).
I'm interested in knowing what you dislike so much about the ecoboost engine. I'm rather fond of it myself, I know someone with an F150 with the ecoboost and it does quite well. Person in question has a very heavy foot, and hence gets typical truck MPG on it, but more importantly it accelerates far better than any other V6 out there, and better than many V8s as well. It also handles hauling in the bed and pulling 18 foot boats with no problem and it runs on regular gas.
If you want to bash the big three for lack of "American" character then I would say you need to go back to at least the early-mid 80s by which time all three of them had essentially converted all their cars to FWD and unibody.
About the only car company left that has mainly stayed American in the face of international pressure is Chrysler.
I will give them credit for having the largest number of non-truck RWD vehicles on the market, although all their RWD vehicles share the same platform so one could call that cheating on that metric.
Even worse though the Dodge Challenger needs to lose about 800 pounds to compete with the car it wants to be (Ford Mustang). That might be the only reason to get a Camaro; it only needs to lose about 400 pounds to make Mustang weight (although the Camaro has atrocious sight lines out the back and has less power than the Mustang).
Fiat has wisely kept them American without falling to environmentalist pressure to go Eurotrash.
I'm not sure we can say that Fiat has been at the reigns long enough to be sure of that. Let's check back in another couple years (on a different site by then as slashdot won't last that long).
Not interested in something that sounds and operates like an oversized lawn mower.
On that I agree with you 100%. Not that it matters as many Hondas (in particular) are not made for guys as tall as I am.
I have noticed that the official narrative here at slashdot continues to be "if the American car companies are doing something, it is 1000% TEH EVIL, but if the same thing is done instead by an Asian car company, it must be embraced as the greatest thing since air".
So go ahead, tell me how this is going to lead to the demise of civilization as we know it or perhaps even the end of mankind as a whole. Extra points if you can relate this to the Ford Pinto, the Diesel engines used by the big three in the late 70s / early 80s, or the low build quality of every Buick made in the 90s. If you can include all of those and tell us how Lee Iacoca is satan incarnate you win the internet.
In his office at Harvard. He had legitimate JSTOR access there.
Precisely. Why enter a networking closet when you can just do the download from a place where you are already allowed to go?
The difficulty is that he needed _bandwidth_, and ideally to avoid detection on the routine network maps managed by IT staff
Was there a reason why those papers needed to be downloaded in such rapid succession? If he was able to get - for example - 20GB of papers in a day, what difference would it make if it took him a week instead? I can't find a solid argument for why he couldn't have done it without using the networking closet.
As for detection, if he was downloading papers that the school had access to, then detection should not have mattered. It is not unusual for grad students (for example) to download many GB worth of papers when writing or preparing their thesis; similarly people writing review articles for publication might need to download very large numbers of papers as well.
and to avoid the typical monitoring and proxy configurations found on most competently administered public wi-fi access points.
Even if the wi-fi throttled down his bandwidth for excessive usage (though an academic wi-fi should be set up more intelligently, only doing such things when the traffic is purely recreational rather than academic), he still could have obtained the data - it would have taken longer.
If all he wanted was academic journal articles - and I'll agree that they should have been free rather than paywalled - there was no good reason to use the networking closet. Hell if he's as smart as we make him out to be with regards to networking he could have either distributed his downloads across a number of systems to evade detection, or spoofed (IP and/or MAC) addresses, or a number of other things to do the same thing without having to physically go where he was not supposed to be.
I never really understood why Swartz felt he needed to break into a closet at MIT in order to download those journal articles. I am all in favor of information being freely available, but I don't agree with his choice of method.
Every public university I have been to thus far (and some private ones as well) has had public wifi that grants anyone on campus the ability to access all the digital journals that their library subscribes to. Unless MIT is different, he could have just used the wifi (or perhaps even public wired access in public places - I've seen that in libraries as well) to download the articles and then he never would have faced breaking and entering.
That is an excellent point and it was one thing that I was wondering when writing that comment. I would not have really expected that 3D printed tires would be possible had they not specifically mentioned the idea in the summary.
That is an interesting idea for sure. I'm not sure if we could ever really get to 3D printing that could print something that durable; arguably a tire goes through even more physical wear than the guns that have been printed so far.
It does leave me to wonder though if we could print a tire straight on to the rim. Then the whole matter of mounting is no longer an issue - although balancing likely still would be. Could a service truck with a 3D printer print a new tire for a motorist in comparable time - and with better safety - than what it takes to put a space saver spare on from the trunk?
Slashdot Mirror
I have noticed that motorized scooters have been granted a status in some places of "absolutely magical". It is apparently legal to park them at no cost at bicycle racks, even if they prevent actual bicycles from parking there. They are, by association, legal to ride (or at least, push) on the sidewalk as well. You can carry whatever or whoever you want with you on it, seldom need a proper helmet, and if you have enough power you can go ahead and drive on the freeway as well. They generally need less insurance and registration to boot.
Why bother with a bicycle at that point? We don't really embrace fitness in this country anyways.
I would pay money for a parking app that can tell me which towing company tows cars from there. Where I live, car theft is 100% legal if you are a towing company - it has been demonstrated repeatedly on camera and in court - and some companies are far more frequent offenders than others. I am willing to pay more to park in lots that are not patrolled by certain crooked towing companies.
CSci degrees, at nearly every university in the US, are programming degrees. If you aspire to do tech support (or really much of anything other than programming) you are wasting your time with a CSci degree. Don't get me wrong, it is a very useful degree to have, but it is not generally a path towards doing computer support (nor should it be).
Now, that said, a lot of support techs clearly would benefit from more formal schooling - but it could be done in a less cost and time consuming manner than a 4 year degree.
99.9999% have never posted anything of any value.
Language rules are critical to communication. Eventually if too many linguistic rules and word meanings are discarded, communication becomes essentially impossible as statements don't have the same meaning to both parties in the discussion. There are some rules that don't make a lot of sense, but they are what they are and mostly need to be adhered to in order to ensure that communication can happen.
The US has been raising illiterates for decades (if not longer). In this metric we can truly shout
We're number one!
We're number one!
We're number one!
I doubt they could catch up with our functional illiteracy rates even if they tried.
Does the NSA really ask the President's permission to exploit any given loopholes in their work? If the President had to authorize all their auctions than this would seem to be both rather damning for the president and a bit of a waste of his time.
Don't waste time reading slashdot.
They said he is dropping the conservative character he portrays on The Colbert Report, but they didn't say if he will stop being the egomaniac part. That could make for good television. He could, after all, still be a liberal egomaniac...
(and I know, the slashdot chorus will chime in and declare that to be redundant)
The last time I used gogoinflight I was using it to search for and download freely available academic papers for work. I know I should be appalled at them giving up the data, but I wouldn't use a service like that for anything that I would be worried about the feds looking in on.
Since Toyota took a bit of a hit after the acceleration problems they were having, I expected Sony might come along to help them out. I'm just waiting for this collaboration to eventually yeild a power drivers seat with a memorystick slot in it that remembers the shape of your ass.
I know it sucks to see something go from free to not free, but a while ago I upped by agreement with them from free service to their most basic level. For me its worth the $25 per year. Others may feel otherwise, and their may be cheaper solutions out there as well, but it works pretty well for me.
I also like that someone wrote an auto-update utility (ddclient in FreeBSD) that I can run on my webserver as a daemon to keep my records updated should my ISP change my address on me.
I would argue this may be one of the largest reasons why we don't have more ISPs starting up any more. Now that the majority of people who have access to any kind of high speed connection have cable modem options it is incredibly difficult for anyone else to compete. For most homes, if there are options the options are cable or DSL. In most markets if you want to go DSL you have to contact your phone company to get the line set up, and then select an ISP. If you want a cable modem instead you have just one company to call. People will, in most cases, opt for the easier route of just one company.
Unless a new company can deliver a product on their own - without requiring the consumer to contact the phone (or any other utility) company - at a competitive price point, they will have an enormously hard time competing with cable. There is a reason why cable has become the largest ISP in the country in a rather short amount of time.
Whoever posted this summary really should have added that. There are other places where one might consider adding beer that would be less effective. You don't have to get past the paywall to find that.
This appears to be a duplicate
a company that's poised to take over the future.
Facebook has no future. Their business plan is to continue to get people to come and give up their personal information for free, and then sell that information for profit to everyone else they can think of. The well is already starting to dry up on that. Unless you expect the world to end in the next 5 years, saying that facebook will take over the future is ridiculous.
... will not appreciate this. You'll be lucky if you don't end up getting rear ended while driving with this technology. Yeah, it saves gas (and hence money) but the person who is 3 inches off your bumper is not concerned about your MPG, they just want to get to wherever they are going. You'll be lucky if you only get the finger from them.
And don't tell me about "no fault insurance". That is a giant load of crap. "No fault" is just a way for insurance companies to make even more money off accidents, by raising rates for both the person who caused the accident and the victim.
The low volume runs definitely increase the production cost. And as the other reply pointed out, the minnowboard also has a superior Atom CPU to the Dell tablet that you mentioned. If you could find a tablet with the identical CPU it would be a much better comparison.
Seems pretty expensive considering you can get a Dell Venue 8 with 2GHz dual core/2GB ram/32GB flash/battery/screen/case for $179.
That really isn't the point. The Venue 8 is a tablet while the minnowboard is made for building embedded systems. Places where the minnowboard would be used would often have no use for the screen on the Venue.
While they have vaguely similar hardware, they are really after very different markets.
Ford stopped being an American car company about when Mulally decided to eviscerate every single American car platform from the lineup, replace them with Eurotrash
First of all, most of those decisions were made before Mulally arrived at Ford (consider the Focus especially but the Fiesta and Fusion arguably go under that umbrella just as much). Second, those cars are better for driving, handling, and fuel economy than the mid size and smaller models that Ford had before then.
I will concede, though, that they really should have kept the Crown Vic (and Grand Marquis / Town Car) platform going longer. They really haven't done a very good job of offering alternatives for fleet vehicles. An excellent example of this is that the next NYC taxi is a Nissan something-or-other after having been the Crown Vic for decades.
and then put the abomination of Eco-Boost on every engine (including the Mustang).
I'm interested in knowing what you dislike so much about the ecoboost engine. I'm rather fond of it myself, I know someone with an F150 with the ecoboost and it does quite well. Person in question has a very heavy foot, and hence gets typical truck MPG on it, but more importantly it accelerates far better than any other V6 out there, and better than many V8s as well. It also handles hauling in the bed and pulling 18 foot boats with no problem and it runs on regular gas.
If you want to bash the big three for lack of "American" character then I would say you need to go back to at least the early-mid 80s by which time all three of them had essentially converted all their cars to FWD and unibody.
About the only car company left that has mainly stayed American in the face of international pressure is Chrysler.
I will give them credit for having the largest number of non-truck RWD vehicles on the market, although all their RWD vehicles share the same platform so one could call that cheating on that metric.
Even worse though the Dodge Challenger needs to lose about 800 pounds to compete with the car it wants to be (Ford Mustang). That might be the only reason to get a Camaro; it only needs to lose about 400 pounds to make Mustang weight (although the Camaro has atrocious sight lines out the back and has less power than the Mustang).
Fiat has wisely kept them American without falling to environmentalist pressure to go Eurotrash.
I'm not sure we can say that Fiat has been at the reigns long enough to be sure of that. Let's check back in another couple years (on a different site by then as slashdot won't last that long).
Not interested in something that sounds and operates like an oversized lawn mower.
On that I agree with you 100%. Not that it matters as many Hondas (in particular) are not made for guys as tall as I am.
I have noticed that the official narrative here at slashdot continues to be "if the American car companies are doing something, it is 1000% TEH EVIL, but if the same thing is done instead by an Asian car company, it must be embraced as the greatest thing since air".
So go ahead, tell me how this is going to lead to the demise of civilization as we know it or perhaps even the end of mankind as a whole. Extra points if you can relate this to the Ford Pinto, the Diesel engines used by the big three in the late 70s / early 80s, or the low build quality of every Buick made in the 90s. If you can include all of those and tell us how Lee Iacoca is satan incarnate you win the internet.
In his office at Harvard. He had legitimate JSTOR access there.
Precisely. Why enter a networking closet when you can just do the download from a place where you are already allowed to go?
The difficulty is that he needed _bandwidth_, and ideally to avoid detection on the routine network maps managed by IT staff
Was there a reason why those papers needed to be downloaded in such rapid succession? If he was able to get - for example - 20GB of papers in a day, what difference would it make if it took him a week instead? I can't find a solid argument for why he couldn't have done it without using the networking closet.
As for detection, if he was downloading papers that the school had access to, then detection should not have mattered. It is not unusual for grad students (for example) to download many GB worth of papers when writing or preparing their thesis; similarly people writing review articles for publication might need to download very large numbers of papers as well.
and to avoid the typical monitoring and proxy configurations found on most competently administered public wi-fi access points.
Even if the wi-fi throttled down his bandwidth for excessive usage (though an academic wi-fi should be set up more intelligently, only doing such things when the traffic is purely recreational rather than academic), he still could have obtained the data - it would have taken longer.
If all he wanted was academic journal articles - and I'll agree that they should have been free rather than paywalled - there was no good reason to use the networking closet. Hell if he's as smart as we make him out to be with regards to networking he could have either distributed his downloads across a number of systems to evade detection, or spoofed (IP and/or MAC) addresses, or a number of other things to do the same thing without having to physically go where he was not supposed to be.
I never really understood why Swartz felt he needed to break into a closet at MIT in order to download those journal articles. I am all in favor of information being freely available, but I don't agree with his choice of method.
Every public university I have been to thus far (and some private ones as well) has had public wifi that grants anyone on campus the ability to access all the digital journals that their library subscribes to. Unless MIT is different, he could have just used the wifi (or perhaps even public wired access in public places - I've seen that in libraries as well) to download the articles and then he never would have faced breaking and entering.
That is an excellent point and it was one thing that I was wondering when writing that comment. I would not have really expected that 3D printed tires would be possible had they not specifically mentioned the idea in the summary.
That is an interesting idea for sure. I'm not sure if we could ever really get to 3D printing that could print something that durable; arguably a tire goes through even more physical wear than the guns that have been printed so far.
It does leave me to wonder though if we could print a tire straight on to the rim. Then the whole matter of mounting is no longer an issue - although balancing likely still would be. Could a service truck with a 3D printer print a new tire for a motorist in comparable time - and with better safety - than what it takes to put a space saver spare on from the trunk?