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  1. Re:Things Do Not Want on New Microhotels Fight Airbnb With 65 Square Foot Rooms (nytimes.com) · · Score: 2

    I understand that college kids and the young may not care about this sort of thing, it's go cheap or don't go at all. But this is an absolutely terrible idea

    I am an adult, and I go CAMPING... For FUN! Do you have any idea how tiny a tent is? The biggest, fanciest ones give you less room than this, and the ones you can actually pack-in are smaller than the your bed...

    Personally, my #1 concern is NOISE. I prefer motels to hotels because of the slightly reduced NOISE (i.e. insulated and weather-stripped exterior door). If these tiny rooms are super-noise proofed, I'm all-over them. If they're NOT, then god help you trying to sleep in a hotel room with four times as many neighbors in the same space...

    that if it catches on, will make business travel even more shitty than it already it for people in most typical bottom dollar employers.

    If you work for a shitty company, they will put you up in shitty accommodations. End of story. I've seen plenty of times where the cheapest motels were adjacent to trailer parks, and overflowing with migrant laborers and homeless loitering in the parking lot all hours of the night. This could easily be a huge improvement over situations like that.

    Low-cost micro hotels could make things worse, but they might make things better, too... When employees aren't happy with the cheapest options available, employers usually start doing a flat-rate payout, which might be a bit more than you paid for your cheap lodgings, or it might be cash to use towards more expensive accommodations that you prefer.

    Already some of these places have a $25/day restriction on food (McDonalds basically) .

    You sound like quite a twit. Do you go to restaurants 3X a day while you're at home? It's absurd to expect that kind of luxury treatment, at someone else's expense, while you're traveling. Most fast-food restaurant meals will come in under that limit, and something simple like packing a damn sandwich will make it easy to come in well-below it, making room for at least one stop at a nicer eatery.

    I'm betting you'd feel entirely different about travel allowances if you saw how they affected your salary. I'd sure rather put a lid on those abusers of travel expensing, and get better pay in return.

    It's better not to compete with Airbnb, and let the kids do as kids do and focus on the captive audience that is already paying premium because it can afford it

    Micro hotels and capsule hotels are a great idea! Those who want to go cheaply now have an option to do so. And in return, there is much less demand for the higher priced accommodations, which should lower those prices, too. Of course expensive hotels would prefer to be the only option around, driving up travel prices and giving them captive customer cash-flow, but too bad for them. They can adapt (lower prices) or die.

  2. Re:In practice on Ask Slashdot: Is It Time To Shrink the Ethernet Connector? · · Score: 1

    I'll just wire it to the rest of the Tempest shield in the apartment walls, ceiling, floor, and door, then?

    Your walls, ceiling, floor and door probably already attenuate 5GHz signals pretty well to begin with. Wood and sheetrock in particular absorb moisture from the air and become at least slightly electrically conductive. Your windows are always the RF weak-point (which is why you get best TV/radio reception in front of a window), but can be easily fixed by putting metallic screens on them.

    It's true that won't completely block all signals, but it should help a lot, and result in you finding at least a few 5GHz channels being free of nearly all interference.

  3. Re: Don't bother on Ask Slashdot: Is It Time To Shrink the Ethernet Connector? · · Score: 1

    to wire every room in a house with wall jacks and such is expensive, especially after labor is accounted for.

    It depends entirely on the house. If you've got an unfinished basement, and already have telephone and/or TV wall jacks in the rooms you want to network, you could do the whole thing in a couple hours.

    Without a basement it depends on how miserable of a crawl space you have, how spread-out the rooms are, and how much other wiring is already in-place for re-use.

    It depends on how professional you want it to be, also... Any idiot can run some CAT-5 cables under their carpet in very short-order, and crimp ends on them. I've seen some people just staple CAT-5 high on their walls, too... Paint it to match, and it actually doesn't look too bad. It's those who just leave it loose and hanging (or laying on the floor) that I find embarrassing. You could even copy cable/satellite installers, who run the coax on the outside of their homes, and just drill directly through the walls into each room... It would work as well for CAT-5 as it does for coax, and (for some reason) people don't seem to mind it being done with coax.

  4. Re:In practice on Ask Slashdot: Is It Time To Shrink the Ethernet Connector? · · Score: 2

    You do a lot of gaming on your raspberry pi?

    Lots of people do video streaming to their RPi... Even in better conditions, highdef video streams over WiFi are subject to a lot of stuttering. Works fine for me ONLY if I'm less than 30ft (~10m) from my AP.

  5. Re:In practice on Ask Slashdot: Is It Time To Shrink the Ethernet Connector? · · Score: 1

    There is a tremendous amount of bandwidth connection, and there's no reasonable way to eliminate it.

    Putting aluminum screen material over your windows seems like a reasonably easy thing to do...

  6. Their own data shows a big problem... on Self-Driving Cars Should Be Legal Because They Pass Safety Tests, Argues Google (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    I can't imagine the level of stupidity required for Google to make such a request. Google's own reports (which they resist being required to provide) show quite clearly that human drivers are frequently a very necessary supplement to their autonomous systems:

    "Between September 2014 and November 2015, Google said there were 272 occasions when a technology failure forced the test driver to re-take control."
    https://ia.acs.org.au/news/goo...

    And this request comes shortly after a Google car was found fully-responsible for crashing into a bus:

    http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

    And that's not a one-off... Google's small fleet of self-driving cars are getting in numerous accidents. 8% is the last figure I saw. Google spins it as the fault of everyone else except its own vehicles, but that claim is specious at best:

    http://gizmodo.com/self-drivin...

    There's ample evidence that self-driving cars do several things which (while they MIGHT be safe if all cars were autonomous) cause clashes with existing human drivers on the road:

    http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

    Even the much-simpler task, of drive-by-wire in existing automobiles has proven too unreliable to trust human lives with. Toyota screwed this up badly, and it has cost them dearly:

    http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

  7. Re:Meanwhile my phone crashes about once a month.. on Self-Driving Cars Should Be Legal Because They Pass Safety Tests, Argues Google (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    They are required to obey the computer because in the past, pilots ignoring this input have cause planes to crash into each other in mid-air because the pilot thought he knew better. The TCAS commands even override Air Traffic Control commands. How's that for trusting your life to a computer?

    You've got it all twisted... TCAS is NOT perfect, it's just that both pilots doing a sub-optimal avoidance maneuver is better than one pilot disagreeing with TCAS, while the other obeys... If one pilot obeys, while the other chooses a better maneuver, it's TCAS that CAUSED the crash. Without TCAS, those collisions would likely not have happened. Of course, blaming the pilot for every crash caused by faulty equipment, where only an omnipotent pilot could potentially have avoided it, has been a long tradition in the airline industry!

    A superior system to TCAS would be one that reads the control inputs of each pilot, and uses that as the basis of how to instruct the other pilot.

  8. people have to have no life at all and/or a huge inferiority complex to even care about it.

    Uhh... You're talking about Trekkies, right?

  9. Re: That's some awful stuff on SeaWorld To End Orca Breeding Program (latimes.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    The primary benefit of eating meat is the nutritional density. A but of beef provides more energy than all the kale you can eat.

    A 4 oz Beef Ribeye Steak has 280 calories.
    4 oz (dry) of White Rice has 448 calories.

    How many vegans do you know with physically or mentally demanding jobs?

    Olympic athletes all "carb-load", they do NOT meat-load. And dare I mention Sumo wrestlers? The vast majority of their calories come from rice, with a little bit of meat really only for flavor.

    With a diet of rice, potatoes, beans, pasta, etc., it's quite easy to be physically fit without eating any meat, and no high-tech dietary studies or supplements are required.

    In fact, there's a huge number of major athletes who are strict vegans:

    Mirco Bergamasco Rugby player Italy
    Brendan Brazier Ironman triathlete Canada
    Luke Cummo MMA Fighter United States
    Mac Danzig MMA Fighter United States
    Steph Davis Rock climber United States
    Amy Dumas Wrestler United States
    Jon Fitch MMA Fighter United States
    David Haye Boxer United Kingdom
    Eric Johnson NFL football player United States
    Scott Jurek ultramarathoner United States
    Jim Morris Bodybuilder United States
    Pat Neshek Baseball player United States
    Jake Shields MMA Fighter United States
    Christine Vardaros Professional cyclist United States
    Alexey Voyevoda Bobsledder Russia
    Griff Whalen NFL football player United States
    James Wilks MMA Fighter United States
    Ricky Williams NFL football player United States
    Mike Zigomanis Ice hockey player Canada

    And last but not least:
    Carl Lews Track and field athlete, who won 10 Olympic medals, nine gold, and 10 World Championships medals, eight gold.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    The fact that your comment got modded-up so highly, despite you clearly not doing one web search for "vegan athlete" to try and verify the veracity of your baseless world view, is a clear sign of how far /. has fallen into irrelevancy and worthlessness.

    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vega...

  10. Re:No reason for alarm on Plastic-Eating Bacteria Could Help Clean Up Waste (inhabitat.com) · · Score: 1

    Civilization will be just fine if we have to replace our pipes every couple decades.

    The cost to replace such pipes in an urban area is positively ASTRONOMICAL. So no, civilization will have extremely difficulties with the drastically increased price of water, due to the need to frequently replace delivery infrastructure.

    we still make plenty of stuff out of wood and there are lots of things that can eat wood.

    Wood is treated with harsh chemicals which will kill most pests that would otherwise eat it. In addition, there have been hundreds of years of engineering knowledge channeled into designing wood structures which are highly resistant to termites (any house that has wood in contact with the ground will fail inspection and illegal to occupy), in addition to an incredibly expensive pest control industry that has developed high-tech chemicals to kill wood-eating pests if they do manage to find a way in. And even with all of that, wood-eating pests do billions of dollars in damage, every year.

  11. Re:No reason for alarm on Plastic-Eating Bacteria Could Help Clean Up Waste (inhabitat.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't think there is anything to be concerned about. They didn't engineer this bacterium, they discovered it.

    That's not good news, that's BAD news... Nature is getting better at destroying the things we use because we thought they were effectively indestructible.

    The lead in Flint Michigan's water will look like a quaint inconvenience when bacteria figure out how to feed on the innumerable PVC and ABS pipes municipal utilities have directly buried, to distribute water to homes and businesses.

  12. Re:Services on Some Root For a Tech Comeuppance In San Francisco · · Score: 1

    Moving outside of Silicon Valley means I'll be paying more to commute back into Silicon Valley.

    There are jobs outside of Silicon Valley...

  13. When I'm forced into close proximity (train, restaurant, etc.), I should not be forced to listen to your over-loud end of a phone conversation

    I'm sure the guys who are stuck on the train with you, don't think they should be forced to behave as you want them to, either, so call it a draw. Your idea of proper decorum isn't the same as everyone else's, so you might enjoy the elimination of cell phones, but then the tyranny of the majority will continue to progress until it stops you from doing things which you think are proper, but similarly impacts other people.

    In a restaurant, it's entirely up to the proprietors to decide the rules. You can ask them to intervene, ask to be seated elsewhere, etc., or you can take your business elsewhere. If they want a rowdy atmosphere, it's idiotic to try and force your preference on them.

    You might notice libraries never have problems with people speaking loudly on their phones... Go there, if you demand a quiet environment.

  14. The mistake this guy made was running his jammer continuously. If you have jammer and want to target one person on a cell phone, you only have to momentarily switch on the jammer when the other end of the call is talking.

    Anybody who is using their phone at the time, will be pretty easily able to spot the guy who keeps putting his hand in his pocket, every time the cell signal drops.

    I'd do you one better, and recommend just listening to an AM radio as you move around, to more easily track down the source of this, or any other kind of RF interference.

  15. Re:Huh? on DARPA Wants Ideas On Weaponizing Off-the-Shelf Tech (ieee.org) · · Score: 1

    The average "criminal" is NOT going to re-write code or anything like that.

    No, but it's the "above average" criminals/terrorists you really need to watch-out for.

    Who do you think is doing the big retailer (Target, JCP, Home Depot) break-ins, if not criminals who "re-write code"?

  16. Re:The horse is way out of the barn on DARPA Wants Ideas On Weaponizing Off-the-Shelf Tech (ieee.org) · · Score: 1

    Can you put together a reliable propulsion system for long flight?
    Can you make it take off vertically reliably?
    Can you make it fly fast?
    Can you create accurate flight control to impact a target?

    You don't have to make any of that... The popularity of amateur rocketry means you can go BUY all of that, right off the shelf. Which is EXACTLY the scenario DARPA is looking to examine.

    Can the vehicle accurately verify it is the correct target before impact?

    With GPS, this is a no-brainer...

    Can you make a warhead from off the shelf components that have a real impact on a target?

    Anybody can find instructions for home-made explosives online... Most are crude, but some high-explosives are possible, too. Hell, WWII was fought with basic incendiary bombs anybody could make. And some of the most destructive conventional weapons are fuel-air explosives, which is basically just large quantities of diesel fuel with a couple small explosive charges (properly timed for maximum effect).

    Can you show in flight testing that it will be reliable for years to come?

    That's a ridiculous requirement that is completely out-of-line with this challenge. Those armies who would consider such of-the-shelf weapons, don't need them to sit in silos, ready to go, for decades. Instead, they'd be building them when they need them.

  17. Re:Services on Some Root For a Tech Comeuppance In San Francisco · · Score: 1

    I make $50,000 per year, put 20% away in savings, rent a studio apartment in Silicon Valley, and most people consider me "poor" because I live a modest lifestyle.

    Eerily similar to my first full-time job. I was earning $50k, and living in a studio apartment. But I was NOT living anywhere near Silicon Valley, so my rent was about $500/mo, my apartment was a 10 minute drive from work, I was a short distance from plenty of open land and hiking trails, etc. I was able to put away 60% in savings... If you factor taxes, I was putting away 75% of my take-home.

    When I got double that salary in a more expensive (still not silicon valley) area, it actually didn't result in much more take-home. There were NO studio apartments in the area, and my rent ended up being 3X as much. Cost of living, plus much higher income taxes, meant I was barely putting away any more money than before. This despite working much harder and longer hours, as the company would expect for paying me twice as much.

    My advice to you: Get out of the high-rent areas. Work for less, take it easier, and you'll save just as much without trouble.

  18. Re:Why stay? on Some Root For a Tech Comeuppance In San Francisco · · Score: 1

    They'll vote for Bernie, and more "Big Government" to fight the "Big Government Crone Capitalism" not realizing that Big Government is actually the problem.

    Things that Bernie Sanders has said he'd do, like reducing the number of H1-B visa, increasing the minimum wage, etc., etc., is not Big Government, nor "the problem".

    Meanwhile, the "small government" Republicans, who've vowed to reject all immigration reform, will actually do a ton of harm... keeping millions of people in legal limbo, forcing them to take jobs under-the table with below-market wages, keeping all other wages artifically depressed.

    Incidentally, would you care to name the last president who campaigned on reducing the size of government, and actually did it? Nope, not Regan, the military expansion outstripped all his cuts... In fact going as far back as Thomas Jefferson, they've ALL been proven liars upon being elected. They all decide to expand the government, once they're in charge of it.

  19. Re:Ownership vs. Renting on Some Root For a Tech Comeuppance In San Francisco · · Score: 1

    A house I was looking at sold for $360k. For a 450sq foot house. Just barely bigger than my apartment.

    Who cares how big the house is? It's the land/lot that appreciates in value. The house is a write-off. You can either completely renovate and expand it, or bulldoze and replace it with something new.

    That said, you can find several listings with twice the house, on a city lot, for about that same price in the LA area, so that's not typical, anyhow. Sometimes it's the cheapest properties that are strangely in the most demand because of so many people who can afford a $400k 30-yr loan, but not ONE CENT more... You might find just a few percent higher price gets you a MUCH nicer house with much less buyer demand. If you think that's too expensive, you're not being realistic. You aren't going to dramatically cheaper houses anywhere at all, unless there's some horrible reason nobody wants to live there. Housing prices aren't going to be what your parents paid, and unskilled job wages aren't keeping-up with inflation of property.

    After the crash, circa 2008, good-sized houses on quarter-acre lots an hour drive from L.A. were selling for $50,000. They've all gone up to at least 3X what they were selling for back then, but still plenty of affordable options if you're willing to commute an hour each way. Metrolink (commuter rail) is commonly an option all-over greater Southern California area... You can even live out in the Palmdale desert with even cheaper houses on big lots, and ride the train to work anywhere in the LA area.

    LA rent isn't nearly as insane as SF. A $1,500/mo rent is doable if you don't want to commute, and don't want a 30-yr mortgage hanging over your head. After a few years, the money you saved can buy several houses outside the area, and renting them out will be a job in itself.

  20. Re:Ownership vs. Renting on Some Root For a Tech Comeuppance In San Francisco · · Score: 1

    $360k buys you a hell of a house in most of the US.

    Get a remote job.

    $360K buys you one hell of a James Bond villain's giant compound in India...

    About a billion Indians will do ANYTHING to get a remote IT job with the kind of 1st world salary you want.

  21. Re:Flaw in Economic Data on Some Root For a Tech Comeuppance In San Francisco · · Score: 1

    there are people on fixed incomes or working in fields where the high wages aren't sustainable, who get stuck in the old economy when their fellow citizens are part of the new economy. They need each other ... someone has to build the homes, make the cheese, pour the latte ... but they can't afford each other.

    What are you even talking about? There's absolutely no need for those who "make the cheese" to live in a dense urban core along-side the ultra-wealthy. They are better suited living near the farms, in areas with dirt-cheap real-estate.

    Those who "pour the latte" simply have their salaries increased until someone is willing to do the job... Maybe they commute in, maybe it's filled part-time by school-kids, retirees, etc., but the money is at least good enough for SOMEBODY in some situation to want it. Maybe the lattes get more expensive, but oh well.

    Similarly, it's up to construction companies who "build the homes" to either get more efficient, or raise prices until they can make it work. Maybe the contractors come in via rail every day, maybe the buildings are increasingly pre-fab, allowing very few local workers to erect a building in just a few days, etc. And when you reach the limits of efficiencies, you raise your prices. In a market where the smallest properties cost millions, the cost goes unnoticed. If contractors can't make it work, nobody is willing to pay the price, then new construction stops until demand increases even more.

    The only problem in the bay area is the absurd zoning and regulations, which prevents a few multi-story condo/apartment buildings being constructed to meet (some) of the demand. A few rounds of new, high-density buildings in the area, and rents would drop for everyone. Middle-class labor would perhaps have several people sharing a single rental, while those making big money would at least have the option of cheaper rents, which would take some of the air out of the housing bubble... That means it won't be such a huge crash, when it does, eventually crash.

  22. First? My ass... on Brazilian Coders Are Pioneering the First Cross-OS Malware Using JAR Files · · Score: 5, Informative
  23. Re:Revert to 1990s control of encryption on New Legislation Would Ban US Government From Purchasing Apple Products (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    It would be extremely easy to checksum the source code before printing out the books, and even include it in the books. Then you simply verify the manual labor by checksumming the output, and comparing the hashes. You have someone fix the work, until it matches EXACTLY.

  24. Re: What was it before? on MAME Released Under OSI-Compliant, FSF-Approved License (mamedev.org) · · Score: 1

    Note that MAME is a registered trademark, and the are still restrictions on use of the MAME name, logo and wordmark.

    Coming soon:

    * Lion's MANE gaming system.
    * Badly MAIMED arcade emulator.
    * Free MAIN game emulator.

    In all seriousness, I'm happy to see the change. I ran a mid-sized arcade for a few years, and was acutely aware of how expensive it was to keep diagnosing and repairing the decades-old systems. It's blindingly obvious how very much cheaper (in maintenance AND electricity!) it would be to replace the guts with a PC running MAME, except for the license restrictions that prohibited doing exactly that (which criminals of course would ignore anyhow).

  25. Re:Revert to 1990s control of encryption on New Legislation Would Ban US Government From Purchasing Apple Products (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    One thing the govt can always do, whether we like it or not, is revert to the control of encryption that was common in the 1990s and earlier. They could, by law, restrict encryption for export, etc.

    No, they can't. As I just ranted about in an earlier comment... Source code is protected speech, and speech is constitutionally protected from government censorship. Without the overwhelming support needed to pass a constitutional amendment (which nobody believes the US Fed can possibly hope to manage these days), they can't legally stop the export of software, including encryption, from the US.

    This is the trick PGP used many years ago to get around export restrictions, and they were eventually successful in court:

    Export Regulations only covers software in electronic form (e.g. on disks, or via the Internet). PGP 5.0i, on the other hand, was compiled from source code that was printed in a book (well, actually 12 books - over 6000 pages!). The books were exported from the USA in accordance with the US Export Regulations, and the pages were then scanned and OCRed to make the source available in electronic form.

    This was not an easy task. More than 70 people from all over Europe worked for over 1000 hours to make the PGP 5.0i release possible. But it was worth it. PGP 5.0i was the first PGP version that is 100% legal to use outside the USA, because no source code was exported in electronic form.
    http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/