Is it even worthwhile to use an app like that to save a few cents on gas?
Not EVERY TIME you need to fill-up, but it's very good for finding which gas stations in your area are consistently inexpensive, which ones play games with pricing (occasionally cheap to bring-in business, then crank-up the prices). And when traveling it absolutely INVALUABLE for avoiding gas-traps that can be $1 per-gallon more than the gas station half a mile ahead...
If I have to spend even 5 minutes looking up gas prices and driving out of my way to go to a cheaper gas station, it's not worth saving 30 cents a gallon on gas.
At $8/hour (a reasonable minimum wage), 5 minutes of effort is worth 67 cents, making even a 5 cent/gallon price difference worth the effort.
Personally, there's nothing I would love more than an app (or maps/navigation feature) that would show me which cheap gas stations are along my route, rather than a dumb radius search that might tell me to do a U-turn and drive a 10 mile loop to save 1 cent/gallon, or going 5 miles away from the highway, when in both cases continuing on my route for 5 miles to the next cheap gas station is most often the far better option. GasBuddy's map is utterly useless for such things, and would take an hour of clicking-on each pin to figure out the answer to that simple and frequent question.
I see Gas Guru is a solid competitor to Gas Buddy. I'll have to compare their terms and see which is slightly less evil.
Having a currency with deflation has never been really tested.
"Japan's economy was caught in a deflationary spiral for the past 20 years. It started in 1989, when the Bank of Japan raised interest rates causing the asset bubble in housing to burst. During that decade, the economy grew less than 2% per year as businesses cut back on debt, spending and lost productivity with excess workers (Japan's culture discourages employee layoffs). The Japanese people are also savers, and when they saw the signs of recession, they stopped spending and put away funds for bad times."
"Massive deflation helped turn a recession into The Great Depression. As unemployment rose, demand for goods and services fell. Prices dropped 10% a year. As prices fell, companies went out of business. More people became unemployed. When the dust settled, world trade essentially collapsed. The amount of goods and services traded fell 25%, but thanks to lower prices the value of this trade was down 65% (as measured in dollars)."
"As prices fall, people put off purchases, hoping they can get a better deal later. This puts pressure on manufacturers to constantly lower prices. Constant cost-cutting means lower wages and less investment spending." http://useconomy.about.com/od/...
A deflationary spiral is a vicious circle where decreases in price lead to lower production, which in turn leads to lower wages and demand, which leads to further decreases in price. The problem exacerbates its own cause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I believe in quality over quantity, and/. doesn't have the intelligent conversations with knowledgeable people that it once did. They've nearly all fled.
I learned a huge amount from submitting stories to Soylent and Pipedot, and comparing them to the crud was on Slashdot at the time... Namely,/. likes to publish a completely inaccurate and twisted stories any idiot knows is slanted and wrong, and then 99% of the comments are made-up of people correcting (and ranting about) the bad story. If you don't publish such crap, you can have informative discussions with 1% of the audience...
In addition, it's the very few, high-quality commentors that make the site, not the rest of the horde. You can have a very small community, as long as it contains a few very smart people, and have just as much insightful conversation. I saw it working wonderfully back in the early days of/. but there's nothing of value left here, now. If Pipedot can continue to maintain the high signal-to-noise ratio as it grows, it *could* be better than/. ever was. But who knows what the future may hold...
You've basically just described SoylentNews, a Slashdot clone that appeared when the Slashdot Beta shit really started heating up.
SoylentNews never aspired to be anything like slashdot. Instead NCommander stated clearly "SoylentNews intends to be a source of journalism", which just resulted in it becoming HuffingtonPost with discussion, instead of a/. replacement.
The only direct replacement for/. that appeared was PipeDot. "pipedot intends to be a better slashdot". https://pipedot.org/comment/2C... Unfortunately, the word hardly got out, and readership over there is pretty low.
/. is just an empty name, and it has less value than ever. All the best parts of/. can and have been forked.
SoylentNews is like HuffingtonPost on slashcode, while PipeDot is a working rewrite of slashcode that kept the sci/tech focus and high standards, but hasn't managed to build a big community of users so far. Just pointing/. readers to Pipedot instead would do the job, and rescue millions of dollars from Dice's pockets.
A lot of this hit the fan about 10 years ago when a crash was partially blamed on the pilot working two jobs, being overtired and overstressed, and then crashing with a load of passengers. People were shocked at an airline pilot would have trouble feeding himself on just one job. I don't think much has changed since then.
There have been changes. Standards for pilots of the tiny airlines have been raised a bit, extra restrictions were put on their schedules, and loopholes that allowed reducing pilot pay have been closed.
But most importantly, the big airlines are now held responsible for those tiny regional/commuter airlines they're contracting with. The big guys no longer get to take your money and book you on a tiny turboprop (with their logo on the side) while washing their hands of the poor safety record of those "regional" airlines. Their own big pockets will be the target of any future lawsuits.
"A government study recently found 61% of all advertised flights for American, Delta, United and US Airways (now merging with American) were operated by regionals in 2011, up from 40% in 2000." http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
If you're smart, you avoid regional airlines. The accident rates are dramatically higher, and you're saving little, if any, money booking flights on them.
I have no idea why no one bothered porting OpenSSH to Windows before, but it's about damn time!
Because SSH is:
...command-line oriented, and before Powershell, the Windows command-line was a complete steaming pile...
...extremely Unix oriented. Without a VT100+ emulator, SSH'ing into a Unix box is about as useful as a teletype. No exaggeration, only non-interactive commands work well. CMD/Powershell will go wonky when you try to run "links".
...not any more useful than Putty unless running on top of a good Unix environment (like Cygwin). Windows' pipes and sockets don't work like Unix pipes and sockets. There's no Windows-native rsync, cvs, svn, git, etc., that could be used together with a Windows SSH client.
Best way to make Windows tolerable is to install Cygwin, and run everything (including OpenSSH) under their rxvt terminal port.
At least the patents on DVDs are expiring if not already expired. The first DVD player was sold in 1996, and patents can be good for up to 20 years from the filing date, so it would seem that by late next year, all necessary patents should have expired.
This is HORRIBLE legal advice. Patent laws were different before 1996, that's why MP3 patents are still around (and will be until 2017) despite the fact that specifications were published back in 1991!
In the United States, "patents filed prior to 8 June 1995 expire 17 years after the publication date of the patent, but application extensions make it possible for a patent to issue" quite a few years after initial filing.
MP3 patents have mostly expired, though one US patent expires later this year.
I use i3lock, which would mean attackers would have to find a way to get into/usr/bin to usurp my locker
Umm... No. Changing your PATH, setting LD_PRELOAD= or one of many other envs, changing Xsesson scripts or your WM's menu entries... Any of those would do just fine.
You also missed the entire point of the article, that an X11 screen-locker is just a normal user application like any other, a black image over top and only just TRIES to steal focus and input.
However, internal combustion engined vehicles require fossil fuel to run
Internal combustion engines can run quite well on hydrogen, ethanol, methane, and any number of other non-fossil sourced flammable gases.
In addition, plug-in hybrid vehicles offer a possible path for oil demand to drop drastically, without requiring any more improvements to battery technology. The vast majority of trips can be powered by electricity, while only longer trips need consume any oil. They need only drop in price.
has decided to take money in exchange for allowing "non-intrusive" advertising through its lists, pretty much against the interests of it's users who don't want any ads.
On the contrary. Allowing non-intrusive ads (by default--you can disable this feature in: Preferences) is the best thing any Adblock type program has ever done.
It's actually offering content producers a significant incentive for using ads which are less objectionable to users. The alternative is advertisers benefit by doing worse and worse things, and those who choose to block ads are silent and uncounted. This could help reverse the trend, and keep sites and advertisers honest and decent, and offer counter-incentive to irritation.
I don't know what it is, but slashdot editors just LOVE the hell out of cell phone tracking. I mean, there has probably been a story or two on the subject before now:
What are the odds your family isn't all on a single cellular carrier, making you unable to take advantage of such redundancy?
Verizon and Sprint are compatible, while AT&T and T-Mobile are compatible. And with them all switching to LTE, it's likely they will all be mutually compatible in a few more years, when manufacturers start selling multi-band LTE phones.
Most every post-paid cellular plan includes voice roaming. Even if you're not paying for roaming normally, when you dial 911, all restrictions are dropped, and your cell will connect to any available tower from any provider that it can.
Balloons cost a million to launch, and stay up a couple weeks. I could see drones having a real advantage. Then again, geostationary satellites have an even bigger advantage.
In FIOS areas, it's no longer possible to get a POTS landline. You can get a phone service over FIOS, but it's subject to wall-power being available, and you're using the same E-911 system as normal VoIP or cell phone services, anyhow. It's the FCC that's to blame for me not having a landline.
Also, there's no reason cellular 911 service shouldn't be ultra-reliable. There are 4 different nationwide carriers in the US. What are the odds that all 4 of them will have ALL their overlapping cell towers in an area knocked-out? That does happen, today, but ONLY because the FCC pussied-out on requiring them to have backup generators in each cell tower, and lets them just keep a few backup batteries in there for short power outages.
And if some event damages the fiber-optic line to my house, there's no chance I'm fixing it... At least with a cell phone I have the option of climbing onto higher-ground and trying to get a signal from a more remote tower, or even just SMS texting emergency services (coming real-soon-now) and hoping.
With ad-hoc WiFi in cell phones, people may soon be able to self-assemble into their own wireless network that spans whole cities, after a disaster knocks-out all other local service. Try that with your land-line.
...scratch that. SoylentNews turns out to be just as bad as/. in this regard. They posted this same damn story, too, and the head of the site has stated they don't want to be a tech site at all.
Instead, my last hope rests with pipedot, which is much more like an old-fashioned/. with a focus on sci/tech instead of flamebait crap. Hell, the sci/tech stories even get more comments on pipedot than they do on SoylentNews, which says a lot about the community.
an apartment where she does share the building with up to 15 other families.
That doesn't preclude installing an antenna, it just reduces your options. Multi-floor apartment balconies and/or windows usually get pretty good TV reception. If previous occupants had DBS dishes mounted, you can stick an antenna on that J-channel. And landlords are usually reasonable. You can always ask for permission to install an antenna, explaining the non-destructive mounting option (chimney straps, non-penetrating root mount, etc.) you'd like to use, and promise it'll be less unsightly than what you'll do if they refuse.
Speaking of technical, it was only recently you can easily find actual frequencies used by TV stations (needed if you are using UHF wireless mics). After the DTV transition, I could not find actual frequencies used which drove me nuts because those that say it is same as NTSC are wrong
Umm, tvfool.com has had that info forever.
I linked to the FCC's DTV transition plan in my journal about OTA TV in 2007:
If you're talking about the center frequency, that's a very simple conversion. The Linux DVB package contains two text files listing center frequencies:
Sadly, even if we move to picocells, the antennas will still need to be "visible" and will still have some "size" to them due to the frequencies they need to handle.
Actually, wavelength at 800Mhz is only about 1ft (~30cm), so that's practical to hide. Hell, you could disguise it as a chimney or some other roof penetration.
My plan would be to mount them on telephone poles wherever available. There, they could just use business-class cable/DSL/FIOS service as the backhaul. Maybe that possibility would encourage Verizon to expand their FIOS deployment, since the big money is in cellular. AT&T's U-Verse fiber network could support it, too. Sprint/T-Mobile would be at a disadvantage, but maybe deals with local cable companies would help both sides compete. After all, where you need several picocells is right where there are already large populations, and already have wired options installed.
With that plan, cellular data could actually be both faster and cheaper than wired internet access.
Slashdot Mirror
Not EVERY TIME you need to fill-up, but it's very good for finding which gas stations in your area are consistently inexpensive, which ones play games with pricing (occasionally cheap to bring-in business, then crank-up the prices). And when traveling it absolutely INVALUABLE for avoiding gas-traps that can be $1 per-gallon more than the gas station half a mile ahead...
At $8/hour (a reasonable minimum wage), 5 minutes of effort is worth 67 cents, making even a 5 cent/gallon price difference worth the effort.
Personally, there's nothing I would love more than an app (or maps/navigation feature) that would show me which cheap gas stations are along my route, rather than a dumb radius search that might tell me to do a U-turn and drive a 10 mile loop to save 1 cent/gallon, or going 5 miles away from the highway, when in both cases continuing on my route for 5 miles to the next cheap gas station is most often the far better option. GasBuddy's map is utterly useless for such things, and would take an hour of clicking-on each pin to figure out the answer to that simple and frequent question.
I see Gas Guru is a solid competitor to Gas Buddy. I'll have to compare their terms and see which is slightly less evil.
"Japan's economy was caught in a deflationary spiral for the past 20 years. It started in 1989, when the Bank of Japan raised interest rates causing the asset bubble in housing to burst. During that decade, the economy grew less than 2% per year as businesses cut back on debt, spending and lost productivity with excess workers (Japan's culture discourages employee layoffs). The Japanese people are also savers, and when they saw the signs of recession, they stopped spending and put away funds for bad times."
"Massive deflation helped turn a recession into The Great Depression. As unemployment rose, demand for goods and services fell. Prices dropped 10% a year. As prices fell, companies went out of business. More people became unemployed. When the dust settled, world trade essentially collapsed. The amount of goods and services traded fell 25%, but thanks to lower prices the value of this trade was down 65% (as measured in dollars)."
"As prices fall, people put off purchases, hoping they can get a better deal later. This puts pressure on manufacturers to constantly lower prices. Constant cost-cutting means lower wages and less investment spending."
http://useconomy.about.com/od/...
A deflationary spiral is a vicious circle where decreases in price lead to lower production, which in turn leads to lower wages and demand, which leads to further decreases in price. The problem exacerbates its own cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I believe in quality over quantity, and /. doesn't have the intelligent conversations with knowledgeable people that it once did. They've nearly all fled.
I learned a huge amount from submitting stories to Soylent and Pipedot, and comparing them to the crud was on Slashdot at the time... Namely, /. likes to publish a completely inaccurate and twisted stories any idiot knows is slanted and wrong, and then 99% of the comments are made-up of people correcting (and ranting about) the bad story. If you don't publish such crap, you can have informative discussions with 1% of the audience...
In addition, it's the very few, high-quality commentors that make the site, not the rest of the horde. You can have a very small community, as long as it contains a few very smart people, and have just as much insightful conversation. I saw it working wonderfully back in the early days of /. but there's nothing of value left here, now. If Pipedot can continue to maintain the high signal-to-noise ratio as it grows, it *could* be better than /. ever was. But who knows what the future may hold...
SoylentNews never aspired to be anything like slashdot. Instead NCommander stated clearly "SoylentNews intends to be a source of journalism", which just resulted in it becoming HuffingtonPost with discussion, instead of a /. replacement.
The only direct replacement for /. that appeared was PipeDot. "pipedot intends to be a better slashdot". https://pipedot.org/comment/2C... Unfortunately, the word hardly got out, and readership over there is pretty low.
Pipedot had a pretty good GamerGate write-up a few months ago:
http://pipedot.org/story/2014-...
/. is just an empty name, and it has less value than ever. All the best parts of /. can and have been forked.
SoylentNews is like HuffingtonPost on slashcode, while PipeDot is a working rewrite of slashcode that kept the sci/tech focus and high standards, but hasn't managed to build a big community of users so far. Just pointing /. readers to Pipedot instead would do the job, and rescue millions of dollars from Dice's pockets.
Law in California says landlords can't refuse to allow you to install EV charging infrastructure. You'll have to foot the bill, but they can't say no:
http://pipedot.org/story/2014-...
There have been changes. Standards for pilots of the tiny airlines have been raised a bit, extra restrictions were put on their schedules, and loopholes that allowed reducing pilot pay have been closed.
But most importantly, the big airlines are now held responsible for those tiny regional/commuter airlines they're contracting with. The big guys no longer get to take your money and book you on a tiny turboprop (with their logo on the side) while washing their hands of the poor safety record of those "regional" airlines. Their own big pockets will be the target of any future lawsuits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
However, the practice has continued:
"A government study recently found 61% of all advertised flights for American, Delta, United and US Airways (now merging with American) were operated by regionals in 2011, up from 40% in 2000." http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
If you're smart, you avoid regional airlines. The accident rates are dramatically higher, and you're saving little, if any, money booking flights on them.
Because SSH is:
Best way to make Windows tolerable is to install Cygwin, and run everything (including OpenSSH) under their rxvt terminal port.
This is HORRIBLE legal advice. Patent laws were different before 1996, that's why MP3 patents are still around (and will be until 2017) despite the fact that specifications were published back in 1991!
In the United States, "patents filed prior to 8 June 1995 expire 17 years after the publication date of the patent, but application extensions make it possible for a patent to issue" quite a few years after initial filing.
I wish that was true, but it's certainly not:
http://www.tunequest.org/a-big...
Rickrolling? You seem to be confusing "geeks" for "/b/tards"...
Umm... No. Changing your PATH, setting LD_PRELOAD= or one of many other envs, changing Xsesson scripts or your WM's menu entries... Any of those would do just fine.
You also missed the entire point of the article, that an X11 screen-locker is just a normal user application like any other, a black image over top and only just TRIES to steal focus and input.
Internal combustion engines can run quite well on hydrogen, ethanol, methane, and any number of other non-fossil sourced flammable gases.
In addition, plug-in hybrid vehicles offer a possible path for oil demand to drop drastically, without requiring any more improvements to battery technology. The vast majority of trips can be powered by electricity, while only longer trips need consume any oil. They need only drop in price.
On the contrary. Allowing non-intrusive ads (by default--you can disable this feature in: Preferences) is the best thing any Adblock type program has ever done.
It's actually offering content producers a significant incentive for using ads which are less objectionable to users. The alternative is advertisers benefit by doing worse and worse things, and those who choose to block ads are silent and uncounted. This could help reverse the trend, and keep sites and advertisers honest and decent, and offer counter-incentive to irritation.
I think you're okay... They'll both assume you must be talking about the other one.
I don't know what it is, but slashdot editors just LOVE the hell out of cell phone tracking. I mean, there has probably been a story or two on the subject before now:
http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...
http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...
http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...
http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...
http://slashdot.org/story/02/1...
http://slashdot.org/story/02/0...
http://slashdot.org/story/06/0...
http://slashdot.org/story/07/0...
http://slashdot.org/story/12/1...
http://slashdot.org/story/06/1...
http://slashdot.org/story/02/1...
Everyone go out and find all the cell phone tracking stories you can, and submit every one to /. They love it when you do that!
Verizon and Sprint are compatible, while AT&T and T-Mobile are compatible. And with them all switching to LTE, it's likely they will all be mutually compatible in a few more years, when manufacturers start selling multi-band LTE phones.
Most every post-paid cellular plan includes voice roaming. Even if you're not paying for roaming normally, when you dial 911, all restrictions are dropped, and your cell will connect to any available tower from any provider that it can.
Balloons cost a million to launch, and stay up a couple weeks. I could see drones having a real advantage. Then again, geostationary satellites have an even bigger advantage.
In FIOS areas, it's no longer possible to get a POTS landline. You can get a phone service over FIOS, but it's subject to wall-power being available, and you're using the same E-911 system as normal VoIP or cell phone services, anyhow. It's the FCC that's to blame for me not having a landline.
Also, there's no reason cellular 911 service shouldn't be ultra-reliable. There are 4 different nationwide carriers in the US. What are the odds that all 4 of them will have ALL their overlapping cell towers in an area knocked-out? That does happen, today, but ONLY because the FCC pussied-out on requiring them to have backup generators in each cell tower, and lets them just keep a few backup batteries in there for short power outages.
And if some event damages the fiber-optic line to my house, there's no chance I'm fixing it... At least with a cell phone I have the option of climbing onto higher-ground and trying to get a signal from a more remote tower, or even just SMS texting emergency services (coming real-soon-now) and hoping.
With ad-hoc WiFi in cell phones, people may soon be able to self-assemble into their own wireless network that spans whole cities, after a disaster knocks-out all other local service. Try that with your land-line.
...scratch that. SoylentNews turns out to be just as bad as /. in this regard. They posted this same damn story, too, and the head of the site has stated they don't want to be a tech site at all.
Instead, my last hope rests with pipedot, which is much more like an old-fashioned /. with a focus on sci/tech instead of flamebait crap. Hell, the sci/tech stories even get more comments on pipedot than they do on SoylentNews, which says a lot about the community.
Well, this nicely wraps-up my 16 years of involvement with /.
See you on SoylentNews.
That doesn't preclude installing an antenna, it just reduces your options. Multi-floor apartment balconies and/or windows usually get pretty good TV reception. If previous occupants had DBS dishes mounted, you can stick an antenna on that J-channel. And landlords are usually reasonable. You can always ask for permission to install an antenna, explaining the non-destructive mounting option (chimney straps, non-penetrating root mount, etc.) you'd like to use, and promise it'll be less unsightly than what you'll do if they refuse.
As long as mmell doesn't share the roof with other tennants, he has the right to mount an antenna up there.
Law of the land since 1996:
http://www.fcc.gov/guides/over...
Umm, tvfool.com has had that info forever.
I linked to the FCC's DTV transition plan in my journal about OTA TV in 2007:
http://slashdot.org/journal/18...
Specifically:
"FCC DTV tentative frequency assigments"
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs...
If you're talking about the center frequency, that's a very simple conversion. The Linux DVB package contains two text files listing center frequencies:
us-NTSC-center-frequencies-8VSB
us-ATSC-center-frequencies-8VSB
ATSC eg.:
A 57028615 8VSB
A 63028615 8VSB
A 69028615 8VSB
A 79028615 8VSB
A 85028615 8VSB
Actually, wavelength at 800Mhz is only about 1ft (~30cm), so that's practical to hide. Hell, you could disguise it as a chimney or some other roof penetration.
My plan would be to mount them on telephone poles wherever available. There, they could just use business-class cable/DSL/FIOS service as the backhaul. Maybe that possibility would encourage Verizon to expand their FIOS deployment, since the big money is in cellular. AT&T's U-Verse fiber network could support it, too. Sprint/T-Mobile would be at a disadvantage, but maybe deals with local cable companies would help both sides compete. After all, where you need several picocells is right where there are already large populations, and already have wired options installed.
With that plan, cellular data could actually be both faster and cheaper than wired internet access.