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User: sootman

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  1. Wow on Area 51 No Longer (Officially) a Secret · · Score: 1

    While everyone else is making jokes about aliens and the budget, I'm still trying to wrap my head around what it would take to launch a U2 (103-ft wingspan) from a carrier. Besides the width, I didn't think it was optimized for short takesoffs, and it looks like the wings would snap off if you launched it with a catapult.

  2. Jobs' most important legacy on Larry Ellison Believes Apple Is Doomed · · Score: 1

    He showed that people WILL pay for well-designed, well-made things, even at a premium. Now that he has shown it can be done, it should be pretty easy for Apple to continue down that path. Think about it: there was nothing revolutionary about any of their recent hits: the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. They were just extremely well-made examples of each respective line. Some innovations were added, sure, but the main thing is Apple actually GAVE A SHIT about how well they worked for the user. All the innovations they added were in pursuit of making things BETTER, not just "more".

  3. Re:WE'RE TOO BIG TO JUST "DOUBLE DOWN" ON FAILURE! on 3 Reasons Why Microsoft Needs 3 Surface Tablets · · Score: 1
  4. Re:leadership on BlackBerry Officially Open To Sale · · Score: 2

    > There are lots of huge companies that no longer exist because...
    > the competition became better at playing the game than them.

    Yup. Also known as "Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land."

  5. Well... on Is 'Fair Use' Unfair To Humans? · · Score: 1

    "copyright" itself is by definition an unfair concept (it attempts to combat one kind of unfairness with another) so it stands to reason that anything else that comes from it would also be unfair. (Ditto for patents.)

    I mean, you do know that it's a totally made-up concept, right? Copying is a true human right. We have eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear, brains with which to remember and analyze, mouths with which to speak or sing, and hands with which to create. If I watch someone make a chair, I know how to make a chair and can do so myself. A thousand years ago, if you saw a nice chair in someone's house, you didn't have to ask permission to make one just like it for yourself.

    If someone tells me a joke or story, or sings a song, it is in my head and I can reproduce it at will. (Allowing for memory and talent.) The idea that someone can say "Hey, I thought of that first, you can't do that thing I just did unless I say so" is a totally artificial construct.

    Granted, its original purpose was to keep big businesses from "stealing" the ideas of "little guys", and encouraging little guys to make good things and not fear that they'd get nothing due to big companies instantly copying them and making things better and cheaper, but it's been abused 16 ways from Sunday. Solve one problem, create a thousand more.

  6. Re:3% velocity on Building a Full-Auto Gauss Gun · · Score: 3, Informative

    According to Wikipedia, a BB gun has about 18% of the muzzle energy of a .22. And this thing is 1/6 the strength of that. We're getting down to Lego territory.

  7. Re:Oh, how great a system... on First California AMBER Alert Shows AT&T's Emergency Alerts Are a Mess · · Score: 1

    *I* think I can handle a certain amount of texting while driving, it's the lawmakers who think I can't. They're pushing laws for us to not read texts while we drive... and they want to text us while we're driving. Small problem there...

  8. Oh, how great a system... on First California AMBER Alert Shows AT&T's Emergency Alerts Are a Mess · · Score: 1

    1) The alert comes in the middle of the night. You are woken up and there's nothing you can do unless you want to go outside and start watching cars go by.

    2) The alert comes during the day... while you're driving... and you're so startled by this loud-ass alarm that you crash.

    Let me get this straight: they want to a) ban texting while driving and b) send random texts to a half a state at a time?!?!? Do they REALIZE how many cars are on the road at any given moment? Fucking brilliant.

  9. Re:I don't see much of a problem on First California AMBER Alert Shows AT&T's Emergency Alerts Are a Mess · · Score: 1

    Yes, let's just wake up the whole country for what is usually custodial interference, because if there's one thing people are good at, it's spotting license plates when they're home sleeping in bed. Hope you like getting an average of one alert every two minutes. (203,900+58,200)/365 = about 700 per day, and that's not even counting the runaways. Let's say the bulk of the country lives in one of ten major metropolitan areas... you'd still get them 70 times per day. Even if only 1 in 10 gets an alert, that's 7 per day... 50 per week, 2500 per year.

    But we don't get that many, do we? No matter which way you look at it, someone is deciding which cases are worth waking everyone up for and which aren't. You can let the government decide, or you can decide for yourself.

  10. I'm still waiting for them to adopt this.

  11. Never mind that... on IKEA Augmented Reality Catalog Lets You Preview Products In Your Apartment · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What I need is VR system to help me figure out how I can cram six flat-packs into my car.

  12. I must have read the summary too fast... on Navy Version of Expedia Could Save DoD Millions · · Score: 1

    ... because I missed the "revolutionary" aspect of "putting all your data into one database." Or is it based on context? Maybe logistics and capacity handling are "revolutionary" to the Navy; meanwhile, FedEx and UPS are saying "Welcome to ten years ago!"

  13. Dude, even *I'm* selling on Amazon. on Geeks.com Online Shop Has Closed · · Score: 1

    They can too. If you have inventory, and you can sell it for more than you bought it for, you should be OK. Or even eBay. The last thing I bought on eBay was a random part to fix my clothes dryer from a seller with many thousands of good feedback. Get started!

  14. Oh shit! on Surveillance Story Turns Into a Warning About Employer Monitoring · · Score: 1

    I googled 'pressure cooker bomb' recently because I didn't even know they existed until I heard about them on the news.

    Moral of the story: don't be curious about Bad Things.

    Or maybe the moral is "ban the news." It just spreads information about Bad Things.

  15. Re:You pray if you like on Queen's WWIII Speech Revealed · · Score: 2

    Actually, she did serve. I caught a bit of coverage of the new baby and it talked about how all the royals are expected to serve. From Wikipedia:

    In February 1945, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service, as an honorary Second Subaltern with the service number of 230873. She trained as a driver and mechanic.

    She was born in April 1926, so she was not yet 19 in February of '45. V-E day came along a few months later. (May 1945)

  16. well, duh. on iPhone Hacked In Under 60 Seconds Using Malicious Charger · · Score: 1

    The "charger" port is, in fact, a USB port (or something similar) so yeah: if you don't have physical security, you don't have security, just like everything else.

    Also, "Apple... will fix the vulnerability in the iOS 7 release" is not the same as "Apple has said they won't fix this in iOS 6." We'll have to wait and see what they say/do before passing judgement. (Radical idea, I know.) Apple was selling 3GSs with iOS 6 less than a year ago, and as far as I know, those little guys won't run 7.

  17. NO!!!!!! on Are We At the Limit of Screen Resolution Improvements? · · Score: 1

    More like this, please. We had 22" monitors @ 200 dpi TEN FREAKING YEARS ago. I understand they were pricey at the time, but then again most technology is like that -- I don't understand why they didn't keep making them and wait for them to get cheaper. Apple introduced the multi-thousand-dollar 30" LCD around the same time and it stayed in production for years and the price dropped over 50% in that time. I'd pay $2-3,000 today for a 24-30", 200 dpi monitor. (Assuming it used standard connectors and I could use it for 5-10 years, as I tend to do with good monitors.)

  18. Good conclusion, wrong premise on Study Finds 3D Printers Pay For Themselves In Under a Year · · Score: 2

    I think the boom will come when you can easily REPAIR all the things that would otherwise be "broken" when all it is is one little plastic piece inside that needs replacing. I'm thinking of things like cheap but otherwise good toys, the little battery cover on the back of a remote, etc. Or being able to make anything you can think of. There are plenty of little "boy, I wish I had a little stand/holder that would do X and Y" that would make life better.

    Same with regular printers. It might be hard to quantify exactly how much you're saving by being able to print coupons, boarding passes, etc. on your home printer, but the overall convenience and general quality of life are definitely improved. Little "I'll do this because I can" things are what make it worth it.

    I don't need a purchase to pay for itself in a certain amount of time, I just need it to make my life better enough that it's worth buying. I didn't buy a smartphone with google maps because I need to save enough gas to pay for the phone, I bought it to reduce the amount of time I have to sit in traffic.

  19. yeah, right. on Microsoft Will Have To Rename SkyDrive · · Score: 1

    "This is quite a big branding issue for Microsoft."

    Oh yeah, I'm sure the owners of hotmail.com/live.com/outlook.com, MSN Search/Windows Live Search/Bing, and MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger/Office Communicator/Lync are lying in bed awake at night over this.

  20. Exactly! on A Year of Linux Desktop At Westcliff High School · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > [Windows XP] works fairly well from a user point of view, it's
    > been around practically forever, and people don't like change.

    Yes, yes, and yes. Too bad MS didn't realize that -- they could have just spent the last few years refining XP and keeping people happy.

    Apple actually has a pretty good thing going on with OS X -- like them or not, "small changes every year or two" beats "monumental fuckups twice a decade."

  21. An absolute must-read on the subject on Obama Praises Amazon At One of Its Controversial Warehouses · · Score: 4, Informative

    I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.

    "... when you're late or sick you miss the opportunity to maximize your overtime pay. And working more than eight hours is mandatory. Stretching is also mandatory, since you will either be standing still at a conveyor line for most of your minimum 10-hour shift or walking on concrete or metal stairs."

    "The gal conducting our training reminds us again that we cannot miss any days our first week. There are NO exceptions to this policy. She says to take Brian, for example, who's here with us in training today. Brian already went through this training, but then during his first week his lady had a baby, so he missed a day and he had to be fired."

    It's 4 pages. Take the time to read it. It's depressing as fuck. I buy very little from Amazon anymore, and when I do, it's usually from individual sellers, not "Amazon" itself.

  22. Re:Makes sense on Asus CEO On Windows RT: "We're Out." · · Score: 1

    > I don't think that even Apple stores sell that
    > many iPads during holiday season.

    Easy to find: Apple sold 22.9 million iPads in the 2012 holiday season. That's a quarter-million PER DAY; six million in 3.5 weeks.

    If just 10% of iPads are sold in Apple's 400 retail stores, that's over 60 per day per store.

  23. The solution: Esperanto! on Ask Slashdot: Tags and Tagging, What Is the Best Way Forward? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... or some other language where every word has one and only one meaning.

    "Somehow I remain convinced that a unified, semantically-based solution, using a mix of folksonomy and taxonomy, is the Graal of tagging."

    So basically you want everyone to agree on what to call everything. HA! Will never happen. Words mean different things in different contexts. A word that's overly-general in one context will be overly-specific in another. Also, fun fact: not everyone on the planet speaks the same language. Hell, even time changes words. 10 seconds ago, I learned that "Graal" was a word: "Holy Grail, or "Graal" in older forms" If you want a good tagging solution, start by not trying to be so cute and showing off how smart you are and use words that are used today -- call it "the grail" like everyone else in this century. People like you are what breaks tagging systems. :-)

    We'll probably solve the problem of how to identify people before we come up with a unified way to name things.

  24. Re:Not much to do with parkour on RHex Robot Shows Off Parkour Moves · · Score: 1

    Yeah. If the headline would have been "robot has some neat ways to travel" it would have been fine -- and on that scale, it's quite an accomplishment -- but it had absolutely NOTHING to do with parkour at all.

  25. fucking AMATEURS! on Google Chromecast Reviewed; Google Nixes Netflix Discount · · Score: 2

    Even if most products are NOT hits, everyone HOPES for one, and an organization as big as Google should at least PLAN for the possibility of one -- and at this price, SOMEONE in the googleplex should have figured out that it had a good chance of actually being one. They should have either a) had an infinite number of Netflix discount codes available, or b) CLEARLY publicized "First N customers get 3 free months of Netflix!" And then be prepared to reach N in a matter of minutes.

    For as many PHDs as Google has, it's continually surprising how much stuff like this they screw up.

    (Sorry for the caps. I'm tired and don't feel like writing tags. Dear Slashdot, its 2013. Please get a rich text editor for comments -- bold, ital, underline, strikethrough, lists, blockquote, and link oughtta do it.)