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User: caseih

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  1. Tab and url box look visually identical on Open Source Add-on Rewrites the User Interface of IE11 · · Score: 1

    Maybe it's just the Windows theme, but I found the screenshots disorienting. I could not tell the difference between the tab itself and the location input box.

  2. Re:Diesel is a better solution on Lawmakers Out To Kill the Corn-Based Ethanol Mandate · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You're right about startup. But that can be mitigated with block heaters in cold climates, which are already widely used. Especially on little tiny engines. As well it's not nearly so hard to turn over a tiny engine, so I think the cold start problem is no worse than gasoline. A small engine will warm up fairly quickly.

    I stood next to a big rig the other day when it was -40C (I was loading it), and it had no smell of diesel at all. Just a vague ammonia steam whiff occasionally. This is of course after it's warmed up. In my mind diesel is the only alternative in the future as it's the only engine capable of running without modifications on a myriad of biologically-derived oils. Heavier oil biofuels made by algae and waste digestion seem to be better bets than ethanol.

  3. Re:Not buying this on NSA Says It Foiled Plot To Destroy US Economy Through Malware · · Score: 1

    I think it's ironic that US government bonds are still considered a safe investment. A bank takes money you deposit with them and invests it at a profit, using a portion of that profit (near zero, let's be honest) to pay you back for giving them money. The government seems to *not* be in the business of doing that. Any money you lend them gets spent straight away. Yet I guess it's safe because if you want to get your money back from the US government they just sell a bunch more bonds to some other hapless person to pay you. This works as long as we have a national appetite and tolerance for debt.

    And this is really the whole reason a default on the national debt would really hurt the country. Yes it would affect the Chinese, but since most of the debt consists of Americans' own retirement money, a default would instantly wipe out the retirement savings of a generation or two. The economic impact of that would be staggering indeed. So in the meantime, even though the right-wing hawks bluster, even they know they have to keep the thing going. At least until they are dead.

  4. Re:Not the first:AbiCollab has been running for ye on Owncloud 6 Brings Collaborative Open Document Format Editing to the Web · · Score: 2

    Also Afresco offers web-based collaboration and edition of ODF documents. How it compares feature-wise I don't know.

  5. Re:There's no mystery. on Open Source Beehives Designed To Help Save Honeybee Colonies · · Score: 1

    I think I know what you were trying to say, but you messed up with the roundup part. Please get your facts straight. Roundup is a herbicide, not an insecticide. An overused and ultimately problem-causing herbicide, but not related to bees in any way that I know of. At least in this context.

    The suspected class of insecticide is neonicotinoids, which is actually a naturally-occurring pesticide secreted by some plants. Two companies that I know of, Bayer and Syngenta, produce an insecticide based on this chemical that coats the seeds of certain crops (pulses, corn, etc) when planted. The idea is the plant will take the chemical in systemically, and become unappealing for insects like weevils when they chomp into the leaf. And of course we don't know if when bees come along to the flowers if the chemical is still in the plant enough to kill or hurt them.

  6. Old news on Two Supermassive Black Holes About To Embrace · · Score: 4, Funny

    Happened over two billion years ago and we're just hearing about it now!? Typical.

  7. Re:The great depression? on European Health Levels Suddenly Collapsed After 2003 and Nobody Is Sure Why · · Score: 1

    Purely anecdotal here, but I know of more than a few holocaust survivors who lived (and some who continue to live) healthy lives well into their 90s. These are folks who were walking skeletons when the war ended. Starving to death.

  8. Re:Ethanol is a crock nobody wants on Can the US Be Weaned Off Ethanol? · · Score: 4, Informative

    I understand what you're saying, but the pedant in me wants to point out that there's no such thing as "pure gasoline." Gasoline(tm) is a cocktail of many different hydrocarbon molecules, usually consisting of between 4 and 12 carbon atoms in their chains. And different companies' products contain differing ratios of the common components of petrol.

  9. Re:Harder on people, easier on corps on EPA Makes Most Wood Stoves Illegal · · Score: 1

    Guess you aren't aware that the EPA has incredibly strict pollution regs on diesel engines these days. If a big rig sold this year pulled up beside you at a light, if you couldn't hear its engine you'd never know it was diesel. The smell is completely gone. A faint ammonia and steam smell is all you get to identify these new diesels now.

    In the past a diesel engine could either be smoke-free and efficient, or NOx free, but not both. Higher temperatures mean no smoke but lots of NOx. Then in europe they discovered that Urea in liquid form can be sprayed into the exhaust stream and that will react with the NOx to form CO2 and N2. That technology has now caught on in the US, in part as a result of EPA regulation.

    Now, none of this does anything to solve the CO2 problem of course. But you can't argue that diesels are as bad as wood smoke. While some people moan about the hassle of urea (DEF as it's called), from my experience it's not that big of a deal. And I can run my machine into my shop roof and it doesn't fill the place up with noxious smoke.

  10. Google Chrome and remote desktop app on Ask Slashdot: Easy, Open Source Desktop-Sharing Software? · · Score: 3, Informative

    By far the easiest and cheapest would be to have them be running Google Chrome and install the remote desktop app. They need to just fire it up, have it generate a code, and give you that code that you plunk in your end. It's fairly fast, secure (one-time codes), and works on mac, linux, and windows.

    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desktop/gbchcmhmhahfdphkhkmpfmihenigjmpp?hl=en

  11. I can confirm problems using external apps an IMAP on The Case Against Gmail · · Score: 1

    I have used IMAP and thunderbird exclusively to access my Gmail e-mail for many years. There are certainly issues. It does mostly work, but the mapping between folders and labels on Google's end is not perfect.

    Another issue is that IMAP is just dog slow on gmail. I've tried disabling IDLE, but that does not help. Tried all kinds of other tweaks too.

    Also IMAP and Gmail for mailing lists has a horrible, long-standing bug that Google refuses to fix. That is if you post to a mailing list from Thunderbird, your own messages to the list are silently discarded by Gmail when they come in. When using their proprietary web interface that's not a big deal since Gmail places messages from the Sent folder into the conversation. But on IMAP this does not occur. So you'll never see anything you post to a list when using any real e-mail client and Gmail.

    Don't even get me started about Google's 1-dimensional conversation view... No it's not threaded; it's merely chronological. Please google, give me threaded messages. Google Wave once did it, so I know you know what threaded means! Conversation view only works with two people in a conversation. Some of the threads I've followed on mailing lists lately would be a hopeless jumble in Google's conversation view, with many twists and turns and dozens of people involved.

  12. Great little video until flash crashed on Welcome to the Goodwill Computer Museum (Video) · · Score: 1

    Would be nice to have html5 video as well as flash. Sadly I could not download the ooyala video stream either.

  13. Re:Can someone explain why websites were down? on The Cost of the US Government Shutdown To Science · · Score: 2

    JPL is not a government-run organization. It's run by CalTech. However sites like The FCC and NASA were down.

    Honestly it probably cost way more to take the sites down and put up a "we're not home" page than it would have to leave them running with no updates. It's a political thing. It's the government's way of trying to influence public opinion on the shutdown.

  14. Re:Gnome tool kit on Wireshark Switches To Qt · · Score: 1

    That's true. gtk-list is still gtk-list@gnome.org, but my e-mail client shows "Gnome list" as the long name.

  15. Re:Gnome tool kit on Wireshark Switches To Qt · · Score: 1

    Yes Qt will make it a non-X11, more native application on OS X (carbon, though if I recall correctly).

  16. Gnome tool kit on Wireshark Switches To Qt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Gtk used to stand for the gimp toolkit, but more and more it's the gnome toolkit. I wouldn't be surprised to see it merged into the gnome framework entirely at and future date. Even the mailing list is now renamed to gnome-list.

    It's still a great toolkit, and still somewhat cross-platform. It's still being actively worked on on Windows and Mac osx. But with the focus mainly on gnome and Linux (gnome 3 has little support for other platforms now) they are not as advanced or stable ports.

    I think wireshark's move to qt is a good one. Will definitely lead to better apps on Windows and Mac.

  17. Re:This just in... on Car Dealers vs the Web: GM Shifts Toward Online Purchasing · · Score: 1

    Except that it's true. The stats back it up. More men and women under the age of 25 have no car and no interest in owning a car than ever before. Car ownership statistics in that age category are on a steady decline.

    Whether that's just that mommy and daddy still drive them everywhere and in the future reality will hit them, or not, I cannot say.

  18. Re:Just think... on Charge Your Mobile Device With Fire · · Score: 1

    But ironically, burning wood to charge your phone is pretty close to carbon neutral, at least if the entire world isn't doing it and deforesting the planet in the process. Provided the fire is from dead wood in a healthy forest, this is completely carbon neutral. Big ifs, sure. But combustion is not always a bad thing.

  19. Had this freedom in Canada for a long time on Obamacare Could Help Fuel a Tech Start-Up Boom · · Score: 4, Informative

    Healthcare is one major reason I decided to move back to Canada and work in a self employed situation. Here people can work two part time jobs if they want, or start a business and not worry about having to buy into basic health care plans. Many companies do offer supplementary insurance though. Even our own family company is thinking of doing that.

    Obviously freedom means different things to different people. Guess at least half the republican party sees things differently.

  20. Re:Sounds good, but we need a robust plug on Automatic Translation Without Dictionaries · · Score: 2

    Agg. firefox put me on the wrong story... bye bye karma

  21. Re:Proposal: on GNU Hurd 0.5, GNU Mach 1.4, GNU MIG 1.4 Released · · Score: 1

    It's a fine line here, though. I definitely can legally take your code that you released as BSD, extend or modify it, and release my version as GPL in its entirety. You still retain the copyright on your code, and of course someone could extract your code from my project and use it under the original BSD license. But I as a developer need not make much distinction.

    As for your claim the BSD requires the license to be distributed with the code, it doesn't actually say that (never uses the word, "license"). It says you must keep the copyright notice and "this list of conditions and the following disclaimer." The GPL actually satisfies all three of the conditions in the BSD. Copyright notice is maintained, the disclaimer of warranty is maintained, and the terms and conditions of the GPL are supersets of the BSD.

    So my reading, and the reading of the lawyers at the FSF is that yes, you may in fact relicense BSD code under the GPL (subject of course to what I said in the first paragraph).

  22. Sounds good, but we need a robust plug on Automatic Translation Without Dictionaries · · Score: -1

    And despite the Anonymous Coward calling me an apple fanboy for saying it, the Micro USB connector just isn't good enough for cell phone use as a charger. At first I thought it was a great idea, but it gets full of lint (and in some conditions dust and dirt) easily and doesn't always make a good connection when the springs in the cords start to get weak.

  23. Re:Proposal: on GNU Hurd 0.5, GNU Mach 1.4, GNU MIG 1.4 Released · · Score: 0

    If I was making major changes and improvements to a BSD-licensed code base, I might very well want to relicence it under the GPL just to protect myself keep my code from being absconded by a proprietary product out there.

    If by less free you mean that someone is less free to rip the code off and make their own proprietary product around the code, then yes you are correct. If you mean free as in the users can freely access the source code and it will always remain in such a state, then the GPL is freer. All depends on which freedom you think is more important, especially when two freedoms conflict with one another.

  24. Re:Great player missing some key things though on VLC Reaches 2.1 · · Score: 1

    Maybe it's their wrong-headed way of addressing the scourge of vertical videos. Not sure if I blame the person making the video or the phones for not automatically cropping the video to make the aspect ratio sane (1:1 or 4:3 at the very least). Can't stand vertical videos. It's like looking through a crack in a door.

    Seriously until I saw this video, I always thought vertical videos resulted from a bad encoding job: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt9zSfinwFA

  25. Re:Wow, they managed to break the idea of a cable! on Apple Starts Blocking Unauthorized Lightning Cables With iOS 7 · · Score: 1

    I used to think everyone should adopt the micro USB as the standard for charging and peripherals. That is until I got my first smart phone that had it. After about a year, most of the cables would not stay in very well as the metal springs loose their spring in the cable. The connector itself is fragile and prone to breaking. And it fills with link and dirt, making an already loose-fitting cable even worse. Add to that that Android's battery life sucks on any phone, so you have to regularly be plugging it in. Micro usb is just not made for this kind of duty cycle use. Now I realize apple was pretty smart to just design their own plug, even though I despise the proprietaryness of it.

    If we're going to settle on an an open standard, it's going to have to be something designed for this kind of use and abuse.