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User: Mars+Saxman

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Comments · 155

  1. Re: How long will you have a choice? on 'Two Years Later, I Still Miss the Headphone Port' (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 2

    I'm typing this comment on my shiny new-ish Blackberry KeyOne, an Android phone with a QWERTY keyboard. It took about a week to adapt back to using physical keys, but after a few months of use I'm totally content. So much less frustration when you can actually feel the keys!

  2. Re:This reminds me of top-posting in newsgroups. on Linus Torvalds In Sweary Rant About Punctuation In Kernel Comments (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    I still disprefer that style. It works ok for quick one-liner replies, I guess, but what I really want is a conversation, and that means I want the context quoted near the reply, inline.

    Alas, Microsoft never understood that there is more than one way to do it, and shoehorned their corporate style down our throats by making it difficult to convince Exchange to work any other way, so we're stuck with the dominance of top-posting now.

  3. Re:And yet, the Slashdot opinion... on Infographic: Ubuntu Linux Is Everywhere · · Score: 1

    Right there with you: I started slinging code in the '80s, I've been making my living that way for over twenty years, and Ubuntu is my default because it works and I don't have to waste time futzing with it. Of course it's not perfect, but it's certainly no worse than the alternatives, and in many ways it is better. I love the fact that I don't have to think about it - give me a machine, new or old, doesn't matter, throw on whatever the most recent Ubuntu LTS happens to be, bam we're in business.

  4. Re:SolarCity - Tax dollars - Why this is happening on US Projected To Lead the World In New Solar Installations This Year (computerworld.com) · · Score: 1

    The government money only needs to flow long enough to subsidize enough investment to bootstrap the industry. Prices are coming down and scale is going up, exactly as you would expect. The government is probably stuck providing some degree of subsidy for a long time to come simply because such political programs are difficult to kill, but it won't take many more years before solar is cheap enough to be the obvious choice with or without subsidy.

  5. Re:yes they should on FBI Should Try To Unlock iPhone Without Apple's Help, Lawmaker Says (csoonline.com) · · Score: 1

    I missed that golden threshold, alas, but can I still have demigod status?

  6. Re:Technology Paradox on Why Some Cities Get All the Good Jobs (chicagotribune.com) · · Score: 1

    That makes it sound like driverless cars will be a disaster. We will have a nightmare ahead of us already when it comes time to clean up after the last century of suburban sprawl - why on earth would we want to double down on disaster by encouraging even more of it?

  7. Re:oh ffs already on Women Get Pull Requests Accepted More (Except When You Know They're Women) (peerj.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, at this point I pretty much just immediately flip the bozo bit on anyone who uses the term "SJW" non-ironically. It conveys no useful information except that the person using it is... um... possibly a troglodyte.

  8. It's not a lot of power by American standards but it seems totally reasonable for Morocco. When I visited a decade ago, electricity was used primarily for lighting, and virtually all bulbs were compact-fluorescent. Space heaters generally used propane or kerosene, not electricity. Power-hungry appliances like clothes dryers and dishwashers were not at all common, and their cuisine depends far less on refrigeration than ours does.

  9. Re:Snitching devices on Hit-and-Run Suspect Arrested After Her Own Car Calls Cops (yahoo.com) · · Score: 1

    This is one of the reasons I'm happy to keep on paying whatever it costs to repair my increasingly-clanky old SUV. At least it's not spying on me; it's actually mine.

  10. Re:Another reason to ban rifles on Mass Shooting In San Bernardino Kills At Least 14 (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    Your risk assessment is completely backwards. The US government makes it pretty difficult to find out exactly how many people the cops shoot each year, but it's a lot: in 2011, it was 1,146. American cops shot more people in *one year* than all mass shootings combined *in that decade*.

    http://jimfishertruecrime.blog...

    In terms of saving lives, forbidding cops from carrying guns would be the most effective form of gun control we could institute.

  11. Re:You're lucky they let you hand out candy from h on Slashdot Asks: Notes For Next Hallowe'en? · · Score: 1

    You can always ignore the busybodies and do what you like, you know.

  12. Re:My view of this on Ahmed Mohamed, His Clock, and the Curious Turn of Events · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's no new evidence here - it was obvious the instant we saw the photo of his project that he'd repackaged the guts of some old AC clock! Good for you that you figured out exactly which one it was, but really, so what? I worked on similar projects when I was his age. You have to start somewhere, and casemodding a piece of old garage-sale junk is a totally reasonable project for a 14-year-old newbie.

    We aren't making a fuss over him because he's an extraordinary genius; rather, we're making a fuss over him because he's just an ordinary kid who *ought* to have been treated with ordinary respect, and we're trying to make up for the unforgivably shitty dumbass bullshit he's been subjected to.

    And really, it's less about him than it is about all the other kids like him: the message is "don't let those fucknuts in Texas scare you, smart young Muslim inventor kids; America at large thinks you're cool".

  13. Re:Privacy on Inside the Failure of Google+ · · Score: 1

    I browse the web in Firefox. I visit Facebook in Chrome. I never, ever, for any reason log in to Facebook from Firefox.

  14. That sounds like the most useful way of doing things. If I haven't built and tested my codebase against a specific library version, how can I assert that my codebase works properly with that specific library version?

    The counterargument holds that this should never happen as long as people use semantic versioning properly, but that's no more realistic than expecting people to release bug-free libraries that never need to be upgraded.

  15. Re:How about ... on Ads Based On Browsing History Are Coming To All Firefox Users · · Score: 1

    I would be happy to do without the free stuff, most of which is crap, if it meant I would never have to deal with advertising anymore.

    Ad-supported "free" stuff feels like a bait-and-switch; "here's something cool, oh no wait it's just an ad-delivery medium". I'd rather know up front what I'm getting into, and not have ad-encrusted crap constantly trying to sneak past my filters by acting like real stuff.

    Adblockers help a lot, and making a general rule of avoiding commercial media helps too, but it'd be really nice if I could relax and let my guard down sometimes. It's not fun knowing that there is an army of trained professionals out there doing their crappy best to manipulate me into buying certain things or thinking about things in certain ways, and that nothing short of constant vigilance will protect me from them.

  16. Re: Since when.... on FBI Accuses Researcher of Hacking Plane, Seizes Equipment · · Score: 1

    Posting on twitter is not "to your friends", it is publishing to the entire world. Why do people keep forgetting this? Is there some affordance in its UI which misleads people?

  17. Re: pacific northwest on Drought and Desertification: How Robots Might Help · · Score: 1, Troll

    Buzz off California, don't fuck with Cascadia. You've stolen enough other people's water already.

  18. Re:Loadsa uses! on Commercial Flamethrower Successfully Crowdfunded · · Score: 1

    You are correct sir, and that is all thanks to my flamethrower.

  19. Re:Loadsa uses! on Commercial Flamethrower Successfully Crowdfunded · · Score: 2

    I use my flamethrower for gardening - my back yard has a strip of asphalt for parking, but all the rest is gravel, so it's easy to keep the weeds down by hosing the place down with fire every now and then. It's a great way to start fires in the firepit - no need to mess around with kindling and wait an hour for the flame to really get going; just toss in some logs, torch 'em for a minute, and you're set. Beyond that, it's also a great way to grill vegetables - hold a bell pepper or an ear of corn in a pair of metal tongs, then give it a quick squirt with the flamethrower. Cooks right up, ready to eat in seconds.

    I am not kidding about any of this.

  20. Re:You know what this means on Breakthrough In LED Construction Increases Efficiency By 57 Percent · · Score: 2

    Not just some - all. White LEDs *are* blue LEDs with a phosphor coating; the amount of phosphor determines whether it is a "cool white" or "warm white" style LED.

    You can also make "white" light by running all three components of an RGB LED at max, but nobody does that because it is way more expensive in terms of dollars and in terms of lumens-per-watt.

  21. Re:Hyperbole in a headline? on Larry Ellison Rejuvenating Hawaii's Sixth-Largest Island (Which He Owns) · · Score: 2

    Given that your idiosyncratic definition of "ownership" can, by definition, only ever apply to a sovereign government, it's not a term that is likely to come up for conversation very often. In the meantime, we would need some other term, which could apply to the state we currently call "ownership", an everyday situation which frequently comes up in conversation, as it involves billions of people.

    Gee, I have an idea! Why don't we use the common, everyday word to describe the common, everyday situation, and invent some complex, specialized, technical term to describe this rarefied form of national-sovereignty "ownership" you have in mind?

  22. Re:Exchange on Ubuntu Smartphone Shipping In October · · Score: 1

    I'm not even sure what "seamless Exchange access" means. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

  23. Re:Not really.... on Dual Interface Mobile Devices To Address BYOD Issue · · Score: 1

    Hear, hear. The people who use their personal phones or laptops to do official work confuse me. I've never been asked to do such a thing and have no idea why I would want to. I had a business cell phone once but that was just because it was a small company with no PBX; I just left the phone on my desk like any other office phone. Never had any problems, and I never had any risk that my employer might have any knowledge of my personal email or phone conversation.

  24. Re:Saddened :( on Ask Slashdot: Teaching Chemistry To Home-Schooled Kids? · · Score: 1

    Hi. I was home schooled all the way up through high school, before the word "homeschooling" came along to describe what my parents were doing. Neither of my parents was "specifically trained" in the manner you suggest. Huge disservice? I don't think so. They bought ordinary textbooks and set me to work studying them, taught me how to write papers and made me write up what I learned, got me a library card and let me check out as many books as the library would let me take, bought a computer and a modem and generally left me free to explore with them. I got a better education than most, and I never had to deal with bullying or all the social crap that comes with a herd of barely-supervised children who have not yet learned how to behave socially. I learned how to interact competently with adults and wasted very little time on other children. Sure, I always felt a bit awkward around other kids, but by the time they grew up into adults I basically knew how to handle them. It's worked out pretty well so far.

  25. Re:I NEVER said replace on VisiCalc's Dan Bricklin On the Tablet Revolution · · Score: 1

    You might well be right; I just hope things don't go the way you expect them to, because it doesn't sound like much fun. I have been disappointed by the steady disappearance of physical keyboards from phones; my current phone has a touchscreen, and while I can get along with it, typing more than a sentence or two just sucks. It's slower and far less accurate - it is only the presence of an extremely aggressive autocorrect system that makes the touchscreen keyboard usable at all.

    In a world where your average home PC is actually an iPad, I'd rarely, if ever, write a comment as long as this one, because it'd be so much irritating work.

    if you take a tablet and attach a keyboard, how is that different from having a laptop?

    None, but you just agreed with me.

    Not so much. A computer is a computer is a computer, so all we're talking about is the form factor. "Tablet" is a form factor which works for situations where you are lounging around: sitting on the couch or the easy chair, in bed, something like that. But what are you going to do when you need to write a bunch of text? You can stick your tablet into a tablet holder, pull out a keyboard, and start working - um - wait, except you've just re-invented the laptop, badly. So now you have an awkward laptop for doing desk type things. This is in fact a very significant amount of the work people do with computers today, and I believe that we will continue to have many devices available which are designed for that type of usage.

    Obviously tablets are going to grow much more quickly than PCs, because they are a form factor which is suited to a range of computing activities that previously went unserved. That means the hot development money is going to move to the tablet world, all the aggressive young startups will go work on tablet apps, etc. It's just the same cycle that we saw with phones. But that doesn't mean PCs become any less important than they are now: it just means there's a huge new market which is drawing all the new attention.