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User: jfoobaz

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  1. Bad headline on LHC To Idle All Accelerators In 2012 · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's wrong, and it's even contradicted by the summary below. The LHC isn't idling all accelerators, CERN is idling all of the accelerators they operate.

    I know it's Slashdot, but is it too much to ask that the editors try to pay enough attention to ensure that the headline is accurate with respect to the summary?

  2. the motivations aren't always financial? on Microsoft Says No To Paying Bug Bounties · · Score: 1

    Apart from the people who like to research security vulnerabilities for the fun of it, what other motivation is there? If you run a security company and finding vulns is good PR, or you're running botnets and making money from spamming and phising, or you're targeting companies for data theft, it seems like the motivations are almost always financial.

    At least if you paid a bounty, you might convince a couple of the part time security researchers to make a quick buck or two - a little incentive might pay some dividends there. But more importantly, to say the motivations aren't always financial as though that's a particularly meaningful observation, that's exceedingly stupid and indicates a real lack of understanding of computer security in the real world.

  3. You misunderstans - users aren't their customers on Facebook User Satisfaction Is 'Abysmal' · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Facebook's customers are people who pay for the advertising, and who get extensive ability to target ads to specific people based on demographic and other kinds of data that Facebook gets by mining users profiles and inter-connections. And I'd imagine that these customers are just fine with the seemingly constant changes in privacy rules and settings.

  4. What's an order of magnitude? on Warships May Get Lasers For Close-In Defense · · Score: 1

    Eh, megawatt, kilowatt, what's an order of magnitude or 3? We're talking lasers here.

  5. Re:It probably depends on where you use them on Does Anyone Really Prefer Glossy Screens? · · Score: 1

    In other words, the complete opposite of cubical-land.

    Yeah. Or my office ( my desk has a window behind it and I can't change the furniture placement), most conferences I've been to, the library, your average coffee place with internet, hotel lobbies, everywhere outside during the day, and probably dozens of other places I'm not thinking of just now.

  6. Re:It's not just the summary on Nokia Siemens To Buy Motorola Unit For $1.2B · · Score: 1

    The reason it impacts US marketshare is because Nokia's market share in the US is significantly less than Motorola's - I think Nokia is around 8% and Motorola 20%, so basically they jump from 8% marketshare to 28% marketshare. Nokia does much better in Europe and Asia where phone service is not bundled with the phones.

    This would be a good point, except that this deal has nothing at all to do with Nokia's handset business - this deal is the purchase of Motorola's wireless infrastructure business, not their end user wireless device manufacturing. Further, this company is a joint venture (as another poster points out) between Nokia and Siemens, not Nokia proper.

  7. mod parent up on Massive EU Program To Study Three-legged Dogs · · Score: 1

    Shitty original reporting, combined with intellectual laziness of the Slashdot poster and editors.

  8. Re:It's for locomotion research on Massive EU Program To Study Three-legged Dogs · · Score: 1

    Look out for heat-ray research on the horizon.

    Behind the times much? http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/07/17/1152222

  9. It probably depends on where you use them on Does Anyone Really Prefer Glossy Screens? · · Score: 5, Informative

    I can't stand them, but I actually take my laptop with me all the time and can't always pick where I'm sitting in order to reduce glare. If you're constantly at a desk, and have control over the lighting and other environmental factors, they might be fine, but they generally look crappy to me even in controlled setttings.

  10. It's for locomotion research on Massive EU Program To Study Three-legged Dogs · · Score: 5, Informative

    Towards the bottom of the article, it mentions that the purpose of the study is "... to develop advanced robots that can help animals and even humans cope with function after the loss of a limb."

    The headline and summary make it sound like utterly frivolous bullshit, when it's actually important research into motion and balance techniques in living creatures that can be applied to robotics.

    Typical Slashdot.

  11. These aren't reliable numbers on Times Paywall Blocks 90% of Traffic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is based on an estimate by the Guardian, without any data provided by the Times to back it up. It could well be true, but it's basically wild speculation without actual numbers to back it up.

  12. It's not just the summary on Nokia Siemens To Buy Motorola Unit For $1.2B · · Score: 1

    This is a separate division from the handset manufacturing, and it's not clear why it'd have any impact on US sales of Nokia phones.

    The bit about the "an invigorated entrance to the US market" is taken directly from the lede of the article, which overall seems to avoid mention of the handset market (apart from discussion of Motorola's iDEN holdings). Maybe some clueless editor at Information Week stuck it in to spice things up.

  13. Re:Goatse Posters on The Hell Known As Internet Screening Services · · Score: 1

    No offense, but if that's all it took, you're pretty weak.

    Seriously, though, check go check out some medical textbooks. I remember looking through this one on oral medicine when I was a kid; some of the shit that can happen to your face as the result of untreated facial infections, or cancer, or hundreds of other problems is deeply terrifying.

  14. Huh? on Windows vs. Ubuntu — Dell's Verdict · · Score: 1

    As far as the Dell website is concerned it doesn't even mention Macintosh and regardless of if you love or hate them it's still a glaring omission.

    I'm not sure exactly how Dell's failure to mention a competitor's products on their website is a glaring omission. They can (and do) offer Ubuntu and Windows, so it makes sense to mention those options. OS X is only available from a competing hardware manufacturer; why should they do marketing for them?

  15. Re:Now that's just not right... on Tokyo Rail Billboards Scan Viewer's Age, Gender · · Score: 2, Funny

    HTML swallowed my

    Giggity.

  16. If you live and work in NZ, great on Software Now Un-Patentable In New Zealand · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Unfortunately, other countries have different ideas on the matter. If the US changed the law so that that software wasn't patentable, that might have more of an effect on the world.

  17. Re:How is this even legal? on Droid X Self-Destructs If You Try To Mod · · Score: 1

    Yes, but in that scenario your washing machine would actually pose a physical risk to you and your well-being, as it would be able to start a fire (and a thermite charge large enough to melt the contents of a washing machine would almost certainly start a fire). Bricking your phone, while an asshole move, isn't actually dangerous.

  18. Re:FTA: on DARPA Issues Call For Computer Science Devotees · · Score: 1

    I kind of wonder if they're fishing for the next batch of project managers for information systems projects.

    The previous director of DARPA, wasn't so popular with the research community; he was an engineer from industry, and instituted a regime of (fairly unrealistic) GNG (go/no go) targets in programs every year. If sites didn't hit certain scores on the GNG evals, they lost their funding. Which sounds not too bad on the surface - why would you continue to fund an organization that's not doing well? Except that for a number of projects that DARPA does (information and language processing technology, in particular), there's some very difficult problems with have somewhat good problems where you might be able to shave a few points off with refinements of existing approaches. If your funding hinges on meeting targets, rather than trying to solve the problem, you're just not going to pursue a new (but possibly fruitless) approach because the risks are too high.

    I kinda viewed that wording as looking for new, fresh, research oriented blood for the organization; perhaps there's an ongoing return to the roots of DARPA - research. Research with a purpose, directed towards a specific goal, with producing something useful at the end, but research that may fail but needs to be done to discover possibly novel approaches to problems that might otherwise go ignored in a wholly results driven system. One can hope.

  19. Re:I guess I'm old fashioned on Colleges Stepping Up Anti-Cheating Technology · · Score: 1

    "getting an education" != "passing an exam".

    No shit.

    However, to pass the exam, you presumably had to have at least crammed enough information in your brain to be able to perform the aforementioned regurgitation. If you're not even bothering to put in that level of effort (or god forbid, actually fucking learn something), schooling is totally wasted on you.

    And it's not just exams kids cheat on - they buy papers or massively crib content from Wikipedia and other sources without attribution, etc. Researching and writing a paper on a subject is a key way you become proficient in the material and learn to apply it. Again, I'm old fashioned, I guess, because my interest in schooling is learning something rather than getting some grades.

  20. mod parent up on Colleges Stepping Up Anti-Cheating Technology · · Score: 1

    If someone "dumb" is doing better than you, you are most likely not as smart as you think you are.

    Exactly.

  21. Re:Not much of a change on China Renews Google's Content Provider License · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    You have my respect, sir.

  22. I guess I'm old fashioned on Colleges Stepping Up Anti-Cheating Technology · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think of the purpose of education as getting an education. If you don't ever learn the material well enough to pass exams on your own, it's kind of a waste of time.

    And, yeah, I get that people work for grades and the piece of paper at the end of the whole thing, but if you didn't actually learn anything apart from how to cheat well, you missed the whole point. Though you probably stand to have a lucrative career in international finance.

  23. Re:Not much of a change on China Renews Google's Content Provider License · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Insightful? Really? All it takes is some half-assed analogy to Apple for the Slashmods to find something insightful?

  24. Re:Let me get this straight..... on Groovy For Domain-Specific Languages · · Score: 1

    So does birth control to a CS guy mean banging some chick you met at the bar and telling your wife that the bar chick was just an abstraction and you were really making love to her? The bar chick was just a layer in your relationship?

    Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

  25. But it's not a standards-compliant site on VP8 and H.264 Codecs Compared In Detail · · Score: 1

    Check the validator output.