Slashdot Mirror


User: Entropius

Entropius's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
2,967
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 2,967

  1. Re:Mandatory panic! on South Carolina Student Arrested For "Killing Pet Dinosaur" · · Score: 1

    And yet Japan and Germany are two of the most prosperous countries in the world today.

  2. Re:Neutrino Mass on The First Particle Physics Evidence of Physics Beyond the Standard Model? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Lattice gauge theorist here -- we're working on that.

    I agree with your interpretation -- this very well may just mean that the QCD part is hard and the theorists didn't correctly estimate systematic errors from it. However, there's quite a push in the lattice community to actually calculate the messy nonperturbative parts, so there's hope that this will be sorted out from the theory side alongside the new Fermilab experiment.

  3. Re: Surprise? on Munich Reverses Course, May Ditch Linux For Microsoft · · Score: 1

    My mom (a non-techie) and a couple of friends run Lubuntu with no problems at all -- my mom's certainly called me fewer times for tech support since she started using it instead of WinXP.

  4. Re: Stupid on Apple's Diversity Numbers: 70% Male, 55% White · · Score: 1

    Nonblack people are hardly a monoculture.

  5. Re:Stupid on Apple's Diversity Numbers: 70% Male, 55% White · · Score: 1

    Apple has no obligation to fund schools in black neighborhoods. That is the government's job -- that is why we and they pay taxes.

  6. Re:Regulations on The Fiercest Rivalry In Tech: Uber vs. Lyft · · Score: 2

    I said "hurting their customers", not "breaking a law established for the benefit of a cartel".

  7. Re:Makes both look bad on The Fiercest Rivalry In Tech: Uber vs. Lyft · · Score: 2

    I live in one. It's 2/3 of a mile walk to the nearest mainline bus stop (and if you've used DC city buses, you know how inefficient they are). It's about 2.5 miles to the nearest Metro station. Try again.

  8. Re:Makes both look bad on The Fiercest Rivalry In Tech: Uber vs. Lyft · · Score: 1

    There are huge swaths of the city not served by public transit in any reasonable way.

  9. Re:Regulations on The Fiercest Rivalry In Tech: Uber vs. Lyft · · Score: 1

    What are they doing that hurts their customers that warrants a cease-and-desist?

  10. Re:Regulations on The Fiercest Rivalry In Tech: Uber vs. Lyft · · Score: 1

    They're doing dirty tricks to each other. The service they provide to customers is still better than the city cabs.

    We don't need "regulations" here. If Uber and Lyft are getting trolled by each other then they will need to build anti-troll safeguards into their business model, which they are able to do on their own. There's no problem here that rules from City Hall (other than the standard ones against fraud, like requesting a ride with no intent to actually use it) will fix.

  11. Re: There we go again on DARPA Wants To Kill the Password · · Score: 1

    The trouble is that measuring entropy is hard as it depends on context.

    "Frutyyzlrdkgejk" looks like a string of characters with high entropy. So does "Cthulhufthagn". One is likely to be tried by an intelligent password cracker long before the other.

    "Football purple dizzy rainbow" looks like four words chosen at random and thus has high entropy. So does "correct horse battery staple." One of these is a much weaker password than the other.

  12. Re: There we go again on DARPA Wants To Kill the Password · · Score: 1

    Even barring the "attacker gets /etc/passwd and you don't know about it" problem, the problem is password reuse. If you require people to have strong passwords then they'll likely reuse them on other websites; Facebook isn't going to lock user accounts because somewhere else got their hashes compromised.

  13. Re:Are you kidding me? on California Man Sues Sony Because Killzone: Shadowfall Isn't Really 1080 · · Score: 2

    Rounded rectangles, man.

    Rounded fucking rectangles.

  14. Re:You go girl on California Man Sues Sony Because Killzone: Shadowfall Isn't Really 1080 · · Score: 1

    Deciding how to measure monitors is sort of tricky; what exactly does that 22" refer to? Viewable area, viewable area minus bezel width, or what? This is well known in the monitor world, and maybe it shouldn't be so, but an educated purchaser could probably figure out what 22" meant. (If they said '22" viewable area', that's different.)

    In this case, 1080p means something specific, and the product wasn't that. Now it's an absolutely stupid and trivial complaint, but as others have said, if we don't want them taking a mile we shouldn't give them an inch.

  15. Re:UN representation of CIS members on Putin Government Moves To Take Control of Russia's largest space company Energia · · Score: 1

    I'm aware of the history and, yes, I'm being sarcastic. Except about Florida.

  16. Re:Not a bad idea on Putin Government Moves To Take Control of Russia's largest space company Energia · · Score: 1

    Water being provided by the public sector makes sense for a completely separate reason: it's a thing that is very difficult to define property rights over. Who owns the groundwater under Tucson, AZ? Does your average Jose have the right to drill a well on his land and pump out however much he wants and sell it? What about slurping water out of the Santa Cruz River? (You're probably saying that you've never heard of the Santa Cruz River. That's because it's not there any more -- we poured it all on crops. It's now something of a hilarity among Tucsonans to name things "River X" that are near the dry riverbed.)

    Water rights are hard as hell and very difficult to incorporate into a reasonable scheme of private property. Same with radio spectrum, for that matter. Things like food are easy: own some land, plant fruit trees, sell fruit out of truck. Certainty over the solution space doesn't necessarily mean that something should be in the public sector -- farming practices for apples and the design of toilets are pretty well optimized* by this point, but there have been no moves to nationalize the apple or shitting industry.

    *The Japanese robo-toilets may disagree.

  17. Re:Not a bad idea on Putin Government Moves To Take Control of Russia's largest space company Energia · · Score: 1

    I notice that you don't list "food" here. It's very much something people need to live, it's on a mostly-free market almost everywhere, and it works just fine.

  18. Re:UN representation of CIS members on Putin Government Moves To Take Control of Russia's largest space company Energia · · Score: 2

    That's not a bad idea. Could the USA reformulate itself as a confederation with the same legal structure and operations, but with 49 seats in the UN rather than one? (I think everyone would agree that not having Florida represented is in the best interests of everyone except comedians.)

  19. Re:minutes to midnight on Putin Government Moves To Take Control of Russia's largest space company Energia · · Score: 1

    Drag someone off the street and shoot them in the head in plain daylight.

  20. Re:And no one will go to jail on CIA Director Brennan Admits He Was Lying: CIA Really Did Spy On Congress · · Score: 2

    The correct internet term is "pissing in an ocean of piss."

  21. Re:I guess they won't need any more foreign Visas? on Microsoft CEO To Slash 18,000 Jobs, 12,500 From Nokia To Go · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They continually invent new and creative kinds of suck.

  22. Re:ESPN on Comcast Customer Service Rep Just Won't Take No For an Answer · · Score: 1

    They also oversharpen the shit out of it.

    The worst is grass, where the blades are close to the limiting resolution. The compression algorithm can't decide whether it's worth it or not to capture the detail in the grass blades, so you either get a smeary mess or holy shit oversharpened artifacts.

  23. Re:We're sorry he so faithfully followed instructi on Comcast Customer Service Rep Just Won't Take No For an Answer · · Score: 1

    Sure, but when I say that my reason for cancellation is I'M MOVING OUT, stop hounding me.

    Also, when I call to inquire at my new residence, telling me that your downstream speed is 25 megabytes/sec is a good way to make me ask "Ma'am, do you mean megabytes, or megabits?"

    An answer of "Oh, we mean megabytes! Our competition measures their speeds in megabits but we have megabytes, which are eight times as much!" won't inspire confidence.

  24. Re:It's a No Brainer Win-Win at the End of the Day on New Microsoft CEO Vows To Shake Up Corporate Culture · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't want them to "reinvent productivity" -- I want them to stop buying other people's things and making them suck (Skype) and stop working hard to make their own things suck (Windows 8).

  25. Re:Actually makes good sense on TSA Prohibits Taking Discharged Electronic Devices Onto Planes · · Score: 1

    I thought that's what those x-ray machines were for?

    Besides, there is a lot of empty space inside some laptops. If they're worried about someone putting a bomb inside a laptop that won't boot then they should be equally worried about someone putting one inside a laptop that will.