Slashdot Mirror


User: MindStalker

MindStalker's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
5,342
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 5,342

  1. Aereo can I at least get my PBS stream? on Bye Bye Aereo, For Now · · Score: 1

    Aereo can certainly stream PBS and other must carry stations legally by this ruling.

    Please Aereo, continue carrying these streams while you work for a solution.

  2. Re:Is it locked to the Amazon app store like... on Amazon Announces 'Fire Phone' · · Score: 3, Informative

    That may have been true in their first release, but Fire devices have been able to incorporate Google Play for a while now. There as "Apps from unknown sources" option now. Though it still a little tricky to copy over the apx file.

    http://www.gizmag.com/how-to-i...

  3. Re:How is that stranger? on The Profoundly Weird, Gender-Specific Roots of the Turing Test · · Score: 1

    And that was the test, to see if a computer could mimic a women as often as a man can mimic a women.

    The computer has to do as well as a typical man, not as well as a typical women at being a women.

  4. Re:"Safety Requirements"? on California Regulators Tell Ride-Shares No Airport Runs · · Score: 3, Informative

    This has Little to do with the cabs themselves. This is about the Airports.
    Airports are legally "private" property (even though they are run by the city). All airports in the US at least have a long standing history of charging cabs and limo services for picking up, dropping off customers. Its a simple fact that if you run a private car company you have to pay the airport, period, full stop. The airports in turn will and have charged people with "illegal trespassing" for not paying.
    Many private car companies nowadays accept Uber Black and they do pay the airports their share. UberX drivers being "regular people" don't know to pay the airport, and don't have the appropriate tags/markings for the airport to know what they are. Uber has been trying to work out a solution, but it requires privately negociation between Uber and each and every airport in the country. A LONG and costly operation. California, one of the prime places where the airports have been treating UberX drivers as trespassers is making this as "safety regulation". Ultimately I guess it is a safety issue, as its creating a physical confrontation between drivers and the security officers attempting to ticket them.

  5. Re:He continues to show himself to be ... on Musk Will Open Up Tesla Supercharger Patents To Spur Development · · Score: 1

    Why? He will make licensing fees from each car sold. AND he can charge per KW for other cars to plug into their quick charging ports.
    Little known fact, for the baseline Tesla S (the one that cost 69k), it doesn't come with free supercharging capability, but its available as an option as purchase for $2000 (its also available as a after purchase option, but probably cost more). The higher models come with supercharging standard.

    Weither they sell access to their stations are $2,000 up-front of if they meter it, I don't know. I'd guess they would meter it.

  6. Yeah, we aren't talking about strapping an infant into the car and having it go somewhere (yeah that would be kinda cool, but we are far, far away from that, maybe once we trust robots as nannies). But no reason a 12 year old shouldn't be able to, with adult permission, ride an autonomous vehicle.

  7. Re:It.. can't be true! on Report: Samsung Building VR Headset For Its Phones & Tablets · · Score: 1

    A lot of Oculus tech is actually in its software. It uses predictive head tracking to make the output much more seamless to the user.

    Watch this example of timewarping
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... //I believe this is one of the things Zenimax feels they own.

  8. Re:Only Creative Cloud? on Adobe Creative Cloud Is Back · · Score: 1

    I decided to look into it a little bit more.
    https://forums.adobe.com/messa...
    Apparently the creative cloud is offline applications that while they use online functions they do work offline for 30 days of non conductivity.

    Still stupid.

  9. Only Creative Cloud? on Adobe Creative Cloud Is Back · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So what happens when they no longer sell their products and you have no choice but to have the Creative Cloud. Should the entire design industry shut down when Adobe has an issue?

  10. Re:Vampirism on Elderly Mice Perk Up With Transfused Blood · · Score: 1

    We can't necessarily make an artificial version cheaper than we could simply pay people to donate. We can't clone blood cells in a vat yet, and probably not any time soon.

  11. Re:How about for the interiors? on Nissan Develops a Self-Cleaning Car · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And in reality this is a lot to do with modern paint itself. 20 years ago your car would have rusted out very fast because you never cleaned it.

  12. Re:PCs aint expensive on Ask Slashdot: How To Start With Linux In the Workplace? · · Score: 1

    Donate the hardware or sell it, sure. But wasting thousands of man hours in order to "save the environment" is wasteful ecologically in the long run because is leads to greater energy, paper, and food waste in the long run.

  13. Re:PCs aint expensive on Ask Slashdot: How To Start With Linux In the Workplace? · · Score: 2

    Agreed, they should keep whatever MSWord licenses they are currently running. There is almost no need to upgrade Office unless you need more than the maximum Excel row count.

  14. Re:PCs aint expensive on Ask Slashdot: How To Start With Linux In the Workplace? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Honestly, this is the solution. Unless you and your coworkers are working for free, the man hours you will waste on transitioning and people having issues with the new machines, be it not knowing the file system or the differences between MS Word and LibreOffice. You should run the numbers and find out.
    The machines you need, over their projected lives of 4 years cost $X per employee per day. That $X is likely less than 30 minutes. Is it likely that the new systems will cost you more than the same amount of man-hours in conversion and support?

  15. Re:clunky software? on A Bid To Take 3D Printing Mainstream · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but they will work perfectly fine for board game pieces, art pieces, simple kid toys, cups, plates.. Yeah, that's about it :)
    But the technology is advancing, give it a few years and you'll be able to create most home tools, Legos, and other everyday objects.

  16. Another big issue is that these were 12 top of the line violins. Its pretty impressive honestly to say that violins that hundreds of years old can sound identical to 12 top of the line modern violins. No other 300 year old instrument is likely to sound as good as a modern top of the line version.

  17. Re:They talk very big on Google Project Ara Design Will Use Electro-Permanent Magnets To Lock In Modules · · Score: 2

    It allows you to build and upgrade your phone a piece at a time.

    I think the biggest draw for me would be "replace your screen after you drop it". Feature :)

  18. Re:Pie in the sky on Google Project Ara Design Will Use Electro-Permanent Magnets To Lock In Modules · · Score: 4, Informative

    Its electro permanent. Meaning it requires a power to connect and to disconnect, but no power to remain connected.

  19. Re:Why separate layers? on TCP/IP Might Have Been Secure From the Start If Not For the NSA · · Score: 2

    Most things don't use the entire stack.
    TCP/IP needs to be seperate layers because you don't want to use TCP for everything.

    Everything on the internet has an IP address, so that is the universal internet layer. You can put TCP or UDP or any number of more obscure layers on top of that.

    Most applications squish the sesson,presentation,application layers into one, keeping them seperate is optional, there isn't a separate encapsulation header for each just a session flag to keep track the individual connection.
    Under the IP layer (network) you have the data-link and physical layer. data-link is your MAC address (this is neccesary) and physical is your wire, there isn't a protocol there generally, though there is for WIFI for example which doesn't use wires.

  20. Re:Crash free vs crash-safe on MariaDB 10 Released, Now With NoSQL Support · · Score: 2

    No such thing as crash-free. Hardware/power/other software can cause crashes as well. Its way better to be crash-safe than crash proof. Crash proof is just waiting to be proved wrong.

  21. Re:Ohhh... they just invented MultiMUD on Ultima Online Devs Building Player-Run MMORPG · · Score: 1

    I doubt they are doing this, but I had thought up an interesting solution to this a while back.
    XP can be treated as a universal currency. All servers are assigned XP points based upon the users % spent on their server. So you have a central authentication system that knows user Z spend 40% of his time this month on server X and 60% of his time on server Y this month. Server X in total is slightly less popular and given its 1000 users and their time spent gets allotted say 4000XP, and Server Y with its more 1200 users who spend more time on it gets allotted say 8000XP.
    Those servers can have their own internal economy and XP distribution systems, but when you leave the server the server has to decide how much XP to give to this leaving user. It can give it 0, but nobody will use this server, it can give that one user all 8000XP of its monthly allotment but then would piss off the rest of the userbase :) . Upon entering other servers that new server can have a conversion factor in the universal XP that user came in with to their local XP. Now I guess the real issue would be how to stop cheating servers that suck away a users entire XP and never give any back. I guess a universal rule that new servers can't take away XP, and trusted servers can't take away more than 10% of a users XP. Maybe special authentication system for when I user wants to voluntarily give away more than a certain amount to the server they are entering into. Shrugs, something should be workable.

  22. Re:Um, right. on Don't Help Your Kids With Their Homework · · Score: 1

    The answer is C, you can break 7 up into 5 and 2
    So in your head you can subtract 5 from 15 quickly to get 10, then subtract another 2 to get 8.

  23. Re:Makers and takers on 70% of U.S. Government Spending Is Writing Checks To Individuals · · Score: 1

    Have you looked at the budget this is referening?
    http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/...
    Table 6.1â"Composition of Outlays: 1940â"2019

    The "Budget" consist of essentially 2 items.

    National Defense: 506 B
    Payments for individuals: 2221B
    Net Interest rounds up the 3rd biggest item for 208B

    While yes, we probably do spend too much on some of these "payment to individuals" items, essentially all services the government buys/pays for is a payment to an individual.

  24. Re:Reminds me of something like this in the past.. on Scientists Create Pizza That Can Last Years · · Score: 1

    P-38 is a can opener, but yeah parent poster really should define their terms.

  25. Re:Holy cow, a decent idea! on Financing College With a Tax On All Graduates · · Score: 2

    I think the best system would be a mixed system.
    1) Have a tax that pays a high percentage up to a certain amount (State colleges work this way) per credit hour or whatever.
    2) Have a national scholarship program that pays for good grades. Our currently scholarship program are a patchwork system and leave out many students.
    3) Strict requirements for attending college. If you can't make the grade you get kicked out. Do allow for reentry after a few years, sometimes people have to grow up and mature.