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User: Bill+Dimm

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Comments · 505

  1. Re:But the case hasn't even started! on US Marshals Auctioning $20M Worth of Silk Road's Bitcoins · · Score: 1

    Exits 320 and 352.

  2. Re:But the case hasn't even started! on US Marshals Auctioning $20M Worth of Silk Road's Bitcoins · · Score: 1

    That really is what that little phrase on every bill about being useful for all debts "public and private" really means.

    For some reason, this apparently doesn't apply to driving on roads, since Pennsylvania now has turnpike exits where you can only pay with E-ZPass.

  3. Re:autoplay sucks anyway on Facebook's Auto-Play Videos Chew Up Expensive Data Plans · · Score: 1

    If slashdot ever decided to pull this shit

    Doesn't it? I don't have flash installed so it doesn't happen to me, but I seem to remember it beginning to occur recently if I visited slashdot with chrome

    Is it the ads? ...

    Yes, it is. I just had audio suddenly come blasting out of my speakers. I hunted down the tab where I had the Slashdot homepage open and closed it, and the sound went away. I really can't afford to have stupid video ads sucking the bandwidth away from my VoIP when someone might call me, or weird audio coming out of the blue when I am on the phone with a client, so I guess I just won't be coming here much anymore.

  4. Re:The seats get smaller, while the average person on 3 Recent Flights Make Unscheduled Landings, After Disputes Over Knee Room · · Score: 1

    How about some shareholders agreeing to make slightly less profit on their investments

    Airlines are already notoriously bad investments.

  5. Property Values? on Portland Edges Closer To Google Fiber · · Score: 1

    Have there been any studies on the impact of Google Fiber on property values? There were articles conjecturing in 2012 that property values would go up, but I don't know if there was any follow-up to see if it happened.

  6. Re:OT (sorry). Re Adverts on slashdot on Nanoparticles Used To Create Thermal 'Barcodes' · · Score: 1

    I'm seeing the same thing.

  7. Re:The important take-away is.... on The Mere Promise of Google Fiber Sends Rivals Scrambling · · Score: 1

    I suspect you are right, which is why I wrote "Google can" rather than "Google does," but Google may have incentive to sell service at a loss to improve the experience of their Youtube users (thus making Youtube more profitable due to more usage) or so they can mine the traffic data. In any event, having a price from a pure ISP avoids that whole issue.

  8. Re:The important take-away is.... on The Mere Promise of Google Fiber Sends Rivals Scrambling · · Score: 1

    Why would they offer the service at all if they would be losing money on it? Just leave that market completely and have more money at the end of the day.

  9. Re:The important take-away is.... on The Mere Promise of Google Fiber Sends Rivals Scrambling · · Score: 1

    The $65/month number is from Grande Communications', not AT&T. I don't know anything about their service, so I don't know if it is any more legit than AT&T.

  10. The important take-away is.... on The Mere Promise of Google Fiber Sends Rivals Scrambling · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, what we learn is that ISPs believe they can build a gigabit infrastructure and make a profit charging only $65/month for service without having to subsidize it with an ad business (like Google can). That's a very nice measure of just how much the rest of us are getting screwed by our ISPs.

  11. Re:The commits are funny into themselves. on OpenSSL Cleanup: Hundreds of Commits In a Week · · Score: 2

    I'm wondering what is supposed to be mysterious about that code. The "/* increment */" comment seems to apply to the code inside the loop, not what is being done to the i variable, so I don't think that's it. Is it because the loop goes from 7 down to 0 instead of the other way around? I remember reading a programming book back in the 80's that advocated doing that for better speed since the assembly code generated to compare to 0 was faster than comparing to some other integer (which seems to no longer be the case, and I suspect could even cause cache misses for a bigger loop, although I don't know enough about how CPUs fill the cache to know for sure).

  12. Re:Wake me up when any flavor of OO has outline mo on Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What? · · Score: 1

    Yes, XMind allows you to grab any node and drag it (with the hierarchy under it intact) into any other part of the hierarchy. That was one of my requirements, which a few other mind mapping tools I tested didn't seem to support (or, at least, I couldn't find a way to do it with other tools with just a few minutes of poking around). You can also collapse/expand any node.

  13. Re:Wake me up when any flavor of OO has outline mo on Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What? · · Score: 1

    Have you tried XMind? I was recently searching for an outlining tool and found it to be pretty good for my purposes. The basic version is free.

  14. Re:Not even much money on Intuit, Maker of Turbotax, Lobbies Against Simplified Tax Filings · · Score: 1

    Good point. I looked at the Q4 table and thought the original poster got "couple billion per year" by multiplying the revenue by four. I didn't scroll down, so I didn't see that there was a full-year table available showing that they are profitable (but not justifying the "couple billion" number). Thanks for the correction.

  15. Re:Not even much money on Intuit, Maker of Turbotax, Lobbies Against Simplified Tax Filings · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To be fair, that's billions in revenue, not profit, so I wouldn't say they "make" a couple billion per year. In fact, the source you linked to shows that their operating income is negative, so after subtracting expenses from that revenue they are losing money. So, they don't have a few billion in spare cash sloshing around -- that $2.6 million is not a negligible amount of money for them. The fact that they still think it is worth spending on lobbying when they don't have a lot of spare money is perhaps an even stronger statement about how effective lobbying dollars are.

  16. I've seen two episodes of Dr. Oz. In the first, he talked about treating a jellyfish sting. Knowing nothing about jellyfish stings, I assume his advice was legit. The second episode he talked about homeopathic medicine and all of the wonderful treatment options it provided. He didn't laugh when he was saying that. I never watched again -- can't trust anything he says to be valid.

  17. Re:Linus is being Linus. on Linus Torvalds Suspends Key Linux Developer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    but he actually had a reason [this time, lol]

    I've read about quite a few of these "Linux blow-ups" over the years, and I can't think of a single instance where I cam away thinking Linus was anything short of fully justified once you actually looked at the context.

  18. Re:Sponsored Links are now MORE obvious on Google Blurring Distinction Between Ads and Organic Search Results · · Score: 1

    I'm in the test group, too. The very first time I saw it, for a split second my brain wanted to think the ads were part of the organic results due to the lack of background color differentiation. Since then, I've not been at all tempted to accidentally click the ads, so I think it will make no difference a few days after they transition people over to the new layout (if they ever do).

  19. Re:Merge window buttons and menu bar? on Ubuntu 14.04 Brings Back Menus In Application Windows · · Score: 1

    That's the way I do it, actually, but it's not very discoverable for new users, so it's probably best to not assume they'll do it that way.

  20. Re:Merge window buttons and menu bar? on Ubuntu 14.04 Brings Back Menus In Application Windows · · Score: 2

    If you click the title bar to move the window around, the area you have to hit would be smaller (must avoid menus) and would vary from one application to another due to differing number of menus. I don't know if that's the "official" reason; it's just a hypothesis.

  21. Re:Rags to riches... on How Jan Koum Steered WhatsApp Into $16B Facebook Deal · · Score: 2

    it doesn't seem to translate well into the corporate profit engine well

    Advertising dollars spent on Facebook may be detrimental for companies buying "likes" through Facebook (even directly, not 3rd party). When advertisers figure that out, Facebook is done.

  22. Re:FTL Faster Than Light on Ask Slashdot: What Games Are You Playing? · · Score: 1

    I think the riddle he/she was trying to remember was this one:

    There are two people, one always lies and one always tells the truth, but you don't know which one is which. What would you do?

    The answer: Pick one, and ask him/her which way the OTHER person would tell you leads to riches and power, then go the opposite way.

  23. Re:Dear Dice on Australian Police Deploy 3D Crime Scene Scanner · · Score: 0

    I apparently still have the option...

    The option to turn the ads off finally popped up for me on a different page, so I've got them disabled now. I just wonder how long they will continue to honor it when stupidity like this causes the majority of people to use it.

  24. Dear Dice on Australian Police Deploy 3D Crime Scene Scanner · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Three VIDEO ADS on the homepage, and for FASHION THEATER (whatever that is), no less? Are you completely out of your minds?

    And, where is the link allowing people with good karma to disable ads? I've always tolerated the ads in the past to support the site, but this nonsense is ridiculous. I cannot have a bunch of worthless video ads sucking bandwidth away from my VoIP. Either get rid of this nonsense or I won't be coming here anymore.

  25. Re:Ya-what? on Security Expert: Yahoo's Email Encryption Needs Work · · Score: 2

    There still are a few things they do well. For example, their Finance feature is among the best in class of financial information (IMHO).

    Except that their charts show the price of the stock/fund without adjusting for dividends, i.e. there is no way to graph "adjusted price" or "growth of a $1000 investment." So, when a mutual fund makes a big capital gain payout, which has no economic significance (they hand you a check for $X per share and the share price drops by $X), the chart shows a big dip. If you try to chart two securities together to compare them it is totally misleading because of the economically meaningless dips when there is a dividend or capital gain payout. They have the data to do this right, it is displayed as the "Adj Close" in the "historical prices" table, but they don't make it available in the charts. When they've been doing something that dumb for over a decade in spite of complaints, how can you trust anything they do?