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User: badzilla

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Comments · 401

  1. Yes but when it lands?

  2. Re:Rent is Too High on America's 'Rent Crisis' May Be Ending (fortune.com) · · Score: 1

    Landlords can and do rent to you at less than his mortgage cost on the same property - it's quite common. The landlord is happy to eat the (probably small) loss per month in the hope of a nice capital appreciation. In other words the potential sale price of the property goes up enough per month that it makes the landlord cool with the gap between your rental payment and his mortgage payment. Of course the landlord would ideally prefer not have that gap but rents are extremely market-sensitive.

    This practice is IMO quite mad but it works so long as property prices keep going up, as they currently are in many areas. As soon as they start to decline (areas such as London right now) the wheels very quickly fall off this dopey business model.

  3. Re:Wholeheartedly agree on Why 'Shark Tank' Investor Kevin O'Leary Refuses To Spend $2.50 On a Cup of Coffee (cnbc.com) · · Score: 3, Informative
    People who like tea don't use tea bags

    This is outdated information; it was true 50 years ago but no longer. You can still just about buy loose tea but a trip to any supermarket will show you dozens of different brands of teabags. I am talking about regular people drinking tea in their offices not the occasionally-encountered specialist tea snob.

  4. Re: Only mousetraps offer free cheese on Microsoft Dumps Notorious Chinese Secure Certificate Vendor (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Letsencrypt sounded great but broke on installation for me. Broke (differently) for a work colleague also. When your product majors on ease of use then this is not good, not good at all. OK it's free, thank you, but especially as it rather bizarrely wants unusually frequent cert renewal why take the risk of it eating all your support time?

  5. Re:No mention of ticket prices on NASA Has a Way to Cut Your Flight Time in Half (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    The A4 Bath Road runs alongside one of the runways at Heathrow and is basically a strip of airport hotels. Whenever staying in one of the hotels I liked to stand at the front entrance and watch Concorde take off. Absolutely impressive and I would agree it is several times louder than anything else leaving Heathrow. I also live under what was the flightpath a few minutes flight time from LHR, that was pretty loud also.

  6. Re:if we learned anything in the past on Facebook Must Delete Hate Postings Worldwide, Rules Austrian Court (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Remember the last time an Austrian tried to dictate policy globally?

    You mean when Max Schrems got Safe Harbor overturned? I sure do!

  7. That's why I hate aquariums on Female Shark Learns To Reproduce Without Males After Years Alone (newscientist.com) · · Score: 1

    So she was in an aquarium alone and separated from her "long-term mate". Sounds pretty evil to me. These places need to be closed down.

  8. No problem here is your link. That particular situation is now resolved but would you like to bet your life that there are no more hidden things like this? https://www.theguardian.com/uk...

  9. Re:I'm all for advancement, but on Japan Says Yes To Mirrorless Cars (carscoops.com) · · Score: 1

    What if you wear fixed-focal eyeglasses for driving? These will allow you to see the road just fine whether directly or through a mirror. You cannot see a video screen however unless you remove the glasses (and in my case put on a different pair.) Varifocal or bi-focal would fix this but they are not cheap.

  10. Simulation rigs must be super kickass powerful on Neil deGrasse Tyson Says It's 'Very Likely' The Universe Is A Simulation (extremetech.com) · · Score: 1

    How about genocide all the sims and delete everything, then repurpose the hardware as a bitcoin miner.

  11. It's useful, just not several-hundred-bucks useful on Slashdot Asks: It's Been a Year Since Apple Watch Release, What's Your Thought On It? · · Score: 1

    I have the entry-level Pebble, the price of which has by now dropped to spare-change levels. It does most things that the Apple Watch does, except no heart rate monitor. It's fine for notifications, fitness monitoring, sleep tracking, and so on.

    I never lusted after any kind of smartwatch but tried one out because it was cheap enough to experiment with. My verdict: get one, you will find a use for it. A bit like a second monitor for my PC - at first I thought it was a waste of money but now I would not give it up.

    Most useful practical applications for smartwatch are (1.) Being able to look at notifications in meetings where pulling out your phone is frowned on but you can get away with looking at your watch (2.) Turn-by-turn navigation when walking through an unfamiliar city in the rain.

  12. Re: MY daighter is schedule to go on school trip.. on Japan To Begin Testing Fingerprints As 'Currency' (the-japan-news.com) · · Score: 1

    Biometric passport just means that the visible photo is also stored on there as a .jpg

  13. If someone is waving a talking gadget around in the workplace then maybe you can do something about getting it removed. What about their smart nose stud or some other thing that does not look like a threat? The only way would be airport-style security on your office door and I suspect nobody wants the expense or inconvenience.

  14. Re:BTW, what CHEAP options are there for x64 Table on The Reason a Surface Phone Won't Fix Microsoft's Mobile Problem (windows10update.com) · · Score: 1

    I run Rosetta Stone on an inexpensive Linx 8 tablet with Windows 10. Rosetta Stone wants you to load new languages from CD-ROM but obviously tablets don't have optical drive. You can get round that by plugging in a USB CD-ROM drive or creating an ISO on another computer. Apart from that everything works well. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linx-i...

  15. Attractive choice on Google Favors Less-Regulated UK For Self-Driving Car Development (telegraph.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    The UK land area would fit into California with plenty left over, we're just over half the size. Our population is almost double however, which means almost everywhere is really crowded. We're also used to driving in a reasonably/mostly/hopefully rule-abiding way. I think that makes us a good testbed for driverless cars. Bring it on Google, please.

  16. This is not a new thing on The Google Employee Who Opted For a Truck Over Bay Area Rents (dice.com) · · Score: 1

    In 1999 i had an extended business trip to San Jose to do stuff for Y2K. As usual my company made my travel arrangements but I couldn't understand why they had screwed up this time and put me in a shitty hotel next to a bunch of disgusting-looking shacks. It was several days before I found out these slums were actually insanely expensive homes costing five times as much as a large house back home where I lived.

  17. Bring it on on How Autonomous Cars' Safety Features Clash With Normal Driving · · Score: 1

    The truth is most people suck at driving. Genuinely good driving takes effort and concentration and most people however skilled or well-intentioned have got other stuff on their minds when they get behind the wheel. There's no hope of ever getting people actually to drive according to the rules so the only way is take the human driver out of the loop completely and the sooner the better.

  18. Re:Carphone? on 2.4 Million Customer's Records Stolen From Carphone Warehouse · · Score: 1

    It has also done well at retaining its colloquial name which is Crap-phone Whorehouse.

  19. huge learning curve on The Weird History of the Microsoft Windows Start Button · · Score: 1

    I had over a decade of computer experience when I first encountered Windows 3.0 and even so I was barely able to use it as the designers intended. I totally failed to see "windows" on the screen - instead to me they looked like overlapping rectangles which randomly concealed part of what you were doing. I was like wtf this is supposed to be the latest new thing? To make an even worse user experience this was on a monochrome 286 with 1MB RAM which was sloowww, hence even harder to see the relationship between things you clicked and things that happened.

  20. Re:Tylenol does nothing on Acetaminophen Reduces Both Pain and Pleasure, Study Finds · · Score: 1

    I'm in the UK and paracetamol is a common pain-relieving drug available over the counter.It used to be available in packs of 100 tablets or so but there were a few deaths and it is now restricted to packs of 16 tablets and the shop is not allowed to sell you more than two packs. Whilst I was in the US I found I could not buy "paracetamol" anywhere as nobody had ever heard of it. I was able to buy acetaminophen however (not realising it was theoretically the same stuff.) I can tell you though it is not the same - acetaminophen does absolutely nothing for me whereas paracetamol works fine.

  21. Joker on Ask Slashdot: Advice For Domain Name Registration? · · Score: 1

    www.joker.com never had a problem

  22. Logitech K310 because... on Ask Slashdot: Good Keyboard? · · Score: 1

    The Logitech K310 is reasonably OK to use and the build quality is pretty good. It is just an averagely nice keyboard although I do wish it had backlighting. http://www.engadget.com/produc...

    The unique feature of this keyboard is that it is washable and yes I mean rinse it in a stream of running water whilst scrubbing it with a detergent brush. Have you any idea how filthy and bacteria-ridden is a typical office or home keyboard?

  23. Union membership is a good idea on Teamsters Seek To Unionize More Tech Shuttle Bus Drivers In Silicon Valley · · Score: 2

    Some people have an irrational and emotional dislike of trade unions and are not afraid to show it, with words such as fools, idiots, morons, and so on. Crispin Odey the president of a 12-billion-dollar hedge fund would like to disagree with you: “... there is huge value in being in a union at the moment.” http://moneyweek.com/merryns-b...

  24. Re:Where did the real nerds go? on Google Quietly Unveils Android 5.1 Lollipop · · Score: 1

    If you really know what you're doing AND you get lucky with reasonable community support for your model of phone then yes this works. Otherwise there is a very good chance you will brick your expensive hardware. THAT is why everyone is not "just doing it."

  25. Re:Painted into a corner on Hunting For a Tech Job In 2015 · · Score: 1

    It must be well over 10 years now that the Pound Sterling currency symbol gets displayed as £ angstrom units or whatever the hell it is. I wish Slashdot would get around to fixing it.