Slashdot Mirror


User: pauljlucas

pauljlucas's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,446
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,446

  1. Who says companies can't favor one candidate or party over the other. Fox News clearly favors republicans and that just seems to be accepted.

  2. Re:Not enough affordable housing? on Billionaire Tech Investors Support Divisive Plan To Ban San Francisco's Homeless Camps (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 2

    Replace "city" in what you wrote with "NIMBYs" and then it will be correct. City residents that already have their own home don't want more housing built. They're under the delusion that if they just stick to their guns, everybody else will eventually give up and stop moving here so SF can go back to the little town it once was.

  3. Re:Digital tethering is more effective anyway on Apple's Redesigned London Store Has Untethered iPhones (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    You know that, but I bet most people think it's just an ordinary iPhone. Besides, the phone will be a brick only after it's stolen.

  4. Used != banned.

  5. Re:Quite a spectacular PR disaster for Samsung ... on Replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Phone Catches Fire on Southwest Plane (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Full refund (not an exchange).

  6. Re:Too many problems to even be able to quantify on Sandpoint Town Square Home To First Public Solar Roadways Panel Installation (newatlas.com) · · Score: 1

    I have no idea whether this concept is feasible at scale, but it seems like the best way to know is to work on developing the concept. If we don't try, we'll never know.

    No, it's not feasible. The best way to know is to do math. You can work out exactly how much electrical power it takes to melt snow/ice per unit area, then multiply that by the total surface area of a freeway. It's a lot of power, way more than the panels themselves can generate.

  7. Re:A poor craftsman blames his tools. on Are Flawed Languages Creating Bad Software? (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    Fortran (the 1977 standard, not earlier versions) was/is a decent language.

    That pretty much invalidates whatever point the rest of your post may have had.

  8. Re:Well, that clinches it. on Oracle Formally Proposes That Java Adopt Ahead-of-Time Compilation (infoworld.com) · · Score: 1

    ANSI C doesn't specify things like either word size or endianness. Granted, many C programs don't care; but, when you need to, you have to write different code for different platforms.

  9. Re: Does anyone speak technical here anymore? on A Teenage Hacker Figured Out How To Get Free Data On His Phone (vice.com) · · Score: 1
    He wrote a proxy, so probably something like:

    http://tmobileunlimited.herokuapp.com/http%3A%2F%2Fslashdot.org/whatever

    The proxy fetches the content from the remote server to a local directory /speedtest and then serves the content to the phone from there (rewriting URLs in the process to be relative to /speedtest).

  10. Re:Not possible with Free software on Lawsuit Accuses Warriors' Mobile App of Eavesdropping On Fans -- Even When Not In Use (cnet.com) · · Score: 2

    If a free program wanted to do this, it would be readily visible and available for inspection to determine what exactly it's doing.

    That's the fantasy world that free software proponents* like to trot out. While it's technically correct, in the real world, however, very few people have the ability, motivation, or time to code-review every application they use.

    * Not that it should change my point one whit, but I also am a free software proponent, but not for that dubious reason.

  11. Re:As an actual Palo Alto resident on No Coding in Palo Alto? City Takes On Silicon Valley Growth (siliconbeat.com) · · Score: 1

    BART doesn't go south of Millbrae on the peninsula (and probably never will because of Caltrain). BART is going to San Jose from Fremont.

  12. Re: Autopilot will disengage on Tesla To Further Restrict Its Autopilot Software To Prevent Accidents (electrek.co) · · Score: 1

    Even though he's out of date with what aircraft autopilot can do, the point is that it was still called "autopilot" back before the enhancements. Over time, it got better as you pointed out. Presumably, Tesla's autopilot will get better over time too.

  13. Just eliminate messaging and mentions on Twitter Is Working On Anti-Harassment Keyword Filtering Tool, Says Report (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 2
    One way to fix Twitter would simply be to eliminate mentions and messaging. IMHO, the use-case for Twitter is to allow people to receive broadcast (one-way) messages from others.

    For example, if I follow Bob, then I (and everyone else who follows Bob) would receive Bob's tweets. If EvilJerk also follows Bob, he can be as outraged and tweet about it as much as he wants -- nobody except those who opted-in to follow EvilJerk would get his tweets.

    Problem solved.

  14. Re:Please state the street and number. on Singapore Launches World's First 'Self-driving' Taxi Service (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    You could still point on the map.

  15. Re:Please state the street and number. on Singapore Launches World's First 'Self-driving' Taxi Service (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    I would think that a self-driving car loaded with computers could have a screen and keyboard where you just type the address and get visual confirmation on a maps app.

  16. Re:so there you have it folks. on FBI Finds 14,900 More Documents From Hillary Clinton's Email Server (go.com) · · Score: 1

    Stein believes WiFi harms children's brains. (Google it.)

  17. Re:Oh yeah, that's money well spent on Metropolitan Police To Target Online Hate Crime and Abuse (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    The counterargument is that the perpetrator thinks their lives are worth less, so the law is compensating.

  18. Re:And yet HTML is still shit on The World's First Web Site Celebrates 25 Years Online (info.cern.ch) · · Score: 1

    Browsers now have to accept twice as many tags.

    To make your attempted point accurate, you'd actually have to say that they accepted an exponential number of tags 2^N where N is the length of the tag, e.g., "a" could be either "a" or "A", but "body" could be "bodY", "boDy", ..., "BODy", or "BODY".

    Nobody does that in a real HTML parser: they simply translate the tag name either to all-lower or all-upper case and then do the comparison.

    We dumb [sic] grave accent tags, like À for à and à for à which prevents browsers from converting all tags to either uppercase (or lowercase)...

    No it doesn't. The lexical analyzer handles all of this. If it sees an '&' character, it does the case-sensitive lookup for what follows and then returns the actual character that it represents back to the parser. If it's not an '&', then it does the case-insensitive lookup. Really, this isn't that hard.

    At least it isn't a badly designed and bloated as XML.

    HTML derives from SGML. If you think HTML is bad, SGML is much, much worse. XML is much easier to parse than HTML which is why XHTML exists.

    The worst think about parsing HTML (that you didn't even mention) was the fact that some elements (as they're correctly called, not "tags") have open tags, but no (or optional) close tags, e.g., <p>.

  19. Re:Would love to see something done on Robocalling Scourge May Not Be Unstoppable After All (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    That doesn't work with POTS, apparently.

  20. Re:You missed a couple of sections on Federal Court: The Fourth Amendment Does Not Protect Your Home Computer (eff.org) · · Score: 1

    The court says that when you download child porn from foreign countries, you should expect that you might get malware and your information might be exposed.

    Why should the content of what you download matter? What if I downloaded legitimate software? Also, why should the country of origin matter?

  21. Google Authenticator on Google Is Finally Making Two-Step Verification Less Annoying (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Does Google allow you to use Google Authenticator?

  22. Re:It could be worse... on WHO: Drinking Extremely Hot Coffee, Tea 'Probably' Causes Cancer (usatoday.com) · · Score: 1

    It's talking about temperature, not spice level, or specifically amount of capsaicin.

  23. Quite reasonable, actually. on Apple Is Fighting A Secret War To Keep You From Repairing Your Phone (huffingtonpost.com) · · Score: 1

    It's no secret that Apple makes a ton of money by charging 'astronomical' fee for replacing and fixing display and other components of iPhone and iPad (as well as Mac line).

    My hard drive on my out-of-warranty iMac died. I called a couple of local Mac repair shops in San Francisco and got quoted prices. I also got a quote from Apple: theirs was only $5 more than one of the local guys (that, as it happened, called me back to say that they couldn't actually do the repair) and about $40 less than the other. I was actually pleasantly surprised with Apple's price.

  24. Re:F the ACLU until they defend the 2nd amendment on ACLU Shows How the Apple-FBI Fight Was About Much More Than One Phone (theverge.com) · · Score: 2

    The ACLU believes no such thing. However, they do believe that no religious practice should in any way have anything to do with the government. Sorry if you don't get the distinction.