Slashdot Mirror


User: Trepidity

Trepidity's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
7,941
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 7,941

  1. Re:Coming to a plane journey on Ebola Outbreak Continues To Expand · · Score: 5, Informative

    It also doesn't transmit very easily. So far there are no known cases of it being transmitted in a plane or airport, despite several known Ebola cases having flown on planes. In each case everyone who had flown with them was monitored, but nobody developed the illness.

    It helps that it doesn't travel by air or aerosols.

  2. they're also toys though on Amazon Fire Phone Reviews: Solid But Overly Ambitious · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Smartphones are for work, for life. They're not toys, they're tools."

    Eh, if that were strictly the case, the market would be a lot different. Smartphones are a lot of things: tool, toy, fashion, entertainment.

  3. Re:And BD-Java is good how exactly? on Open-Source Blu-Ray Library Now Supports BD-J Java · · Score: 1

    Well the DRM isn't actually a useful feature, but having a player that supports BD-J, when BD-J is used for some kinds of DRM, is useful insofar as it lets you view the DRM'd discs.

    If the question is whether BD-J being part of Blu Ray has added any useful features to Blu Ray, then I think the answer is no.

  4. Re:Cubic Inches? on Google Offers a Million Bucks For a Better Inverter · · Score: 2

    American engineering tends to use US-customary units. Scientific research mostly uses metric, but engineering uses mostly US-customary, somewhat varying by field (e.g. medical devices tend to use metric).

    Interestingly it's so ingrained into a lot of aspects of North American production that even Canada, which has switched to using metric for engineering, has a lot of parts specified in a way that obviously refers to customary units, with things strangely coming in multiples of 25.4mm, 0.454kg, and the like.

  5. Re:weird choice on Japan To Offer $20,000 Subsidy For Fuel-Cell Cars · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ah good point on (B). Also, since the Japanese public has gotten very skeptical of nuclear power post-Fukushima, that's likely to just put more upward pressure on electricity prices.

  6. weird choice on Japan To Offer $20,000 Subsidy For Fuel-Cell Cars · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My impression is that, 10 or 15 years ago, electric vehicles and fuel-cell vehicles were perhaps equally good candidates for "future non-petroleum car technology", but that electric vehicles have been developing much faster, while fuel-cell vehicles have been going nowhere. Why now place a large bet on fuel cells?

  7. Re:Not fungible on US Senator Blasts Microsoft's H-1B Push As It Lays 18,000 Off Workers · · Score: 2

    I wonder if just putting a wage floor would help out with some of those abuses. Say, you can use H1B, but only for salary offers above $100k. That way H1B can be used to fill high-skill jobs with shortages, but not lower- and middle-end jobs.

  8. Re:Not fungible on US Senator Blasts Microsoft's H-1B Push As It Lays 18,000 Off Workers · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If tech companies weren't shit at training they would be somewhat more fungible, though not perfectly so. Engineering companies are somewhat better at this: if a company is looking for chemical engineers and can't find someone with experience in exactly the process they're hiring for, they'll hire a chemical engineer with experience in a different process and get them up to speed. Tech companies seem incapable of doing that, and instead they have a big list of really specific background they want, "must have 7 years of experience in J2EE and 3 years experience using Joe Bob's Serialization Framework", then complain they can't find anyone so it must be a "programmer shortage".

  9. Re:Silly argument on US Senator Blasts Microsoft's H-1B Push As It Lays 18,000 Off Workers · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not clear yet how the the layoffs will be distributed, but they certainly won't be all in Finland. Microsoft's already given notice of 1351 layoffs in Redmond, and that's likely only the first round of Redmond layoffs.

  10. Re:Way to Striesand yourself on $10 Million Lawsuit Against Wikipedia Editors "Stragetically" Withdrawn · · Score: 2

    They did, though? Or at least the article currently says that. Here is what Wikipedia says at the moment:

    Court cases

    In 1982, Barry was convicted of extortion from and conspiracy against John Royden McConnell, and served 10 months of a 6-year prison term.[4][23]

    In a 1982 civil case, a separate court ruled that Barry had extorted money from McConnell in record company dealings, requiring a financial award of C$285,000.[10] In 1987 he declared bankruptcy, voiding the award.[24][1] Barry said in an October 2013 Larry King interview that he had been a cocaine-addicted, twenty-something rocker at the time and credited the extortion conviction for changing his personal life.[25]

    In 1998, Barry was indicted on corruption charges related to a VitaPro contract worth US$34 million with the Texas prisons.[26][27] In 1999, the Texas Supreme Court ruled the VitaPro contract with the Texas prisons was invalid.[28] After a trial in 2001, he was initially declared guilty, but the verdict was thrown out by U.S district court judge and a new trial was ordered in 2007.[26] He was then acquitted in 2008 after a bench retrial.[26] Barry said the charges were politically motivated.[24][27]

  11. why bother now? on Australian Website Waits Three Years To Inform Customers of Data Breach · · Score: 1

    At this point they'd probably end up with fewer problems just by keeping it quiet forever.

  12. Re:Battler on Australia Repeals Carbon Tax · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How come your neighbor New Zealand can do better?

  13. Re:Pwned on Australia Repeals Carbon Tax · · Score: 2

    When it comes to Tone Abbott it's hard to limit yourself to just one or two examples of stupidity, but one of the more impressive fuckups was that he's so rabidly supportive of Sri Lanka's questionable government, that even the UK and USA are getting annoyed.

  14. Re:Much more dangerous than regular van. on FBI Concerned About Criminals Using Driverless Cars · · Score: 1

    Yes, because of past car bombings, it's much harder to park a van in front of somewhere sensitive for even a few minutes. There is definitely a "demand", so to speak, for a remote-control van that wouldn't have to park.

  15. Re:Weren't they trying to merge with Comcast? on Time Warner Turns Down Takeover Bid From Rupert Murdoch · · Score: 1

    There's a whole slew of ex-TW companies that kept various parts of the name. It's kind of a mess, possibly deliberately.

    As another example: the entertainment production company, Warner Bros., which produced both films and music, was acquired by Time Warner. Fast-forward some decades, and there are now two companies named Warner, one of which is part of TW and one of which isn't. The film part is still known as Warner Bros and is still owned by Time Warner. The music part, formerly known as Warner Bros Music, was renamed to Warner Music, and then recently (2011) sold off to some holding company, so despite still being branded as the Warner music arm, it's no longer owned by Time Warner, or related to the film part of Warner.

  16. Re:Weren't they trying to merge with Comcast? on Time Warner Turns Down Takeover Bid From Rupert Murdoch · · Score: 4, Informative

    Is Time Warner's ISP a different business than Time Warner's content company or something?

    Yeah, Time Warner spun off Time Warner Cable in 2009 as a separate company.

  17. Re:Security by obscurity on Australian Electoral Commission Refuses To Release Vote Counting Source Code · · Score: 1

    One way of putting #2 is that it's easier to mess with paper ballots, but harder to mess with a lot of them and get away with it. If you want to change 100,000 paper votes, a lot of people are going to have to be in on it.

  18. Re:Nothing to see here, move along. on Australian Electoral Commission Refuses To Release Vote Counting Source Code · · Score: 1

    Surely they wouldn't use the services of a country as untrustworthy as Russia! I have confidence that they'll send it to a legitimate democracy for review, like their close ally Sri Lanka.

  19. Re:This is the problem with having a two party sys on Rand Paul and Silicon Valley's Shifting Political Climate · · Score: 3, Informative

    Someone who supports conservative economic policy but liberal social policies, in any other country, has a mainstream party to get behind.

    In some kind of relative sense, yes, but there is no mainstream party in most of the west that supports policies like Rand Paul's. In most of Europe, the "economically conservative but socially liberal" parties have economic policies to he left of the Democrats, including support for national healthcare.

  20. this isn't really new on Rand Paul and Silicon Valley's Shifting Political Climate · · Score: 1

    The Valley has long had a handful of superrich libertarian types. Thiel is one of the better known, and is really more of a Wall Street type who now makes investments in the Valley. He made his money in hedge funds, not in technology. He's been involved with various Republican and Libertarian causes since the '80s.

  21. Re:I don't have a phone on Your Personal Data Is On Your Phone -- In the Form of Bacteria · · Score: 4, Funny

    Is that still legal?

  22. Re:In a week it'll need to be updated to @toredits on Bot Tweets Anonymous Wikipedia Edits From Capitol Hill · · Score: 1

    There's no real reason to use Tor to avoid getting on these lists, just create an account and then your IP is hidden.

  23. Re:more conspiracy theory nonsense on Fighting Climate Change With Trade · · Score: 1

    You know, we have $10/gal gas in Denmark, and are not exactly in the poor house. In fact whenever I travel to the U.S., it seems third-world in comparison, full of crime, poverty, and pollution. Maybe you want to get out of the dark ages and become an advanced, first-world society?

  24. result of the lab/funding system on Elite Group of Researchers Rule Scientific Publishing · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    It's increasingly the job of professors at research universities in the sciences to be more of a "research manager" than a "researcher". They're expected to have a big lab of 5-15 students and postdocs, and to bring in enough grant funding to pay for this lab. The ones who are successful at this lab-head game bring in a bunch of money, have a large lab, and as a result oversee a lot of work that comes out of that lab, most of which has them as a co-author. Individual researchers without a team can't really compete against that.

  25. hope they win on Utility Wants $17,500 Refund After Failure To Scrub Negative Search Results · · Score: 4, Interesting

    On the one hand, it was a dumb purchase on the part of Seattle City Light. But on the other hand, I do think there needs to be some crackdown on bullshit advertising in the SEO/PR sector. Maybe if a few companies get sued for breach of contract, they'll be more careful what services they claim to offer in the future.