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User: sunderland56

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  1. Re:Horrible coffee on The Next Keurig Will Make Your Coffee With a Dash of "DRM" · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The regular Keurig machine makes filtered coffee; it is not an espresso machine. It makes coffee under pressure - more pressure than a drip machine, obviously, but much less than a proper espresso machine.

    Yeah, I used to be a coffee snob too. The convenience of having a fresh, hot cup of coffee within a minute of stumbling downstairs every morning is worth a lot; not having to clean the grounds out of a french press is worth a lot too. Tastes vary, but with 50 or more varieties, there's usually something worth drinking. And, hey, convenience is what sells today; otherwise people would wait to get home to make their phone calls.

  2. Re:Search Software on Ask Slashdot: What Software Can You Not Live Without? · · Score: 3, Informative

    If I'm stuck using a Windows box, first thing I install is MKS Toolkit. That gives me a decent shell, vi, and grep - which will find anything in any file. No need for special search tools.

    (And yes, I know about Cygwin; MKS is vastly superior to Cygwin, since everything just works in a standard DOS shell, it doesn't require it's own special environment).

  3. Re:Huh? on Your Next Car's Electronics Will Likely Be Connected By Ethernet · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ethernet may work all the time - but there are no guarantees on packet latency. The basis of ethernet is that all traffic is equal; nobody has priority.

    Which, to me, sounds all wrong. I'd much rather the packet from the collision-avoidance system to the brake system saying "holy shit stop NOW" gets higher priority than the next packet of Justin Bieber headed to the back seat.

  4. Re:Go. Buy food. Leave. on Whole Foods: America's Temple of Pseudoscience · · Score: 2

    If you are in BestBuy and you talk to an employee, you're doing it wrong.

    Amazon.com is insanely popular in part because they have *no* sales associates, and they never try to up-sell you anything.

  5. Go. Buy food. Leave. on Whole Foods: America's Temple of Pseudoscience · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whole Foods has many products that regular grocery stores do not. I go there, buy the product I want, and leave. Yes, there are some aisles full of oddness, but I just skip those ones. In the end, it's just a store; buy what you want, leave what you don't.

    It's kind of like Best Buy; just because Monster cables are such a stupid overpriced quasi-religion doesn't mean I shouldn't go to Best Buy; it just means I shouldn't buy those cables.

  6. Re:It's just a tool I guess on Doctors Say New Pain Pill Is "Genuinely Frightening" · · Score: 1

    Heroin has already become massively popular as a recreational drug; so there is no downside to using it in medicine.

    A brand new drug meant solely for medical use - e.g. oxycontin - *will* become a street drug. There are many pharmacies that have been robbed or broken into just for the oxycontin; it is so bad in this area that many of them prominently display signs saying "We do not fill Oxycontin prescriptions - no Oxycontin on the premises". I think the point here is not to create another drug that will cause the same problems.

  7. Re:It's just a tool I guess on Doctors Say New Pain Pill Is "Genuinely Frightening" · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Can be used for good, can be used for bad.

    Both heroin and cocaine were originally developed as medicine. Turns out that their potential for misuse far, far outweighs any medical benefit.

    As far as new pain medicines go - why not just go back to using heroin? Cheap to make, easily available in generic form, and it's side effects are well known.

  8. GPL on Interview: Ask Richard Stallman What You Will · · Score: 0

    If you truly want free and open software, not "open source", then why not do away with the GPL? That license is a primary reason that many companies, and many developers, want nothing to do with anything 'open'; the terms of the GPL greatly restrict what you can do with the software. So why continue with GPL?

  9. Re:Bill specifically about Glass is a bad idea... on Google Fighting Distracted Driver Laws · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Entire text of a correctly done bill here: "The use of portable electronic devices while driving a motor vehicle is prohibited".

    That would ban cell phones, texting devices, google glass, and similar - but not prohibit anything built in to the car.

  10. Re:Ain't no body got time for that on 'Google Buses' Are Bad For Cities, Says New York MTA Official · · Score: 1

    Well, renovation of buildings tend to cost more than razing the place and building to your needs.

    Yes, if you are changing their purpose. But one high tech company is pretty much the same as another - they need a bunch of small offices, a few large offices, and usually some lab space. Other than changing the sign on the outside of the building, there's usually not much renovation to do.

  11. Re:Ain't no body got time for that on 'Google Buses' Are Bad For Cities, Says New York MTA Official · · Score: 2

    I would rather that a huge corporation like Google buy/rent an *existing* corporate campus, instead of building a brand new one. Isn't that far more ecologically sound?

    Last I checked, there is no large corporate campus vacant and available in San Francisco. (There's not a lot of vacant land to build a new one either).

  12. Re:Hold the lines on UAE Clerics' Fatwa Forbids Muslims From Traveling To Mars · · Score: 1

    This. Seriously - how many astronauts have ever been devoutly religious? Doesn't NASA generally hire scientists?

  13. Re:Buddhism on UAE Clerics' Fatwa Forbids Muslims From Traveling To Mars · · Score: 1

    it was a valueless "sacrifice."

    It was of great value to the horse.

  14. Re:Option is the key on Ubuntu 14.04 Brings Back Menus In Application Windows · · Score: 3, Informative

    The change *to* global menus was a few releases back, and was forced on everyone; it was not opt-in. This allows people to revert to the original, sensible behaviour.

  15. Focus follows mouse on Ubuntu 14.04 Brings Back Menus In Application Windows · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a big fan of focus-follows-mouse, this will finally make Ubuntu at least *usable*, if not pretty. FFM is in direct odds with global menus.

    Bonus points if they label the configuration settings "be like a Mac" and "be like every other computer on the planet". Maybe this signals the end of the continual macification of Unity?

  16. Not a car UI on A New Car UI · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is not a car UI. It is a UI for the car's entertainment system.

    The car's UI is still a steering wheel and throttle/brake pedals.

  17. Re:ipconfig /flushdns on Report: Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) Scans Your DNS History · · Score: 1

    Why is there an API call to read the DNS history in the first place? The only required API is "please look up this address"; I can't see any valid reason to have a "please give me DNS history" call.

  18. Re:Three Years? on Scientists Create Pizza That Can Last Years · · Score: 1

    They went to college; they know that standard pizza will last a month in their dorm, and just extrapolated.

  19. Re:Canonical hires only morons. on Why Do You Need License From Canonical To Create Derivatives? · · Score: 1

    Mark is a good guy.

    No. Anyone who would choose Unity as a user interface and distribute it to an unsuspecting world is NOT a good guy.

  20. Re:Really good question on NSF Report Flawed; Americans Do Not Believe Astrology Is Scientific · · Score: 5, Funny

    So instead of 40% of Americans having a poor concept of science, it looks like 40% of Americans have a poor concept of English. Is that any better?

  21. Re:Manager declares himself incompetent! on Good Engineering Managers Just "Don't Exist" · · Score: 1

    So, he's a manager (VP Engineering) and it appears he thinks he's not a very good engineering manager.

    He's also currently trying to hire a director of engineering, to work under him. So, he is simultaneously saying "managers are incompetent" and "would you like a job as a manager?"

  22. Re:This is worth a Slashdot article? on Background Javascript Compilation Boosts Chrome Performance · · Score: 2

    The "news for nerds" takeaway is: everyone is assuming mutiple-core systems now. For a single-core system, this will make things *slower*.

  23. Re:loving the new beta... on A Strategy For Attaining Cuban Internet Connectivity · · Score: 2

    Take a look at apple or microsoft's website if you want some perfection.

    You must be new here. You can't be *both* an Apple and a Microsoft fanboy; you must choose sides.

  24. Re:Its sad, but they're only cars... on Sinkhole Swallows 8 Vehicles Inside Bowling Green KY Corvette Museum · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Looking at that mess they did neither.

    If you were looking for excellence in engineering, I think the Corvette museum would be a bad place to start.

  25. Re:You Don't on Ask Slashdot: How Do You To Tell Your Client That His "Expert" Is an Idiot? · · Score: 1

    If they have an "idiot" as an "expert", this speaks a lot about them and they probably need your help quite a bit.

    They may *need* your help; but who says they are going to listen to you? If the idiot in question has been there longer, or has more status, or has a higher pay grade - they may well value his/her word over yours. In any case, the solution is the same - tell management that the "expert" is a bleeping idiot. They'll either (a) believe you, and you're ahead of the game; or (b) get rid of you, in which case you were up against an impossible task, and getting out of there right now puts you ahead of the game. You win either way.