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User: DutchUncle

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  1. Re:Not upgrading may not be a (realistic) option on Amazon Restores Some Heft To Helvetica For Kindle E-Ink Readers (teleread.com) · · Score: 1

    this++. All of the apps on my iPhone worked fine, until one day a bunch of them insisted that they couldn't work without being updated. And of course the update requires updating the entire phone, which I don't feel like doing (I'm close enough to replacement that I don't want to destabilize until then). Part of the idea of XML and TCP standards was to avoid the need to tightly couple clients and servers; of course this is often ignored, or deliberately subverted, in the phone app space.

  2. Re:It's a wider issue on Amazon Restores Some Heft To Helvetica For Kindle E-Ink Readers (teleread.com) · · Score: 1

    The information is usually as complete as "Try it, you'll like it." or, "Your device no longer works with our server so you have no choice."

  3. Oldest technique: Keep information in your head on FBI Gripes "We Can't Read Everyone's Secrets" (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Nobody can read the diaries you don't keep or the lists you don't write down. I learned this from spy and mystery novels going back forever. And "'Allo ' Allo": "Listen very carefully, I will say this only once . . ."

  4. Re:Laughing myself out of the room on Are Roads Safer With No Central White Lines? · · Score: 1

    I recall a WSJ article by an "adult" financial guy brought into an engineering startup full of "kids" who took a while to understand that, in a meeting or discussion, "That idea sucks" was very different from "You suck", and was in fact only the BEGINNING of further detailed discussion and improvement.

  5. Re:Reasons why I don't like the Internet of Things on The Internet of Broken Things (hackaday.com) · · Score: 1

    You attribute to malice what can be simple ignorance. It's not that people don't give a shit about privacy; it's that normal non-technical people don't realize just how invasive things have become. Despite all of the news items, the little old lady next door keeps needing her computer virus-scanned because she keeps giving out her email address, and was too confused with ad-blocking so turned it off, and forwards on the chain emails that friends forwarded to her. She thinks she's being sensible because she only uses her credit card on Amazon, without comprehending (despite repeated attempts on my part) that if her computer has a virus then it can be copying everything she types on ANY page to anywhere in the world. I just thank the gods that she never got a webcam.

  6. Jimmy Carr's new "shortest joke" is a fine example on John Cleese Warns Campus Political Correctness Leading Towards 1984 (washingtonexaminer.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Jimmy Carr replaced his previously shortest joke: "Venison's dear, isn't it?" (which doesn't work as well for Americans, because it relies on the British expression for "expensive" . . .) with the even shorter: "Dwarf Shortage". He followed up with "If you’re a dwarf and you’re offended by that, grow up.” Complaints have been filed with the broadcast regulators about his "discriminatory" "hate speech".

  7. Re:Things that make you go "hmmm..." on EasyJet May Trial Hydrogen Fuel Cells For Taxiing (thestack.com) · · Score: 1

    But you can't capture any of the potential energy of elevation (certainly not without affecting flight characteristics - no windmills glued on the plane please). Mostly what you can get is the wheel spin from 200 mph maximum at landing. Well, maybe pop-out windmills to help the air-brakes on landing :-)

  8. Re:fresh clean water? on EasyJet May Trial Hydrogen Fuel Cells For Taxiing (thestack.com) · · Score: 1

    You don't need a brine tank. You just shake a salt shaker. Except distilled water will be fine for the glass or two that the average person gets on a plane, especially if they're eating pretty much any other prepared food.

  9. I can see the headlines: Mini-Hindenburg! on EasyJet May Trial Hydrogen Fuel Cells For Taxiing (thestack.com) · · Score: 1

    Yes, I know there is already a lot of explosive stuff on the average plane, including the door bolts (tell that to the next nervous seatmate you need to avoid). But hydrogen is so memorable in the storied history of aviation. Customers will freak. For economizing on ground time, so much cheaper and simpler to have more and better tugs.

  10. Re:All for free!!!! on EasyJet May Trial Hydrogen Fuel Cells For Taxiing (thestack.com) · · Score: 1

    Presumably the same equipment that is moving the plane by electrically driving the wheels during taxiing, so there's a few tenths of a percentage point off that dead weight figure. OTOH someone just managed to hide an electric motor inside a racing bicycle, I'm sure one of those teeny little things can move an airplane . . . not.

  11. Re:Market idea on CERN Engineers Have To Identify and Disconnect 9,000 Obsolete Cables (vice.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    Didn't the Moody Blues buy a lot of very expensive multitrack analog tape recorders from NASA to outfit a recording studio . . . which became obsolete just a few years later when digital took over?

  12. Just like the phone cables under NYC streets on CERN Engineers Have To Identify and Disconnect 9,000 Obsolete Cables (vice.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One of the few silver linings of the Hurricane Sandy damage: they finally pulled tons of old copper out of the tunnels and cable-runs and replaced it with fiber, because there was finally no way to be sure which was obsolete and which was current-but-damaged.

  13. Re:OK finally on Discrepancy Detected In GPS Time · · Score: 1

    "I am sluggish for want of recharge; my cursory examination of the room has required .8 seconds. . . . " - Keith Laumer, "Combat Unit"

  14. Re:Post your awesome and crazy theories here!!! on Discrepancy Detected In GPS Time · · Score: 1

    but . . . . . wouldn't that mean that the Matrix is . . . fallible?

  15. Re:I can understand the point. on Stephen Wolfram: No Need To Teach With 'Toy Programming Languages' Like Scratch (wolfram.com) · · Score: 0

    "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." - Edsger Dijkstra

  16. Re:Responsible party? on Linux Foundation Quietly Drops Community Representation (dreamwidth.org) · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Then . . . if enough people feel about this as you seem to, she could stand for election and lose. Instead the rules of the game itself have been changed to prevent even the possibility. Perhaps the next move will be to discover a history of voter fraud and enact more rules to disenfranchise more voters. I have no interest for or against in this particular matter, but as a casual observer it seems underhanded.

  17. One might hope this illustrates danger of backdoor on Backdoor Account Found On Devices Used By White House, US Military (sec-consult.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    .... but somehow I doubt that the anti-encryption crowd will get the point. Instead they'll point out how they, as government, are a different category.

  18. Re:How to deal on The Best Ways To Simplify Your Code? (dice.com) · · Score: 1

    Encapsulating the ugliness just pours epoxy on the technical debt. Managers will always say "leave the old stuff alone, it works, just work around it", when the new features or spec-changes are totally different; or the bug that someone finally found indicates that the old stuff really DOESN'T work, at least not in all cases. Your comments about the danger of change are valid, but sometimes the only real solution is to rip something out and replace it. Otherwise it'll be painful forever.

  19. But I thought open source software was perfect! on Zero-Day Vulnerability Discovered In FFmpeg Lets Attackers Steal Files Remotely · · Score: 0

    And safe! And bugless! and . . . . .

  20. Tragedy of the commons on Explaining the Lack of Quality Journalism In the Internet Age (gawker.com) · · Score: 1

    Grass is free, until the commons (or federal rangeland) is overgrazed. Fish are free, until humans diminish stocks beyond their capacity to breed replacement.

  21. Was there no other location in all of Austin ...? on Oracle Asked To Help Low-Income Residents Evicted For Its New Cloud Campus (cio.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Was there no other location in all of Austin to build, other than destroying this housing? No empty Texas Instruments factories, no half-constructed unfinished see-through buildings? Nothing that could really use destroying and replacing? No open land?

  22. Re:Won't work on Ask Slashdot: Any Dishwasher Hackers Out There? · · Score: 1

    Ok. So cite us some examples of hardware that has been uncrippled EXCLUSIVELY through a software update.

    Most cellphones. I had the original Motorola RAZR that did all sorts of wonderful things . . . in Europe. But not when connected to any American network. For example, you couldn't add MP3s to use as your own ringtones.

  23. Re:Dropout rate in college CS1 is horrendous on College Board Mainstreams AP Computer Science (collegeboard.org) · · Score: 1

    ... t the concentration on syntactic detail, etc. in the original put kids off.

    A friend of mine teaches at the community college level. He regales us with stories about the total inability of students to assemble a coherent and grammatical sentence, let alone a thoughtful paragraph. Syntax isn't everything - one can certainly communicate with people whose native language has a different grammar and syntax than one's own - but it can be an important part of conveying meaning.

  24. Re:What the point? on College Board Mainstreams AP Computer Science (collegeboard.org) · · Score: 1

    Maybe problem solving using logic is a new idea to some of these students.

  25. Embarrassment that this is done in my name on US Stops British Muslim Family From Boarding Flight To Visit Disneyland (theguardian.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was in Britain last summer (Scotland, specifically) for the Fringe. No visa on our US passports, no problems at arrival airport, immigration security people firm (as is their job) but polite. It *can* be done nicely. Reading British coverage of this, I am embarrassed that, as an American, my personal reputation (and future welcome back) is sullied by poor handling of this situation. This should be the same as a police stop: There has to be a reason, and the person should be TOLD the reason, and it better be a good enough reason to justify screwing up someone's day, not to mention potentially losing out on the expense of the tickets. Considering most of these cases are going to be false positives, the impression it gives of the US as a randomly secret-police state is a stain on all of us.