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User: asaz989

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  1. Great job Slashdot on Town Gets Patent On Being the Center of Europe · · Score: 1

    So apparently the whole of this story is that the village of Frauenkirchen has a trademark for its latest tourism campaign - "Mittelpunkt Europas" ("Centerpoint of Europe", more or less, or more idiomatically just "The Middle/Heart of Europe"). This is a trademark, laying a legal claim to the use of that particular phrase as a brand, not to the idea of being "in the middle of Europe" or anything remotely related to patents. Nice stretch, but no story.

  2. New York Times has odd sources on Google and Verizon In Talks To Prioritize Traffic (Updated) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    According to this Bloomberg story, the New York Times is only accurate in that Google and Verizon negotiated net neutrality on everything but mobile networks, and hence Verizon will be allowed to do traffic discrimination on those lines.

    But I find it a little odd to write up that story as "Google and Verizon negotiating an end to net neutrality" rather than as "Google and Verizon negotiating to preserve net neutrality on most internet connections."

  3. Re:not that much money on Afghan Tech Minerals — Cure, Curse, Or Hype? · · Score: 1

    20B dollars per year spread over 28 million people just about doubles Afghan income (from $800 per year figure above). When you're talking about that kind of subsistence level of income, that doubling of income means a much larger multiplication of disposable income for investment, which is what Afghanistan really needs - roads, education, police stations, and all the other things that there just isn't enough cash for. The mineral wealth will not do any good if it's just treated as additional wealth to be used on consumption; it will transform the country if used as much-needed capital for economic growth.

  4. Re:Oh so ridiculous on Afghan Tech Minerals — Cure, Curse, Or Hype? · · Score: 1

    Nobody is going to invest the needed billions of dollars in a country with no real government, no laws, no protection for private property, and every expectation of being taken over by the Taliban as soon as the US army leaves.

    The Chinese would. In fact, they already are.

  5. Re:Sen. Richard Shelby's Comment on SpaceX's Falcon 9 Appears As UFO In Australia · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, it is special. It's cheap. Which was the whole point, from the beginning.
    SpaceX isn't aiming to do anything new, they're aiming to do the same thing for less than half the price (per kilogram, Falcon 9 Heavy compared to the Ariane 5).

  6. Let me get this straight... on Are Googlers Too Smart For Their Own Good? · · Score: 1

    You're complaining that the API for Google Storage for Developers isn't user-friendly?
    This is for developers writing web apps requiring guarantees of security, synchronization, reliability, etc. It's not supposed to be a more "legit" version of Dropbox.

  7. Re:Hey, on Google Says It Mistakenly Collected Wi-Fi Data While Mapping · · Score: 1

    In reply to 2: The article actually says "These snippets [802.11 frames] could include parts of an email, text or photograph or even the website someone may be viewing." They're explaining what a frame is for people who don't know, not saying that Google was assembling and tracking e-mail traffic.

  8. Re:Its because doing business in Europe costs more on Apple's Haves and Have Nots, Around the World · · Score: 1

    Except that Israel is also on the no-direct-apple-sales list - not really the same situation economically as Europe. In fact, until about 2 years ago, they weren't even willing to put in the minimal effort to make iPods capable of displaying Hebrews (or Arabic, or Urdu, etc.) song titles. The fact is, they've decided that they're not even willing to put in the minimal amount of effort necessary to break into any new national market. Go figure.

  9. Re:Oh Noes!!!! on Ubuntu LTS Experiences X.org Memory Leak · · Score: 1

    The problem with using only older, proven packages for an LTS is that then, by the end of the expected service life of the release (which is, by definition, long) the software will be even more ancient than it already was at release time. So there's a trade-off between "it's LTS and hence has to be stable" and "it's LTS and hence needs packages that will still be reasonably current in three years."

  10. Re:Virtual Box on Good, Portable "Virtual" Linux Distro? · · Score: 1

    When did you last use Linux, 2000?

  11. Re:flicker-free? on Electrowetting Promises Power-Sipping, Daylight Readable Color Displays · · Score: 1

    Yes, exactly; when people say that these devices, and e-ink displays, are "easy on the eyes", flicker-free is what they're talking about. That's because these devices work by moving (by electrical means) little bits of matter in changed pixels for every refresh cycle - black or white beads for e-ink, little bits of colored oil for these displays. So when the picture stays the same, there's no off-and-on cycling, but instead the colored material just stays put. These devices sound perfect for your problem - flicker-free like e-ink, but with a fast enough refresh rate for use as a computer monitor.

  12. Re:Good publicity move on Obama Unveils New Nuclear Doctrine · · Score: 1

    My guess would be increased accuracy (all kinds of fancy digital guidance systems). For example: if you're trying to destroy a power plant, and (for the sake of argument) let's say you need to get within half a kilometer to really paste it, and let's also assume that 70% of ICBMs will land within that distance of their target; if you're aiming for several hundred targets and want really high destruction rates, you're going to need to use more than one device per target. Upping that hit probability to 90% changes the numbers by a lot.

  13. Re:Good and Bad on Obama Unveils New Nuclear Doctrine · · Score: 1

    You can't be in non-compliance with the NPT if you've never signed it. India, Pakistan, and Israel never signed it; North Korea signed it and then pulled out. The policy seems to be that the US is treating North Korea - and potentially Iran - as out of compliance with the treaty (departure from the NPT is of debatable legality), while treating India, Pakistan, and Israel as not bound by its terms.

  14. Re:Quick on Japan To Standardize Electric Vehicle Chargers · · Score: 1

    It's JAPAN, for crying out loud; they *have* no oil industry. Not on the American scale, at least. Instead, they have the giant nuclear-generated electricity industry. The political calculus is a bit different.

  15. Re:Did someone say lasers? on Japanese Researchers Develop World's Fastest Book Scanner · · Score: 1

    They only solve the easy problems. Automatic page turning they leave to some mechanical engineer (poor sods).

  16. Re:Hey guise on In Israel, Potential Organ Donors Could Jump the Queue · · Score: 1

    Are you kidding? Us Jews have a nice little story about how proud G-d was when we finally out-argued him on the fine points of His law. (look up the Oven of Akhnai if you're interested in the pretty hilarious details).

  17. Re:pig heart donors however on In Israel, Potential Organ Donors Could Jump the Queue · · Score: 1

    It's not okay to give one because of all sorts of prohibitions on mutilating your own body - no tattoos, no piercings aside from ear and nose (just cartilage), etc. The saving a life thing applies to *anyone's* life; the more shut-in Israeli orthodox types tend to disregard that commandment in favor of being batshit nuts.

  18. Re:Nitpick on European Parliament Declaring War Against ACTA · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually, ever since the Lisbon Treaty came into effect on January 1 of this year, the Parliament has to agree in order for ACTA to come into force. The way it looks now, it would fail by a very large margin, and ACTA would be null and void in the world's largest economy.

  19. Re:A firewall is the least of the problems on North Korea's Own OS, Red Star · · Score: 1

    Or maybe just more people.

  20. Re:Seems like the right solution to me on Schooling Microsoft On Random Browser Selection · · Score: 1

    What ever happened to a programmer's pride in the craft? Or (on a more self-interested level) checking what your interns do to make sure they don't learn bad coding practices?

  21. Re:What's the problem? on Schooling Microsoft On Random Browser Selection · · Score: 1

    A browser selection screen has a lot of money behind it (remember the billions of dollars of euros Microsoft got fined for lack of something like this?) If this non-random behavior slightly changes the proportions so that IE is (on average) favored by customers, their competitors lose out. If IE is on average selected less often than it would be with a really random shuffle, then that's money Microsoft is losing. Whichever way, it matters.

  22. Re:damned faintly praising? on Schooling Microsoft On Random Browser Selection · · Score: 4, Informative

    Are you running Firefox? One of the things that the article points out is that the specific type of non-randomness that sort gives in this case is implementation-dependent (meaning browser-dependent). IE being pushed to the end is what happens in the Internet Explorer implementation of Javascript; the version of Firefox that he tested disproportionately pushes IE to the front, and presumably other browsers would give a different distribution.

  23. Re:Actually anti-spam/botnet? on US Lawmakers Set Sights On P2P Programs · · Score: 1

    The big thing is the second part: popular voluntarily-installed P2P software can't share, say, My Documents by default without explicitly notifying the user. Probably a big motivation here is to prevent the kind of embarassing government leak that happens when some employee gets Limewire to download music and ends up accidentally sharing documents from work, like spreadsheets of social security numbers and addresses, or some politically embarrassing policy they're working on.

  24. Re:Fun trivia on Lost Nazi Uranium Found In a Dutch Scrapyard · · Score: 1

    It didn't corrupt to T/D in Romance languages; it was (and is) already pronounced as T in German.

  25. Learn how to use the external tools on After Learning Java Syntax, What Next? · · Score: 1

    Algorithms/data structures are solid grounding for whatever you want to do; from that point, it pretty much depends what kind of programming you want to do. If you're planning on doing graphical applications, try to learn about GUI programming (if you're definitely sticking with Java, learn its swing/awt graphics API). If you want to make a web-based Java applet, learn the workings of HTTP and setting up Java to interact with a browser. Basically, from this point (after the algorithms and stuff) learn project-specific concepts, and perhaps a broader range of languages (once you know one, it's a lot easier to learn others - the concepts are pretty much the same).