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Comment use tags already (Score 1) 97

Unqualified ratings systems are painfully limited whether they are stars or thumbs. Context is needed to know *why* people liked or disliked something. I can read reviews to get a small sample of this (assuming people have taken the time to write good reviews), but letting users tag content allows us find stuff we like so much more effectively. Tags for sub-genre, themes, memes, good acting, bad SFX or anything else people might be looking for. I wish Amazon would do the same for books too.
United Kingdom

UK Government Proposes Minimum 10Mbps Broadband For Poor (thestack.com) 79

An anonymous reader writes: The UK's Local Government Association (LGA) is proposing a social tariff to ensure that minimum broadband access of at least 10 Mbps is available to all UK citizens at an affordable price. Last November, Parliament announced that it would begin work on a Universal Service Obligation (USO), which would grant all citizens the right to request broadband service with a minimum 10Mbps. At the time, Prime Minister David Cameron said, "Access to the Internet shouldn't be a luxury; it should be a right -- absolutely fundamental to life in 21st century Britain." Research by Ofcom in 2014 showed "marked relationships between socio-economic deprivation and [poor] broadband availability in cities". Similar results have been found in rural areas, which means that the demand for increasing broadband service to a minimum level may be high among people with lower incomes.

Comment Re:The most most seriously needed LEO database (Score 1) 185

No, they are not.

Because if they were, they would be fighting nail and tooth to get the 0.01% off the force and behind bars, where they belong.

As things are, there are three kinds of cops: 1. Dirty 2. Complicit 3. On the way out

You've just demonstrated that "for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong." Cynicism without realism is not productive.

1) Changing entrenched bureaucracies is hard and takes time no matter how good a person you are.
2) Most dirty cops are unlikely to announce their corruption.
3) Innocent until proven guilty applies to cops also and that makes obtaining convictions hard.

Yes, there are corrupt and complicit cops who need to be brought down. But there are good ones that will act to clean up the police force where they can. Those good cops are limited by law in what they can do to reduce corruption just as they are limited in how they can deal with any other crime. This is as it should be; we have rights for a reason.

Comment "direct detection" defined as: (Score 1) 69

For those who didn't read the linked decision: 'direct detection “involves connecting to a peer . . . and then exchanging data with that peer,” indirect detection “relies on the set of peers returned by the coordinating tracker [of a BitTorrent swarm] only, [and] treating this list as authoritative as to whether or not IPs are actually exchanging data within the swarm.”'

Comment 8 year old news, but sadly still relevant (Score 3, Interesting) 75

I found an 8 year-old article (http://perimetergrid.com/wp/2008/01/11/wpad-internet-explorers-worst-feature/) about this and how to disable it with a simple Google search. I'm still glad Slashdot posted about it today because I would never have realized it was a problem. How has this vulnerability existed for almost a decade without being rectified?

Comment Re:Call 911 next time... (Score 1) 153

In the vast majority of cases an ambulance is faster (and safer) getting to you than you are getting to the hospital and they can give you some treatment on the spot.

Source? A brief google search indicates that ambulance response times vary widely from place to place based on a variety of factors. I didn't find any recent sources specific to Springfield, MO. Twenty miles on a freeway is typically less than 20 minutes barring traffic. Do Springfield's ambulances typically respond faster than that? Was traffic a factor? How much would traffic impact the ambulance? How fast does the autopilot feature drive?

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