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Comment Re:Provoking (Score 3, Insightful) 1130

Mod parent up. This is one of the most insightful post I have seen. There is no way that shooting blanks over our own cities (or real bullets in foreign cities) is going to make anyone love our government or the millitary. Our millitary has testing grounds to fire real bullets at. The only reason to perform this exercise over civilians is to get some form of reaction from the civilian. It has worked. There are now many of us who believe that those who previously were considered crazy, are infact right. I am now convenced that our government is actively against us. Who could have imagined that the day would come when I would be affraid of my own government?
News

Submission + - Machine gun fire from military helicopters flying over downtown Miami (miamiherald.com) 1

Okian Warrior writes: Multiple police agencies and the military are currently (Monday night) conducting training exercises over Miami and elsewhere in the county. The exercise includes military helicopters firing machine-gun blanks while flying over highways and buildings.

This YouTube video shows helicopters strafing highways with blank rounds near the Adrian Arts center.

There are reports of similar actions in Houston

From the Houston article: "if you see the helicopters or hear gunfire, it's only a drill."

Not to be alarmist or anything, but, um... WTF?

Government

Submission + - DARPA wants electronics that can dissolve or burst apart after use (networkworld.com) 2

coondoggie writes: "he Mission: Impossible TV show famously started most episodes with a tape recorded mission message that ended with: "This tape will self-destruct in 5 seconds, good luck Jim." Then it melted down in a burst of smoke and flame.
DARPA researchers seem to want to take that sort of destructive notion quite a few steps further by designing electronics — particularly smart phones and other devices — that can melt or at least partially dissolve to the point that they would be useless to anyone else who came across them."

Submission + - Scientists Unravel Mysteries to Spider Silk Strength Using Lasers

An anonymous reader writes: They may be creepy and crawly, but spiders produce some of the world's strongest material: silk. Weight for weight, spider silk is five times as strong as piano wire. Now, scientists at Arizona Statue University have announced that they have found a way to obtain a wide variety of elastic properties of the silk of several intact spiders' webs using a sophisticated laser light scattering technique.

Comment Re:I half agree (Score 1) 735

The Abrams Star Wars warmup: Planet destroyer with a SLOW trigger. check. Sword fighting. check. Flawed "gritty" side of humanity; society hasn't really progressed... check. Logic? none. check. Way more action than talking. check.

Season 1 Ep 4 - "The Naked Time" of the original Star Trek has all these qualifications and more. As a long time Trek fan, I honestly thought that this episode, more than any other, was the inspiration for the 2009 reboot. It was even the first Trek show to have time travel into the past.

Comment Re:It's Just What People Are Used To (Score 1) 162

I use gnome3 every day on my HP tc4400 tablet (it works great). I use xfce4 on my dualscreen desktop where it works better than gnome3 ever will. The developers of gnome3 are fixated on controling my experiance, and the forced 3d accelleration is simply not an option on my desktop machine. One example of the way the gnome3 devs have changed things for the worse is that "alt + tab" will not cycle through your windows any more. Instead (for some god awful retarded reason) they group windows of similar type. so when you want to copy something between two lowriter windows you can't use "alt + tab". It is (sadley) faster to move the mouse into the top left corner of the screen and then hunt for the other lowriter window among all the other shrunken windows. This is not "bitching because it doesn't work like the old software". This is a very real demonstration of how stupid some of the "features" of gnome3 are.

Comment Re:Warp vs Hyperspace (Score 1) 234

I noticed this too. I had always assumed that there were simply multiple ways of travel being sugested based on the fact that there were so many worlds who brought their technology to the galactic party. Some cultures on far away worlds developed "lightspeed" travel, while others found "hyperspace". The really mixed and divers galactic culture would have adopted both means of travel.

Comment Re:Make a white suit out of it (Score 1) 171

I have tried shopping at several second-hand stores and have found that their prices are way to high. I have priced garments that are priced around 75% the cost of a new garment. And what they sell is often well worn clothing that was donated after the death of a loved one to clean out the closets. These clothes should be sold at pennies on the dollar to help the local poor, but instead they are treated like gold. Economically, it is better to buy the new clothes and get a lot longer use out of them, than to save a buck or two on mostly worn out, over priced, second hand garments.
Oracle

Submission + - Is Oracle Linux acceptable? (redhat.com) 2

um... Lucas writes: I wanted to ask the slashdot community their thoughts on their choice of Redhat compatible distribution. I'm working on a project for which there's no money, but there may be in the future, so keeping initial costs down is important. The choices seem to be as follows:

RHEL — just get stick with the real McCoy and call it a day. I'm somewhat disappointed that Redhat doesn't make ISO's available anymore, but that's outside my control.

CentOS — CentOS seems to be RHEL, just free and without support. By my reading of it, CentOS is just a couple of people, who are busy repacking and compiling all the code coming from Redhat. My concerns with CentOS are A) no support option, B) if one of their key people got hit by a bus, that could introduce noticeable delays in their releases.

This brings me to the third option — Oracle Linux. I'm beginning to think that this is the ideal way to go — the distribution is freely available (unlike Redhat), yet support is available should I want the option (unlike Centos). I do wish that I could go this route with Redhat, but I can't.

I've also read a little bit about Scientific Linux, but since the maintainers are more concerned research institutions, I feel like I should side-step that one, as it would essentially leave me in the same place as CentOS would.

So the question here is, am I missing something? I'd really like to go Redhat, but can't justify the cost initially. Oracle seems to be getting a thrashing for their offering, but it really sounds like they're offering what I'm looking for.

So, fellow slashdotters, which way would you direct me? (If it matters, the installation will be the basis of blackbox hosting several virtual machines, virtually networked, with just one of them facing the rest of the internet). I'm still tossed up between KVM and Xen, but for developmental purposes, I'm going with KVM.

Thoughts are appreciated

Earth

Submission + - 200 Lumen/Watt Production Power LEDs Introduced (cree.com)

ndverdo writes: Cree just announced production power LEDs reaching 200 lumen/watt. Approximately doubling the previous peak LED light efficiency, the new LEDs will require less cooling. This should enable the MK-R series to finally provide direct no-hassle replacements to popular form-factors such as MR-16 spots and incandescent lighting in general. The LEDs are sampling and it is stated that "production quantities are available with standard lead times". Reaching a 1600 lm luminous flux light output these LEDs should bring a bright future indeed.
Java

Submission + - Colore - The IF-less programming framework (colore-framework.org)

An anonymous reader writes: What started as a hobby project about 5 years ago, now suddenly got a name...

While this framework was in development, it was always somewhat hard to explain what the use it exactly had; the few that did were always keen for the end result.

Now, the term IF-less programming got coined up for the problem of combining in essence procedural programming with objected-oriented programming.

This framework intends to provide a solution to circumvent this, by working around it and instead provide a dynamic and configurable way to map individual If-Else branches in metadata; complemented with Inversion of Control, Aspect Oriented Programming, Chain of Responsibility and the likes, this provides a solution and pattern that could be used across different languages and platforms.

Why bring all product to all the workers, when you can instead set up different factory lines for different "intents"/requests and have the request be handled in a neat procedural order?

Privacy

Submission + - Oliver Stone: "The US has become an Orwellian State" (rt.com)

dryriver writes: Americans are living in an Orwellian state argue Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick, as they sit down with RT to discuss US foreign policy and the Obama administration’s disregard for the rule of law. Both argue that Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and that people have forgiven him a lot because of the “nightmare of the Bush presidency that preceded him.” “He has taken all the Bush changes, he basically put them into the establishment, he has codified them,” Stone told RT. “It is an Orwellian state. It might not be oppressive on the surface, but there is no place to hide. Some part of you is going to end up in the database somewhere.” According to Kuznick, American citizens live in a fish tank where their government intercepts more than 1.7 billion messages a day. “That is email, telephone calls, other forms of communication.”

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