Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Soon to be 'encouraged' for lower insurance rat (Score 3, Insightful) 30

And mountain climbers.

And bikers in urban areas.

And people who have a temper (emotional stress shortening their lifespan don't' cha know..).

And soon, those who sit too much. Who don't do their expected exercise first thing in the morning. Who don't live however Our Exalted Overlords want us to live.

Thanks but no thanks to all this garbage.

Comment Re:By "Facebook" they mean ... (Score 1) 102

Yup... "No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?" -- George Orwell, Animal Farm -- apparently taken once again as an instruction manual instead of a warning.

Comment Ugh... (Score 5, Informative) 43

For now at least about:config --> browser.urlbar.update1 turns that ugly thing back off. From web searching, it looks like it was renamed on the nightlies around version 74, so expect that will probably go away soon and we'll be stuck with it.

Also: browser.urlbar.trimURLs if you don't care for the hiding of https and www.

Comment Executive Power? (Score 1) 171

How exactly is this constitutional? Congress presumably by law granted the Executive the right to make the loans and charge the interest -- I seriously doubt there's a "but waive it whenever you feel like" clause... if there is, the article definitely doesn't say it.

I know, I know... the FYTW clause strikes again. So annoying.

(And before someone starts frothing in a rage -- I don't think this is a terrible idea for an economic stimulus given the stupid amounts of debt folks are apparently running up, not going to argue those causes. I just want the government to use the proper process, not act in a dictatorial fashion whenever it feels like it).

Comment Re:US Legal system (Score 5, Interesting) 571

And that's how these things would normally be handled here as well.

In fact, it is mentioned in the article that it *did* go to small claims first, where the plaintiff asked for a ridiculous court-maximum of $6000 (for a $75 online purchase). That got found in favor of the defendant after the plantiff apparently admitted to destroying/disposing of the printer and had no further evidence of it not being as described in the sale.

Only after he lost in small claims did he somehow then take it to additional courts. I have a few thoughts based on the Indiana Supreme Court actually knowing this guy by name and commenting on his usage of the courts -- but the words "libel suit" are coming to my mind so I'll just keep my impressions to myself.

Submission + - NetHack 3.6.0 released

An anonymous reader writes: After 11 years, a new version of NetHack got released.

Comment Re:beta tester now? (Score 1) 201

Well, for the last month I've had my Mini which just sits there as an iTunes server run out of memory. Never happened before.

Trying to watch a bit with Activity Monitor, the kernel_task balloons up over 4Gb, Finder shows as non-responsive, the File Cache is only around 1Gb -- and "Compressed" is huge. Free memory the last time I caught it was about 16Mb out of 16Gb.

Given its role, I expect the File Cache to grow -- but either it isn't or Activity Monitor isn't reporting it as such, as it only shows a few Gb in normal operation and doesn't show at all when the problem state is hit. And even if it did eat all the RAM for caching -- if it can't shrink it down without hanging all the user processes then that's certainly a bug.

Otherwise, my assumption is that something is leaking in the kernel over time so the system can't find it to clean it up, everything else gets shrunk/compressed as it can and the reclamation hogs the processor in the worst case. Again, haven't seen this before Mavericks and based on some support threads, I don't think I'm alone.

Power

Environmentalists Propose $50 Billion Buyout of Coal Industry - To Shut It Down 712

cartechboy writes "What's $50 billion among friends, right? At least Felix Kramer and Gil Friend are thinking big, so there is that. The pair have published an somewhat audacious proposal to spend $50 billion dollars to buy up and then shut down every single private and public coal company operating in the United States. The scientific benefits: eliminating acid rain, airborne emissions, etc). The shutdown proposal includes the costs of retraining for the approximately 87,000 coal-industry workers who would lose their jobs over the proposed 10-year phaseout of coal. Since Kramer and Friend don't have $50 billion, they suggest the concept could be funded as a public service and if governments can't do it maybe some rich guys can — and the names Gates, Buffett and Bloomberg come up. Any takers?"
Science

Building an 'Invisibility Cloak' With Electromagnetic Fields 71

Nerval's Lobster writes "University of Toronto researchers have demonstrated an invisibility cloak that hides objects within an electromagnetic field, rather than swaddling it in meta-materials as other approaches require. Instead of covering an object completely in an opaque cloak that then mimics the appearance of empty air, the technique developed by university engineering Prof. George Eleftheriades and Ph.D. candidate Michael Selvanayagam makes objects invisible using the ability of electromagnetic fields to redirect or scatter waves of energy. The approach is similar to that of 'stealth' aircraft whose skin is made of material that absorbs the energy from radar systems and deflects the rest away from the radar detectors that sent them. Rather than scattering radio waves passively due to the shape of its exterior, however, the Toronto pair's 'cloak' deflects energy using an electromagnetic field projected by antennas that surround the object being hidden. Most of the proposals in a long list of 'invisibility cloaks' announced during the past few years actually conceal objects by covering them with an opaque blanket, which becomes 'invisible' by displaying an image of what the space it occupies would look like if neither the cloak nor the object it concealed were present. An invisibility cloak concealing an adolescent wizard hiding in a corner, for example, would display an image of the walls behind it in an effort to fool observers into thinking there was no young wizard present to block their view of the empty corner. 'We've taken an electrical engineering approach, but that's what we are excited about,' Eleftheriades said in a public announcement of the paper's publication. (The full text is available as a free PDF here.)"

Slashdot Top Deals

Dynamically binding, you realize the magic. Statically binding, you see only the hierarchy.

Working...