Comment Re:What's wrong (Score 0, Offtopic) 556
At least you made your trolling blatant.
Comment Chiming in.... (Score 3, Insightful) 556
My sister was brutally murdered and I knew from that point on that killing her killer would not make a difference to how I felt. How I still feel 20 years later... Still, bad deeds must be punished. I only wish her killer was killed by bashing his head in and strangling him like he did my sister. If we did that - kill the killer with the same method they used - it might become a deterrent again.
The main reason why capital punishment is not a deterrent is because we sugar-coat it. We put padded language around it. We get offended by a tweet reporting the go-ahead was made. And then we put them to sleep gently. All because our pussy-ass pacifist socialist education system brainwashes us into discarding any sense of honor, integrity, accountability and responsibility.
Executions should be announced with a media bullhorn and the country should stop everything else while its happening. No, we shouldn't broadcast the actual event. But we should acknowledge and witness when it occurs. We need to make our population instinctively aware that execution is a consequence - that there is a consequence for all our actions and transgressions against others.
Made-For-Torrents Sci-Fi Drama "Pioneer One" Debuts 321
QuantumG writes "The first episode of the new science fiction drama Pioneer One has debuted and it looks like a hit. The pilot was shot for just $6,000, raised through the micro-funding platform Kickstarter, and the production is being supported through donations on the show's website. Donations can be made on a sliding scale with 'bonus' rewards for each level, such as an MP3 of the opening theme and deleted scenes. The show is being distributed through file-sharing systems such as BitTorrent and LimeWire thanks to VODO, the group that also helped produce it. Is this the future of television?"
Digitally Filtering Out the Drone of the World Cup 602
qubezz writes "World Cup soccer fans may think a hornet's nest has infiltrated their TVs. However the buzz that is the background soundtrack of the South African-hosted games comes from tens of thousands of plastic horns called vuvuzelas, that are South Africa's version of ringing cowbells or throwing rats. It looks like the horns won't be banned anytime soon though. A savvy German hacker, 'Tube,' discovered that the horn sound can be effectively filtered out by applying a couple of digital notch filters to the audio at the frequencies the horn produces (another summary in English). Now it looks like even broadcasters like the the BBC and others are considering using such filters on their broadcasts."
FBI's Facebook Monitoring Leads To Arrest In England 329
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that armed police were called to a UK school earlier today after being advised of a potential threat by the FBI. The school stated that the FBI 'raised the alarm after Internet scanning software picked up a suspicious combination of words,' strongly implying that they are carrying out routine, automated surveillance of social networking sites. While in this case it does appear that there may have been a genuine threat, the story nonetheless raises significant privacy concerns."
Airplanes Unexpectedly Modify Weather 223
reillymj writes "Commercial airliners have a strange ability to create rain and snow when they fly through certain clouds. Scientists have known for some time that planes can make outlandish 'hole-punch' and 'canal' features in clouds. A new study has found that these odd formations are in fact evidence that planes are seeding clouds and changing local weather patterns as they fly through. In one case, researchers noted that a plane triggered several inches of snowfall directly beneath its flight path."
Newsweek Easter Egg Reports Zombie Invasion 93
danielkennedy74 writes "Newsweek.com becomes the latest in a long list of sites that will reveal an Easter egg if you enter the Konami code correctly (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter). This is a cheat code that appeared in many of Konami's video games, starting around 1986 — my favorite places to use it were Contra and Life Force, 30 lives FTW. The Easter egg was probably included by a developer unbeknownst to the Newsweek powers that be. It's reminiscent of an incident that happened at ESPN last year, involving unicorns."
MA High School Forces All Students To Buy MacBooks 1217
An anonymous reader sends in this excerpt from the Salem News:
"A new program at Beverly High will equip every student with a new laptop computer to prepare kids for a high-tech future. But there's a catch. The money for the $900 Apple MacBooks will come out of parents' pockets. 'You're kidding me,' parent Jenn Parisella said when she found out she'd have to buy her sophomore daughter, Sky, a new computer. 'She has a laptop. Why would I buy her another laptop?' Sky has a Dell. Come September 2011, every student will need an Apple. They'll bring it to class and use it for homework. Superintendent James Hayes sees the technology as an essential move to prepare kids for the future. The School Committee approved the move last year, and Hayes said he's getting the news out now so families can prepare. 'We have one platform,' Hayes said. 'And that's going to be the Mac.'"
Comment We purchase fuel by gallons, not miles. (Score 1) 1042
fuel/distance is useless for the driver. A driver says to himself when he is at the gas station, "My trip is x miles and my tank holds y gallons. How many gallons does it take to get to x?" ie mpg. x, the distance, is the constant - and desired goal. Not the available fuel.
No one gets in their car and says well, we can only go to Knotts Berry Farm because we don't have enough gas to get to Disneyland.
All you guys are doing is inverting the ratio and changing the units. Gallons versus liters is irrelevant because gal (u) = L is simply gal = (1/u)L
You have to understand the US ratio x distance per 1 fuel-unit. You guys are saying y fuel-units/100 distance. We literally say "more miles to the gallon" as a perfomance ratio. Its an encouraging statement.
Saying "less liters to the 100km" is psychologically depressing. Everyone wants "more", not "less."
How big would Billy Idol be if he sang, "In the midnight hour, I want less, less, less..."
Comment Re:Breaking! mlpm (Score 1) 1042
The MPG scale *IS* liner. Sheesh - what do they teach you guys in Europe!? 1mi +1mi = 2mi. 1gal +1gal = 2 gal.
Comment Re: The unit is linear, easy to understand!? (Score 1) 1042
How is mlpm easier to understand when auto efficiency and roads in the USA are measured in gallons and miles?
Wanna know a secret? MPG and miles are also linear!
"mlpm helps put the idea that gasoline is a great resource
WTF? You think that if you sliced the unit to 1000th of a greater unit it makes it more sacred? LOL. Have you ever looked at the psychology of currency? The smaller the unit, the less people care about it. People throw pennies in the trash! I would wager that the opposite is true. If I had only 1 of something, I would treasure it more than 1000 littler somethings. I could afford to lose a few hundred of the littler somethings because if I round up I still have 1 something.
A slurpee is ~1/4 a gallon
YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT IS SUBJECTIVE to the units you are comfortable with. A liter is about 34 ounces (~1/4 gal) - or about 1 Big Gulp Slurpee and an extra sip! LOL. Europeans are already using the slurpee-unit!
If you want to make something sacred, make it expensive and harder to obtain. Like the diamond industry does. Oh, that's right they are ripping us off when it isn't necessary!
*
Regardless, the real solution to the perception problem in the post is to upgrade from a 10mpg car to a 50mpg car. Arguing that the 10-20 path saves more will only encourage people to drive 20mpg cars rather than 50 mpg cars.
These upgrade paths measure % improvement, not actual savings. A 33mpg saves more than the 20mpg car - without upgrading at all!
Comment Time to port (Score 1) 595
Why aren't we mentioning time to port? I think that's a significant variable.
Comment The answer is (Score 1) 595
Because Apple is the biggest tech company now. You should read Slashdot more often
Senators Question Removal of NASA Program Manager 67
Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times reports that one day after the removal of NASA's head of the Constellation Program, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the committee that oversees NASA, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the committee's ranking Republican, have asked NASA's inspector general to look into whether the NASA leadership is undermining the agency's moon program and to 'examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives' to President Obama's proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies. Congress has yet to agree to the president's proposed policy, and has inserted a clause into this year's budget legislation that prohibits NASA from canceling the Constellation program or starting alternatives without Congressional approval. The Constellation manager, Jeffrey M. Hanley, whose reassignment is being called a promotion, had been publicly supported by the NASA administrator and other NASA officials. But he may have incurred displeasure by publicly talking about how Constellation could be made to fit into the slimmed-down budgets that President Obama has proposed for NASA's human spaceflight endeavors."
BP Says "Top Kill" Operation Has Failed 768
MrShaggy sends a quote from a CBC story: "BP has scuttled the 'top kill' procedure of shooting heavy drilling mud into its blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico after it failed to plug the leak. BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told reporters on Saturday that over the last three days, the company has pumped more than 30,000 barrels of mud and other materials down the well but has not been able to stop the flow. 'These repeated pumping[s], we don't believe will likely achieve success, so at this point it's time to move to the next option,' Suttles said."
