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Crime

Girls Bugged Teachers' Staff Room 227

A pair of enterprising Swedish schoolgirls ended up in court after they were caught bugging their teachers break room. The duo hoped they would hear discussions about upcoming tests and school work, allowing them to get better grades. It worked until one of them decided to brag about it on Facebook, and the authorities were called in. The girls were charged with trespassing and fined 2,000 kronor ($270) each in Stockholm District Court.

Comment Re:Best way to fix it (Score 4, Insightful) 322

I'm pretty sure the GOVERNMENT has no concept of, or right to, ownership. .

This is incorrect on several levels. For one thing, ownership is actually defined by the government. Without a government, the piece of paper that says you own something would be worthless. Not only does the government have a concept of ownership, it actually creates all ownership.

"Owned by the government" means "belongs to the people" since WE paid for it.

Of course that is quite correct, but it does nothing to negate the grandparent's point. We the people paid for the property on which streets are built. Therefore in order to use that property for their networks, ISPs need permission from the elected representatives of the people, a.k.a. the government.

If these providers are not going to give all of us unfettered access to their networks, what incentive do we have to allow them to use our property to build those networks? They should buy their own damn land and put their networks there if they want to have total control over the signal. As long as they're putting the network on our land, we should have unfettered access to it.

Comment The construction of persona (Score 4, Insightful) 95

It goes beyond the problem of having different groups of friends. The problem is that in real life most people have many different personae. You would say and do things with your friends from college that you would never say or do in front of your boss, as the most obvious example.

IRL we put a lot of work into constructing and maintaining these different personae, and we do a lot of work to keep them separate.

With social networking as it is, that's all over. Even if you never participate in Facebook, you are probably tagged in dozens or even hundreds of photos, and the odds are pretty good that some of them show you doing things you wouldn't do in front of your boss.

So the question is, will we adapt the technology to allow the creation and maintenance of a variety of different personae, or will we adapt our own behavior so as to present one consistent, universally acceptable persona to the world?

I think many of us, particuarly the younger generation, are already doing the latter. In order to adapt to this, we have to adjust our expectations of people. Maybe as an employer, you just have to get used to being able to see pictures of your employees smoking weed at parties and so forth, and not let it bother you. However, until we adapt, it creates the problem that suddenly everything you say and do is potentially public (whether you participate in social media or not).

Comment Re:One of the most un-American things I've ever re (Score 5, Insightful) 618

This is a rediculously over-simplified misunderstanding of how society works. How do you propose "making" a job doing basic research? Research has to be funded, that's how it's done in our society. I'm afraid you're living in a fantasy world. This has nothing to do with anyone being "owed" a job. It has to do with setting priorities as a society. We've set up a system in which the priority is short term quarterly gains, and that's what we get. If you want a viable society in the long term, you have to invest in basic research.

Comment Re:Money, Career, and Life (Score 4, Insightful) 618

Exactly. That's why I left. I didn't care so much about the pay, doing science is in itself worth it as long as you're being paid enough to survive. Yeah, for some people it's that much fun.

But my advisor in grad school worked for ten hours a day in the lab, and then he went home and worked another six on his computer from home. His wife made jokes about being a "physics widow." He had a daughter, but he obviously wasn't participating in raising her.

That's no kind of life for a reasonable person. You have to have a monomaniacal disorder to want to live like that. So I left.

The problem is that there is way too much work to do and way too little funding to hire enough people to do it. The result is an attitude that if you're not willing to work 80-100 hours per week, we'll find someone else who is. There are plenty of smart people in the world.

This problem will persist until we make basic research the financial priority that it should be in order to advance as a society.

Comment Nuclear won't do it either (Score 1, Informative) 407

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. Nuclear power won't meet the world's energy needs either, not in any realistic scenario.

To replace enough fossil fuel use to resolve the climate change problem, we would have to build 3 nuclear plants per week for 50 years. The expense involved would be incomprehensible.

http://climateprogress.org/2007/06/18/nuclear-power-no-climate-cure-all/

http://keystone.org/files/file/SPP/energy/NJFF-Exec-Summ-6_2007.pdf

Even under extremely agressive but realistic growth scenarios, nuclear could only cover about a tenth of our projected requirements.

Wind, by comparison, does surprisingly well, as does solar thermal, but they won't be able to cover it all either.

http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/26/full-global-warming-solution-350-450-ppm-technologies-efficiency-renewables/

In fact, not only is there no silver bullet, there are no silver b-bs either. Any realistic scenario requires significan efficiency gains -- in other words, we're going to have to consume less!

That's the bit that people really have trouble coming to grips with, at which point they tend to retreat into a fantasy world of some kind.

Comment Re:no offense, but what a windows mentality (Score 2, Interesting) 300

infrastructures.org looks interesting, but then I see they mention things like 'NetSaint' which was renamed to be Nagios about 7 years ago, and references to "LISA '98".

Some of this information looks old. Am I right? These days, shouldn't we be thinking more about virtualization and cloud infrastructure?

That said, they do touch upon many good ideas. It seems that many mid-sized shops do follow some similar ideas.

Submission + - Atlantis blasts off on final mission (theregister.co.uk) 1

shuz writes: Space shuttle Atlantis lifted off today on its STS-132 mission to the International Space Station — the final flight for the venerable vehicle.

The mission involves three spacewalks over 12 days, during which the team will replace six batteries on the port truss which store energy from solar panels on that truss, bolt on a spare space-to-ground Ku-band antenna and attach a new tool platform to Canada's Dextre robotic arm.

Comment Re:Car hotspot? (Score 1) 135

I'm on a long drive. The passenger in my car is bored and wants to browse the Internet. There are kids in the back who are bored with their books and want to play on pbskids.org . I'm driving, my wife has a laptop and wants to check the Traffic on Google Maps. We want to stream Pandora.com through our car stereo.

Yes, there are other options for some of these issues but a Mobile Hotspot seems better and cheaper then many of the alternatives.

I'm not sure why Slashdot has an article on this. Mobile 3G Hotspots for cars have been around for a couple years now, but they seem really expensive. Crutchfeld.com had one for about $300.

Comment Re:US is one of the worlds largest exporters (Score 1) 555

That doesn't change the fact that we remain a nation of wasteful asses...

A couple shirts doesn't mean much, in the grand scheme of things - but if 350 million American made a similar decision each and every day, our economy would begin to turn around.

I'm not disputing that. In fact, I think we agree.

I was disputing the parent post's believe that the US doesn't "make anything itself". This is a pessimistic and uneducated belief.

I pointed out that the US *does* make many things, and we still export many, many goods.

Comment US is one of the worlds largest exporters (Score 2, Informative) 555

The rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

The United States still makes many things, and is still one of the worlds largest exporters, with over $1 Trillion in exports in 2009.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports

http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres10_e/pr598_e.htm

It appears that cars accounted for 11% of those exports:

http://www.trademap.org/tradestaz/Country_SelProductCountry_TS.aspx

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