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Comment Re:Don't Complain... (Score 1) 561

by Phasma Felis (#43182759) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Block Noise In a Dorm?

Telling an ADD person that they have to get used to distractions is like telling a person in a wheelchair to quit moaning and walk already.

Why is it so hard to believe that not everyone's brain works like yours? With ADD (and some kinds of autism), a conversation on TV across the room feels like it's being shouted in your ear. It is not physically possible to ignore. It can't be fixed with practice or willpower any more than a severed spinal cord can be.
Science

Growing Consensus: The Higgs Boson Exists 254

Posted by timothy from the actually-they-just-like-to-play-with-equipment dept.
It's a long, slow road from tentative discovery, to various forms of peer review, to wide acceptance, never mind theory and experimental design, but recent years' work to pin down the Higgs Boson seem to be bearing fruit in the form of cautious announcements. FBeans writes with excerpts from both the New York Times ("Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.") and from The Independent ("Cern says that confirming what type of boson the particle is could take years and that the scientists would need to return to the Large Hadron Collider — the world's largest 'atom smasher' — to carry out further tests. This will measure at what rate the particle decays and compare it with the results of predictions, as theorised by Edinburgh professor Peter Higgs 50 years ago.")

Comment Re:Small print (Score 4, Informative) 204

The actual small print: $19.99 is for the power cells. The charger that the cells and your phone plug in to doesn't even have a price listed yet, which probably means it costs hundreds. Oh, and it's also not available yet, and pre-orders are sold out.

Slashdot fact-checking fails again. Great job, guys!

Comment Re:Can't Go Backwards (Score 1) 736

by Phasma Felis (#42883947) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Is It So Hard To Make An Accurate Progress Bar?
If an operation takes more than 10 times what it's supposed to, that is new information. The ticking of the system clock is new information, really. When a 1-second operation takes 10 seconds, admitting that you're lost and switching the estimate to "unknown" is less inaccurate/deceptive/an outright lie than sticking with "1 second remaining" for the next five minutes.

Comment Let it wait! (Score 1) 528

by Phasma Felis (#42347251) Attached to: Makerbot Cracks Down On 3D-Printable Gun Parts

For fuck's sake, guys, let it wait! In ten years or twenty years, once 3D printing is generally accepted in the home, then go ahead and make your little plastic hobby guns. 3D printing is an unbelievably vital technology, we need it to grow free and unfettered, and you assholes are handing the government a golden excuse on a silver platter to nip it in the bud and regulate it into uselessness because you just can't bear to wait to have shitty, worthless plastic guns.

What would file-sharing look like now if someone had found a way to, shit, I dunno, kill a 12-year-old with Napster three months after it launched? The RIAA would make that happen with a time machine if they could. Nothing turns the general public against a new technology like a solid, broad-spectrum THINK OF THE CHILDREN ad campaign. Do not let them do this.

Comment Good news! (Score 1) 346

by Phasma Felis (#42329627) Attached to: Hacker Behind Leaked Nude Celebrity Photos Gets 10 Years

Well, dang, Slashdot doesn't normally post good news! A scumbag gets caught and goes to prison. Justice is done, the system works, etc etc.

You hypocrites. If this article was about a EULA where someone claimed the right to publish the contents of your email without permission, Slashdot would be (rightfully) up in arms. But when some stalker-ass waste of skin actually does violate the privacy of a bunch of innocent women, suddenly privacy violation is perfectly okay as long as the victims were popular and used naive passwords.

Or else you're puking up non sequiturs about HSBC. Yeah, those fuckholes deserve to rot in prison too, and it's criminal that they won't be published. That's got nothing to do with Christopher Chaney's guilt.
The Internet

The State of In-Flight Wi-Fi 80

Posted by Soulskill from the cat-pictures-in-the-sky dept.
CowboyRobot writes "Byte magazine gives a run-down of the current state of Internet access on airplanes. 'All of the services function in basically the same way. They provide connectivity to the public Internet via a Wi-Fi hotspot accessible from the cabin of the aircraft. This in-cabin network may also be used to provide in-flight entertainment services ranging from television network feeds to movies and canned TV shows available from an on-board media server connected to the network. In the U.S., the Internet connectivity is available when the aircraft is above 10,000 feet and is turned off during take-offs and landings. Gogo, the current market leader, provides connectivity to aircraft via a network of 250 dedicated cell towers that it has built nationwide. Fundamentally, it offers the same type of connectivity you would expect to see on a standard 3G-capable phone. The connection is limited in speed to just over 3 Mbps — and all users on the plane share this one connection.'"
Hardware

How Peer1 Survived Sandy 130

Posted by Soulskill from the lots-of-inflatable-rafts dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "When hurricane Sandy knocked out the electricity in lower Manhattan, data-center operator Peer1 took extreme measures to keep its servers humming, assembling a bucket brigade that carried diesel fuel up several flights of stairs. Ted Smith, senior vice president of operations for Peer1, talks about the decisions made as the floodwaters rose and the main generators went offline, as well as the changes his company has made in the aftermath of the storm. He said, 'When the water got to a point that it had flooded the infrastructure and the basement, we were then operating under the reserves the building had on the roof, and our own storage tanks. Literally, at that point we had to do calculations as to how long we could run. And we believed we had enough diesel fuel—between what is in the building, and in our tanks, to about 9 AM the following day. ... You know the bucket brigade—it’s something I’ve never asked the team to do. If you think about what that was at that time, you’re talking about carrying fuel up 17 flights, in total darkness, throughout a whole evening. We had informed our data center manager that we were shutting down, but he kind of took on it himself to say, ‘Not on my watch.’ And he organized himself, got a temporary solution and then more customers jumped in. And at peak I think we had about 30 people helping.'"

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