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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Well done! (Score 1) 540

It's not really just about annoying the neighbours. If you stick all the poor people in the same neighbourhood, then all the poor kids will go to schools with poor kids, and all the rich kids will go to school with rich kids. Since schools are funded by property taxes, the poor kid schools always end up having less money. If you mix poor and rich kids in the same areas, and they attend the same schools, and benefit from the same property taxes, then things end up much more even. Instead of one school having everything, and another having nothing, you'd have all the schools with similar amounts of resources.

Some states (like Michigan) have addressed this by changing things up, and funding schools on a statewide basis rather than from property taxes.

Comment Re:Lets be frank (Score 3, Interesting) 216

They're a company that wants to stay in business. TV's about as locked in as can be and even they're draining audiences in one form or another. The internet is an amazing levelling field, and even if terrestrial TV packed up and quit tomorrow, there'd be no firm reason NetFlix alone would dominate the internet markets. They're playing the same game by locking up good content behuind their platform so that if/when the sh hits the fan, they'll have something to keep loyal customers paying well for their services.

Er, so?

Yes, on a broad scale to get quality TV, it will still be made by people who make money off of it. It should be a relief that someone can still do that, not a bad thing.

Comment Re:What a wonderful unit! (Score 1) 332

At first I thought that the 'Acre-Foot' sounded like a joke unit, but obviously it is the amount of water that one hundred and twelve horses need to drink if they are each to plough eight hundred furlongs of furrow in a fortnight!! Honestly, you Americans just crack me up with your wacky units. So much more fun than being stuck with boring old litres!

Oh sure, privilege the number ten just because humans have ten fingers.

I thought you were supposed to be more progressive than us backwater colonies? :) Tsk, tsk; so human-centric ...

Comment what, no woman tie-in? (Score 1) 121

(Aside: what, no woman-in-CS tie-in? What with women being more social, and all that? Just wondering.)

Pair programming is one of those ideas so awful that it could only come from a university.

Sure, if I want to bounce ideas off of someone for something specific, that's great; they're likely to see something that I don't. But I can hardly imagine anything worse than someone else having to have their fingers in the whole pie, all the time, just because we are supposed to be a "pair".

Comment Re: I do not understand (Score 1) 538

It works like this:

American politicians have worked for decades to decode the U.S. voter and their habits. They spend millions of dollars annually on "focus groups" and "mock votes" in order to successfully determine the most advantageous avenues to manipulate the electorate into supporting them in their efforts to remove rights from the electorate, disenfranchise the electorate, and more firmly establish the elected as a modern day aristocracy in spite of US law and constitutional impetus. Look up "wedge issue" to see how the party leadership will use specific issues to fracture a voting block and turn them against each other. Watch how each party incites their proscribed demographic to feel threatened by others. Note how politicians play at fighting the other party, but vote as a whole when presented with an opportunity to curtail, circumvent, or remove rights guaranteed to the people by the constitution and/or bill of rights. And pay special attention to the media mouthpieces when they call out their leaders on their faults. It provides a voice for people's recognition of total incongruity on the part of their leaders, but by voicing it the supporters' ire is assuaged and they go merrily and sheepishly back to fighting the opposition and completely forget to hold their leaders accountable.

In America there are two political parties. They are not liberal and conservative. They are not Republican and Democrat. They are simply the elected and the electorate. Anyone who forgets this or fails to see it, at any time, is a pawn, a sheep...and therefore untrustworthy, compromised. They are exactly equal to those religious people that atheists and sceptics so vociferously condemn. They have lost control of their intellect and sacrificed their freedom and judgement in pursuit of an empty purse. They cannot be trusted even with their own self interest, much less the advancement of society as a whole.

So, welcome to America, where Rome is burning and all anyone does is comment on how good it looks in HD. Stay away if you value your sanity, your freedom, and your connection to humanity.

That sounds so wise ... it certainly frees you from having to make any choices. Must be nice.

A President Romney, while not perfect, would not be letting Iran go nuclear, and whistling while the caliphate gets built, all the while fulminating against Israel, of all things.

There are real choices, and they matter.

Comment Re:Inspire (Score 1) 538

She's also mentions Inspire Magazine.

Inspire used to be edited and mainly authored by Samir Khan Samir Khan was an American citizen, convicted of no crime; he was never even indicted. He was assassinated on orders of Barack Obama along with Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011.

So when these criminals like Feinstein talk about banning books, note they may also mean assassinating the authors.

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.

Yes, down with America!

Let's elect, oh, I don't know, a "progressive" who promises fundamental change. That'll fix it.

Someone that Slashdot loves and endorses. What could go wrong?

Comment Re:Sen. Feinstein (Score 1) 538

Should be removed from congress.

She was reelected in 2012 with 62% of the vote. The only way she can lose is if the California Republican Party nominates someone sensible, and the chance of that is remote. The California Republican Party self destructed back in 1994, when they adopted a virulently anti-immigrant platform in a state that is 40% Hispanic and 13% Asian That have been mostly irrelevant ever since, and California is now a one party state.

Right. She's nuts, so in Slashdot world, that too is somehow Republican's fault.

Comment Re:So much for privacy.... (Score 2) 140

just too funny. the MS guys really do think the whole world is MS.

Well ... let's put it in perspective.

It is funny, and I've had it happen in the past too - I think because of some misconfiguration, not from not using Outlook or Windows. But the idea is that the whole place uses a unified system, which does allow for nifty corporate functions like recalling emails. The issue you saw was that you were allowed to have a rogue setup.

On the other other hand, it is of course very hard to lock down what is by nature supposed to be extremely interoperable ...

Slashdot Top Deals

Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"

Working...