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Comment Re:Third option - don't care (Score 1) 403

You are kinda right, but you are probably old.
I am old too, and I think the same way.
My coworkers, though, happily share and watch very long videos at work, about anything.
Those guy probably would like videos on slashdot, and it may be a good idea to try and lure them here.
We are a nice community, but new people is a good thing.

Comment Re:Keen to hear? (Score 1) 187

You do make sense, but I don't agree.

It would be interesting to have some kind of rating system for the internet. I would like something like sites rating their content with some kind of header, so you can do client filtering more easily. You could just use sites rating, and have a grey/blacklist of sites that misrepresent their content. As an example, I don't care whether my kids see tits, but I would like to filter some of the violence they see in children oriented content.

Identifying actual users is very expensive, but most importantly, opens the door to track everything everyone sees, with a strong identity, like if all your browsing activity went through Facebook. We just don't want that to happen, it's spooky, and very dangerous,

Spam

BT Announces Free Service To Screen Nuisance Callers (thestack.com) 69

An anonymous reader writes: British telco BT is launching a free landline service for UK customers which promises to divert millions of unwanted calls. A dedicated team at BT will monitor calls made to UK numbers, across its network of over 10 million domestic landlines, to identify suspicious patterns, which could help to filter out nuisance callers. The flagged numbers will then be directed to a junk voicemail box. The company has estimated that the voicemail 'net' will catch up to 25 million cold calls every week. It explained that to achieve this success rate, it would be deploying enormous amounts of compute power to monitor and analyse large amounts of data in real-time.

Comment Re:The WHO! (Score 1) 1310

Slashdot probably has more uses for a marketing agency than trying to sell stuff to engineers.
I would use primarily it as a research lab. You have a great community of dedicated people who will contribute valuable content.
You can just let it live, gather valuable information, and play your experiments there. Do they contribute more when headlines are more sensationalist? Do they react to unfair moderation? How many ads will they put up with before complaining?
Also... can this be used to leverage engineers as "influencers" ? I don't mean slashvertisements, I mean well planned manipulation.

Comment Re:I guess it's easier... (Score 1) 425

The food pyramid recommends I eat most of my calories from cereals and other carbohydrates.
There is no scientific evidence that carbohydrates need to be most of your diet, calorie-wise.
You might need a very small amount of them, to jump start your day, maybe, but no reason to fill half your plate with them.

A diet of only protein and veggies is a lot better for me. I am overweight, but I do lose weight if I diet, I just cut as many carbs as possible, add as many veggies as possible, make sure all meal have enough protein, and not care about fats. If I add exercise, I can lose 2-4 pounds a week. I managed to lose over 40 pounds that way. Gained half that over several years of bad diet, no exercise.

Before that strategy, I tried several times low calorie, "balanced" diet, with exercise, I might lose 2 pounds in a month. My doctor says that carbs are bad specially when you are fat, and many fat people benefit from cutting carbs.

Also, most importantly, there's a psychological side to this. Eating is not something yo decide to do, it's more like an addiction. Some foods make you more likely to keep your diet. That's very important. Losing weight can be an test on discipline, but it's much better if some technique is found that helps you lose weight _without_ discipline. That would help more people.

Comment Re:You know? Something here is disturbing... (Score 0) 508

This is not a debate contest. I'm just complaining about the article, which is stupid and tries to ridicule people having reasonable doubts about something that is indeed dangerous..

Is this better?

"Then you need to prove [or at least estimate] the herd effect [for this vaccine] is very useful. [Meaning that it's strong enough, for this particular disease and this particular vaccine, and this particular population, to justify the investment of making people get the vaccines and its enforcement.]"

Comment Re:You know? Something here is disturbing... (Score 1, Informative) 508

The whole article is an ad hominen .
The piece tries to sell vaccines by calling anyone against _this_ particular vaccine an Anti-Vaxxer, and saying that rejecting this vaccine is is Anti-Vax nonsense.

It's not nonsense. Vaccines can be very risky. The first thing you have to do is doubt them.

Then they need to be proven safe. They can be sold then.

Then they need to be proven effective. You might want to use them then.

Then they need to be proven beneficial to the people as a whole, as opposed to the same money used on the next best. Then you can have governments pay for it.

Then you need to prove the herd effect is very useful. Then you can have the government ask everybody to use it.

Music

David Bowie Dies At Age 69 (bbc.co.uk) 296

echo-e writes: Renowned singer David Bowie has died after an 18-month battle with cancer. His latest album, Blackstar, was only just released on Friday — his birthday. His last live show was in 2006. Bowie rose to fame in the 1970s, and he is known for hits such as Under Pressure, Let's Dance, and Space Oddity. He also appeared in handful of films, such as Labyrinth in 1986. Bowie was also notable for being one of the few musicians to immediately see the value and staying power of MP3s and the digital distribution of music. If anything, he was overly optimistic about it. In 2002, he said, "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."

Comment Re:Not an issue. (Score 1) 55

Serious Drupal shops and clients -never- live update their sites.

I'm glad things are so great for you on Mount Olympus. Some of us AREN'T serious Drupal shops. We upgrade when the software says upgrade. When things break, like they shouldn't, we get pissed off.

You can pay someone to worry about that for you.
It's pretty easy to move to a hosted Drupal service, so you don't have to worry about these issues, and get a nice SLA so you can complain to someone to make your site work for you.

The web is a spooky place. It's becoming harder and harder to keep your web business online, without a serious team dedicated to secure it.

Comment Re: Derpal (Score 1) 55

Fuck that. I wanted an Open Source CMS so that I could run it cheaply.

"Open Source" doesn't mean that it will run cheaply. In some cases it means just the opposite.
Also, it doesn't mean "easy". You don't have to pay for licenses, but you still need to do your homework at understanding whether a specific tool suits your use case, at a reasonable cost/effort.

Drupal is very good if you need to do something hard, like integrate with different applications, build your own modules, or you have a large number of documents, something like that. They use it at my city government, and they do great stuff, they handle a lot of data, a lot of traffic, a lot of services provided to citizens, looking great.

If you want something easy, you need something easy, like wordpress, or something hosted. It's quite cheap and easy to run. Just need the right tool.

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