Comment Re:The Slashdot Firefox Paradox (Score 1) 279
Just remove "idle." from the url, and it loads the page like any other slashdot comment section.
Comment Re:Needs a Supreme Court ruling (Score 1) 926
I agree - RELEASE THE KAGAN!
Comment Re:Let's see if I've got this right (Score 5, Funny) 470
Leap seconds, in contrast, are completely pointless. They exist because the SI day is slightly shorter than the solar day, by a tiny fraction of a second. This means that, after a few years, the sun will not quite be at its apex precisely at midday. How much is the variation? We've had 24 leap seconds since they were introduced in 1972, but a lot of these were to slowly correct the already-wrong time. In the last decade, we've had two. At that rate, it will take 300 years for the sun to be a minute off. It will take 18,000 years for it to be an hour off. These numbers are slightly wrong. The solar day becomes a bit under 2ms longer every hundred years, so we'd need leap seconds more often later.
Well in that case it's probably easier for Oracle to just buy the Sun.
Comment Re:How does (Score 1) 1088
having the most wealthy pay their fair share
I'm sorry, but since when is more a fair share?
Since "fair" was the word used and not "equal"
Comment Re:You have to pass it to find out what's in it (Score 1) 571
I agree, that much of it made sense to me. Biases aside (gp calling it ObamaCare was a dead giveaway, maybe they were just trying to be clever) I think a better implementation would be:
(A) SKILLED NURSING FACILITIES.—Section 1819(d)(1) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395i–3(d)(1)) is amended to read as follows:
With ample use of strikeouts of course. A lot of the nonsense above is because all of these parts are dependent on other regulation, and you don't have handy href= tags or database lookups to make them human readable. The wiki implementation mentioned by a commenter above would be useful for this reason as well.
Comment Re:Is it worth the effort? (Score 1) 161
Something or other is keeping them from allowing sparse roots, I imagine this has something to do with the new packaging system. As I recall, someone has gotten the inherit-pkg-dir properties to be allowed, and the resulting zone worked fine. I became curious when they didn't mention upgrade-ability, but then I became distracted and/or hungry and thought nothing more on the subject. This bug supports the pkg root cause though: http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=2550
$200B Lost To Counterfeiting? Back It Up 283
An anonymous reader writes "Over the weekend, the NY Times ran a story about how the recession has impacted product counterfeiters. In it, the reporter regurgitates the oft-repeated claim that counterfeiting 'costs American businesses an estimated $200 billion a year.' Techdirt's Mike Masnick asks the Times reporter to back up that assertion, noting two recent reports (by the GAO and the OECD) that suggest the actual number is much lower, and quoting two reporters who have actually looked at the numbers and found (a) the real number is probably less than $5 billion, and (b) the $200 billion number can be traced back to a totally unsourced (read: made-up) magazine claim from two decades ago."
Comment Re:The oldest profession (Score 1) 31
OK tan
Yay, skin cancer!
Yay not having to take Vitamin D supplements or eat Vitamin D fortified foods and drinks!
Uh, I'll take the supplements, you can keep your skin cancer, thanks.
I realize that you probably meant just a moderate, healthy level of exposure, but at the same time, did you forget which website you were on?
Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 52
It's even worse than that. 200MB/s would take a 2.0Gb connection because of the SATA signaling structure. You're getting one byte per 10 bits over the cable. So when you realize that SATA 1.5Gb/s is limiting you to MAX ideal world 150MB/s transfer... Let's just say that SATA 6Gb/s (effective 600MB/s) and performance3 oriented PCI-express SSDs can't come soon enough.
Comment Re:me two. (Score 1) 458
That's what you think, Copper Top.
Comment Re:Anyone ever read that Stephen King story? (Score 1) 458
Ah well that's what I get when I don't refresh the page for 20 minutes.
Comment Re:Anyone ever read that Stephen King story? (Score 1) 458
I dunno, but I did hear about one case where people simply stopped caring enough to go on living, while a select few had a negative reaction and turned into Reapers.
Comment Re:Finally the backlash hits (Score 5, Funny) 210
It seems like another case of that annoying "You are now leaving our site. It's a big scary internet world out there where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs! Are you sure you want to do that? We take no responsibility for the rest of the internet, but you seem like the kind of idiot that would sue us for a link one of our users provided. Here, we'll give you a life line back to our site, and since you have 15 toolbars installed, you probably don't have any screen space left to see the other site anyway."
Quantum Mechanics Involved In Photosynthesis 137
Kristina at Science News writes "We all learn about photosynthesis in school: sunlight in, plant food out. Not well understood is how this process achieves its initial and uniquely high efficiency in capturing the energy of a photon. Quantum mechanics may be at work in the electron transfer process inside chloroplast, giving electrons the chance to consider many paths at once before choosing the best one."
Comment Re:Don't worry, AT&T (Score 1) 237
I've had a Sprint exclusive phone for years and I'm pretty sure I can do anything you mentioned there with my handy dandy data cable or a MicroSD card reader.
