Comment Re:Ron Paul (Score 1) 565
Once you "compress" the whole thing to ashes by burning it all down, that is.
Unneccessary. Just get a big enough bag.
Alternatively, get any size bag and declare it's inside "the outside".
Comment Re:Does this mean that you could (Score 1) 173
I'd assume (not having read TFA) that you'd still have to pay international charges to call from, say, Spain to the UK, but you'd pay local charges to call a Spanish phone from your Spanish mobile while in the UK. So I'd say you could get a SIM via mail order from country A, but unless the bulk of your calls go to country A, you still won't save much.
Comment Change the animal... (Score 3, Funny) 252
Maybe JK Rowling can write another book that has Harry ditch his owl for an alligator. Bam - Problem solved.
Comment 18'' (Score 1) 94
Toaster-sized at 18''? That's a quite a toaster...
Bill Gates Enrolls His Kids In Khan Academy 286
theodp writes "At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who's been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. 'This guy is amazing,' Gates wrote. 'It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.' Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the 'unbelievable' Khan Academy tutorials that 'I've been using with my kids.'"
Comment Re:android hate (Score 1) 487
That very much depends on the context - as these things so often do. If he rocked his English SATs in order to be fairly certain he's right, then the sentence is correct without the comma.
As a card carrying grammar nazi I would put two commas in his first sentence, though:
Yeah[,] and you're supposed to put a comma in front of conjunctive words like "and, or, but, because"[,] especially if they join two sentences.
Do Gamers Want Simpler Games? 462
A recent GamePro article sums up a lesson that developers and publishers have been slowly learning over the last few years: gamers don't want as much from games as they say they do. Quoting:
"Conventional gaming wisdom thus far has been 'bigger, better, MORE!' It's something affirmed by the vocal minority on forums, and by the vast majority of critics that praise games for ambition and scale. The problem is, in reality its almost completely wrong. ... How do we know this? Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly. Every studio I've spoken to that does this, to a fault, says that many of the games they've released are far too big and far too hard for most players' behavior. As a general rule, less than five percent of a game's audience plays a title through to completion. I've had several studios tell me that their general observation is that 'more than 90 percent' of a game's audience will play it for 'just four or five hours.'"
Comment Re:Won't somebody please think of the children!?!? (Score 1) 255
I'd say it was fucking morons fucking fucking morons.
Comment Re:Rock Rainbows? (Score 1) 341
Of course there is. Even a permanent sunset. You just need to be in the right place.
Making a Child Locating System 1092
celtic_hackr writes "Well, I never thought I'd be an advocate for placing GPS devices on people. However, since it took less than three days for my local school district to misplace my daughter, I have decided that something needs to be done. By the school district's own admission it has a recurring problem of placing children on the wrong buses. Fortunately, my daughter was located, with no thanks to the local school district. Therefore, I would like input on a way to be able to keep track of my child. I know there are personal tracking devices out there. I have nothing against these systems. But I want more than this. My specification are: 1) a small unobtrusive device I can place on my daughter, 2) an application to pull up on any computer, a map with a dot indicating the real-time position of my child, 3) a handheld device with the equivalent information, 4) [optional] a secure web application/plug-in I can install on my own domain allowing me to track her from anyplace in the world, 5) a means of turning it all off, 6) a Linux based solution of the above. I believe all the pieces for making such a system are out there. Has anyone built anything like this? Is there an open source solution? How would I go about building my own? Has anyone hacked any of these personal trackers before, to serve their own purposes? How does a tinfoil hat wearer engineer such a device to make sure Big-Brother isn't watching too? Can these devices be locked down so only certain devices can pick up the GPS location of an individual locator? What other recommendations do you have?"
Submission + - IPv4 is running out... seriously! (trolltech.com) 2
Kensai7 writes: "Thiago Macieira describes at Qt Labs Blogs his personal experience of the upcoming "Great Crash": the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. Here is what he says in the end:
The DNS server that the hotel network gave me is on the same network as my home VPN (because my home DHCP server is the ADSL router by my Internet provider). So all my DNS queries were timing out, because they were being transmitted over the VPN to an address that isn't active. (I think it's assigned to my N95 when I'm at home, but I'd have to be home to check) This problem I had is probably quite common, I imagine. I mean, the hotel I'm in isn't exactly in a touristic spot. It's probably sought more by business travelers, who, like me, come with a laptop and VPN access to their offices. How many of them reroute 10.0.0.0/24 when the VPN is active? I would bet quite a few. So we're 6 months into the year of the Great Crash because IPv4 runs out. And we're still not using IPv6.
This story is his second warning. He did another one six months ago."
Submission + - Swiss Court stops Federal Contract with Microsoft
Ade writes: "Looks like the challenge to the Swiss Administrative Court concerning the government contract given to Microsoft without any public bidding was successful: The court has issued a temporary injunction against the Federal Office of Buildings and Logistics (BBL), effectively stopping the CHF 14M (£8M; $15M)-contract to deliver licenses and support for software used on government computers for the next three years.
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung has the details (article in German).
According to Swiss Government practices, any contract over CHF 50'000 has to undergo a public call for offers. The BBL cited "no serious alternatives" as the reason which this contract never did."
According to Swiss Government practices, any contract over CHF 50'000 has to undergo a public call for offers. The BBL cited "no serious alternatives" as the reason which this contract never did."
Submission + - Ubuntu 9.04 hits mirrors
AdeBaumann writes: "Although the Ubuntu home page doesn't reflect it yet, the final version of Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) seems to have hit the mirrors. Happy downloading!"
Debian Gets FreeBSD Kernel Support 425
mu22le writes "Today Debian gets one step closer to really becoming 'the universal operating system' by adding two architectures based on the FreeBSD kernel to the unstable archive.
This does not mean that the Debian project is ditching the Linux kernel; Debian users will be able to choose which kernel they want to install (at least on on the i386 and amd64 architectures) and get more or less the same Debian operating system they are used to.
This makes Debian the first distribution, and probably the first large OS, to support two completely different kernels at the same time."
CSIRO Wins Wi-Fi Settlement From HP 125
suolumark writes "The CSIRO has won what could be a landmark settlement from Hewlett Packard over the use of patented wireless technology. The settlement ended HP's involvement in a four-year lawsuit brought by the CSIRO on a group of technology companies, in which the organisation was seeking royalties for wi-fi technology that is used extensively on laptops and computers worldwide. CSIRO spokesman Luw Morgan earlier said legal action was continuing against 13 companies: Intel, Dell, Toshiba, Asus, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, Accton, 3-Com, Buffalo, Microsoft and Nintendo."
