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Comment We got it alright (Score 1) 445

"The year of Net Neutrality"..... wait, we got that one!

Don't count your chickens before they are slaughtered.

You currently have no idea of what you "got", because only FCC commissioners have read the actual regulations they will be passing...

There are 300 pages of changes ready to change the internet you know today. Good luck with that.

Comment That didn't work (Score 2) 445

What will make Windows Phone succeed is the same thing that will make OS X succeed and it mainly boils down to apps.

Microsoft already tried that though - they paid a lot of money to developers in order to bring many of the most popular titles to Windows phone from iOS/Android.

Even with that it will still not enough to track consumers...

Comment Comparing Nonsense (Score -1, Troll) 267

Turbine bird deaths are a red herring. An estimated 10000-40000 birds die each year from turbines.

First of all, your numbers are plain wrong, by an order of magnitude.

But given any number, the question is - what is that number out of how many working turbines?

Because there are a LOT of structures, and powerlines, and other things that also kill birds as you mentioned. But you are giving us no idea if the number killed by turbines is proportionately higher or not, only absolute numbers with no means to intelligently compare...

All the intelligent reader has to do is mull over how many times they have seen dead birds beneath skyscrapers and other structures, and compare that to a rough average of at least a few dead birds per day, per turbine.

But then you are AC, so all you were really interested in is making up facts (most of those number s are suspect: and spin to make wind power seem harmless.

Comment Re:Virtual Self Defense (Score 0) 467

when you're going to shoot someone, you can see them and know what you're aiming at. I guess you didn't think of that.

I didn't think of that because I dismiss inherently ridiculous thoughts. All that happens is that a persons OWN WORDS are pointed out to others.

It's far more like I have a magic shield that reflects anything shot at me back at the attacker. Guess then who is responsible for the amount of damage received back...

You totally should be able to do something about it, and that something should not require you to become a private investigator, politician, lawyer, judge, and security guard.

Too bad that is the reality is that in fact that is the case. It is utterly unrealistic to expect ANY kind of public service like a police force to scale to handle the amount of trolling that actually exists - every other person on earth would have to be employed to handle this.

You claim it's a hardship to have to be " a private investigator, politician, lawyer, judge, and security guard". Well guess what, the internet solves that issue by training you how to be all of those things online, if it matters to you.

This behavior pattern - acting before thinking it through

And YOUR behavior, of failing to act until it is far too late, is what leads to things like gangrene and amputation in real life. It is FAR batter to take informed action quickly than action that comes far too late, or to become lost in analysis paralysis.

YOU were the one to claim that self-defense means you must be "a private investigator, politician, lawyer, judge, and security guard." How can you go through those stages WITHOUT thinking it through? The very act of doxxing or shaming is inherently not done without thought, because it requires thought to complete.

Nothing about what I've just said demands "having inherent trust in the system to do everything for you".

Except that you are advising in waiting for action that will, by the natures of scale of the problem, never come. It's hard to imagine what good that will do anyone, except for serving trolls very well indeed.

Comment How? Reaction is equal and opposite. (Score 1, Insightful) 467

The Salem witch trial methods would still have killed many innocents even if witches did exist

But all that we are seeing in THIS case is someone pointing out what people are saying to others. So the harm done is directly proportional ONLY to the persons own actions.

Someone moderately clever will post horrifically offensive content under someone else's name, then "catch" the designated offender and post their info and purported crimes to social media.

So since that might happen one in 500 million times of ACTUAL trolling - so we should do nothing at all about real trolls that we can actually combat. Even though it can be disproved...

The good of the many and all that. We should not back down from preventing common crime because of a hypothetical.

Comment The Metaphor (Score 5, Insightful) 467

The Salem Witch Trials were good thing. After all, there might have been some real witches there.

In this case you have people literally flying around on metaphorical brooms on Twitter.

If there had been actual witches eating children, are you saying they should have done nothing? Because that's what you are saying should be done in the case of people talking on Twitter about how they want to rape his daughter.

We aren't talking about witch-hunts here against people who have done nothing. We are talking about bringing consequences to people who in fact HAVE done something and expect nothing to happen as a result.

Comment Virtual Self Defense (Score 0) 467

This is why we have police departments.

Come on, you realistically expect the police to handle every case like this?

This is no different from having a reasonable right to self defense to protect your life. If you are being harassed online you should be able to do something about it, because chances are the police will not are at least not nearly as expediently as you can. The earlier you take action, the more you cut off the really bad stuff.

that's a reason to fix what's broken about our system

What if what is broken is having inherent trust in the system to do everything for you?

Sounds like it is being fixed.

Comment The benefit is far more than marketing (Score 1) 230

We're skeptics because we see right through marketing drivel. Some technology makes sense. Some, like mobile payments, serves no practical purpose for the average consumer.

I can see why you posted AC, you were wouldn't want anyone to think you were really that stupid, right? Just trolling with an over the top utterly absurd statement, right?

I mean, replacing credit card numbers that have literally affected millions of average consumers through POS breeches, with a system just as easy to use as a CC only now the merchant never gets your card number to leak... or your name if you don't want to share it, or your drivers license number to stalk you with later (since many places rightfully ask for ID with a credit card).

I mean, there's no way anyone who can even log into Slashdot could possibly see all those things as having no benefit to everyone, much less the average consumer... right? Right?

Comment The real morale of the story (Score 4, Informative) 217

Morale: gloomy

But!

That doesn't mean you should never contribute to hardware kick starters. It's a good idea to carefully examine what they have done before to see if they can handle making the new thing...

But!

Sometimes, it's just plain good to kickstart something even if it looks unlikely they will reach the goal. I would argue that is what happened in this case, because they found out a LOT about making this thing a lot of people want, and are sharing what they found. Eventually the thing people really wanted may well get made. If I had contributed to this Kickstarter (I did not) I wouldn't be mad, just a bit sad it didn't go through.

Comment Danger (Score 1) 93

9% of people don't care. I set up my mother's computer with the OS on C and everything else

She sure will care if there's every a problem (and there will be a problem) with one of those drives.

As a rule of thumb it's way better not to double someones possible failure rates if they don't know themselves how to recover from it...

I've spent my life helping people get set up technically so they never need to talk to me again - at least not about their systems. It creates a lot less work for yourself, unscheduled works that generally comes at very bad times.

Comment Mismatch (Score 1) 93

SSD for boot/OS/swap, and slow spinner for data gives 99% of the performance for 99% of people.

That would be great except 99% of people don't want more than one disk.

Hell, *I* don't want more than one disk, and I can ably manage them. But there's no way I can afford the SSD it would require to store everything I have (never mind the backups).

Comment Re:Answers for both (Score 1) 235

Then you're extremely lucky, I've had iOS hard lock when dogfooding apps fairly frequently

So have I, that's when I use the device reset (some combination of buttons, forget what) and it reboots in seconds.

I've never needed to drain the power to 0, no matter how bad the failure was (and they can be really bad on beta versions of iOS combined with writing apps).

Space

NASA's Spitzer Team Releases Highest-resolution View of the Full Galactic Plane 38

StartsWithABang writes From our vantage point within the Milky Way, most of our 200-400 billion stars are obscured by the dust lanes present within. But thanks to its views in infrared light, the Spitzer Space Telescope can glimpse not only all of the stars and the dust simultaneously, it can do it at an alarming resolution. Recently, NASA has put together a 360 panorama of more than 2,000,000 Spitzer images taken from 2003-2014, and one astrophysicist has gone and stitched them together into a single, 180,000-pixel-long viewable experience that shows less than 3% of the sky, but nearly 50% of its stars.

Comment Re:Answers for both (Score 1) 235

No, we want a quick way to do a 100% reboot

I'm an IOS developer and I've never had to do anything more than a device reset (which is instant). Usually powering off and on is enough (though not as quick, it's still pretty quick at around a minute total).

If that's really your reason it's even more absurd.

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