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Comment Re:Are emails copyrighted ? (Score 2) 138

No that is not true. If I create some software I can license it or effectively give it away...

The fact that you - automatically - hold the copyright for the works you create doesn't prevent you from doing either of those things. Indeed, copyright is necessary for you to be able to license the work.

Comment Not "ballistic" weapons (Score 1) 290

Hypersonic weapons — or ballistic weapons that can hit a target flying many times faster than the speed of sound...

The summary is flat wrong in its terminology. A key point about hypersonic weapons, from a tactical and strategic standpoint, is that they aren't ballistic. They're potentially faster and sneakier.

Aside from acceleration during boost and (generally limited) manoeuvering during descent, ballistic weapons are - by definition - coasting unpowered for most of their flight time. Ballistic missiles put their warheads into an elliptical orbit that happens to intersect the surface of the earth (typically somewhere around Moscow) and let gravity do most of the work.

Hypersonic weapons, in stark contrast, are in powered flight for most or all of their journey. Instead of being lobbed up and coming back down, they can go straight to their target (modulo the curvature of the earth). They can travel a path and a velocity that is limited by their own engineering rather than by orbital mechanics. From a strategic standpoint, they would allow delivery of warheads (particularly nuclear warheads) in shorter times by less-detectable and less-interceptable courses, with all the attendant consequences for the calculus of nuclear war, first strikes, and mutually assured destruction.

Comment Re:What the fuck is this pretentious bullshit? (Score 5, Funny) 190

Mechanical switches are just like analog vinyl. Because the action is analog it isn't just on or off but has a slight curve between the states.

This. Exactly this. Inexperienced typists just don't get it.

To convey proper nuance in text, I don't always want exactly 1 letter "A" when I press the "A" key. Using uniform whole letters can seem jarring and mechanical, particularly when writing personal email. Sometimes a message composer only wants, say, 0.95 "A", just to soften the letter out. Other times, it's nice to smooth the letter out a bit, letting it fade out genty across the length of the word instead of being uncomfortably square.

These mechanical keyboards are usually tuned to be "warmer", as well--when you press that "A" key, it has overtones and harmonics from other vowels. A little bit of "E" goes a long way, but true "golden fingers" agree that plenty of "O" adds mellowness and roundness.

The adoption of these digital, non-mechanical keyboards is also one of the major reasons why emotion and subtext - especially related to humor - are so often lost in text-based messaging.

Comment Re:Move to a gated community (Score 1) 611

...all of these can be achieved by adding enough lanes to your freeways. Enough many be quite high number, butt hat's fine: building robust infrastructure to make life better is what my taxes are for.

"Robust infrastructure" is good. "Adding lanes to freeways" isn't the only way to reach that goal--and it isn't necessarily the most cost-effective use of those tax dollars. Just laying down roadbed and asphalt isn't terribly costly; call it $10 million or so per mile of 4-lane interstate. Building wider bridges, digging supplementary tunnels, constructing complex interchanges, realigning adjacent utility conduits and ramps--well, that costs quite a bit more. Expropriating massive amounts of land adjacent to existing interstates in dense urban areas - or adding parallel routes, or building stacked or buried lanes - is extraordinarily, sometimes ruinously, costly. (Boston's Big Dig cost something like $200 million per lane-mile.)

And each lane gets you about 2,000 cars per hour, at best. If you have a million people in the suburbs who want to get to work between 8 and 9am, and they're all driving their own vehicles, your system grinds to a halt unless there are 500 live Interstate lanes into the city. Worse, each additional car you add to the city means more traffic on the roads in town, and demand for parking, and production of local air pollution, and so forth. "Build more lanes" is a solution that ultimately just doesn't scale.

In contrast, bus rapid transit systems can achieve at least 10,000 passengers per hour and sometimes as high as 30,000 per hour depending on configuration. Light rail achieves similar passenger numbers. Metro (subway) systems typically top out north of 30,000 passengers per hour, per line; Hong Kong's metro system clears 80,000 per hour on its highest-traffic lines. (For those keeping score, that's enough to offset 40 Interstate lanes.)

Comment Re:Sensors can't monitor climate change (Score 5, Insightful) 116

Sensors can monitor only weather. They can monitor neither climate nor change. Both must be calculated from series of data points.

That's sort of like saying you can't measure the area of a room using a tape measure,. After all, you have to perform a calculation based on the measurements you collect; the tape measure doesn't have an "area" reading. By one sufficiently pedantic, narrow, arrogant, obnoxious measure, you could argue that you were correct--and you probably would get punched by a lot of tradespeople who recognized you were just being an insufferable prick instead of making a useful contribution.

The sensors - or the tape measure - are necessary tools for the process, even though they don't directly output the final processed result.

Comment Re:Only 25% positive? (Score 2) 342

So the cops blood tested all of these people with what I assume is probably cause and only 25% were actually under the influence? Or do they just randomly blood test everyone and 25% of all Washington drivers are high?

Could be neither. In many jurisdictions, the roadside breath test (or field sobriety test) merely provides probable cause for law enforcement to obtain a warrant, with which they can compel a blood sample. I wouldn't be surprised if they are allowed to test for a range of intoxicating substances - including THC - and not just ethanol with these tests.

Note, as well, that "25% tested positive" is not the same as "25% were 'high' or intoxicated". Detectable amounts of THC or metabolites don't mean, necessarily, dangerous or intoxicating quantities. (Depending on exactly what was being tested, and the sensitivity of their instruments, they could have been seeing very low levels associated with marijuana use days or even weeks previously, or even with secondhand exposure.)

Comment Another /. story that doesn't link to the paper (Score 2) 112

Sigh. Another Slashdot story about a new article published in a scientific journal, another Slashdot story that fails to link to the original published paper. I just noticed that the "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" tagline no longer appears on the Slashdot front page; this sort of omission is probably one of the reasons why.

For people who are interested in the actual data:

Sanghavi, P. et al. "Outcomes After Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Treated by Basic vs Advanced Life Support." JAMA Intern Med Published online November 24, 2014. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.5420.

And here's the JAMA press release.

Comment Re:Link to PNAS article (Score 1) 114

Because the "actual papers" are behind paywalls...

1. Not always the case. Some journals (or articles) are open access.

2. Many Slashdot readers have access to paywalled journal articles through our schools or employers.

3. Abstracts are virtually always free to access, and often still provide better information than news coverage.

4. Links are cheap, and there's no reason to avoid providing links to both the lay summary and the actual paper.

Comment Re:So? (Score 1) 271

Scary thing you said one: The video should no bearing on the issuance of a warrant. As a rule, warrants should be issued on how reasonable a search it is, and likely to turn up evidence. Not, how horrifying the crime is.

Oh, I don't know. The seriousness of the potential crime -- for which the police have genuine probable cause to suspect has occurred -- probably should have some bearing on the warrant that is issued. There is a balancing of interests here, which you actually have buried in your own comment. "How reasonable", in your words, likely includes "how horrifying" as one of its elements--you just saw an opportunity to try to score a cheap rhetorical point.

Unless, of course, you believe that a judge should award a warrant with the same breadth and alacrity whether the video shows a kidnapping or the theft of a candy bar.

Comment Re:I hate these "get out the vote campaigns (Score 5, Insightful) 468

As well as those "register to vote the day of the election" deals. If you can't be bothered to pre-register to vote, or need to be pestered to vote, then you probably get 100% of your info on candidate's and issues from the mailers and TV/radio commercials.

I voted in a municipal election in Toronto, Canada earlier this week. Not on the voter's list? No problem--you can register at one of the city clerk's offices. There's five of them, serving a population of 2.6 million people. Oh, and they're open from 8:30am to 4:30pm, Monday to Friday. So that should be a snap to get to, as long as you don't have a full-time job, or a child to care for, or mobility issues. (You don't mind choosing between a couple of extra bus fares and eating lunch, do you?)

I followed the campaign closely, I was aware of the major issues of the day (as well as the minor issues that didn't get nearly enough coverage), I had strongly-held opinions based in thorough, extended research--and I registered to vote on the day of the election.

The notion that all people who didn't register in advance are somehow lazy, unworthy, and incompetent is canard that punishes the working poor, the single parents, the handicapped. Looking in from the outside, it's apparent that it's one piece of a larger Republican campaign to disenfranchise as many Democratic-leaning voters as possible. It's a story that is propagated by Fox News, the viewers of which are exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Comment Re:Oh boy, another infection vector (Score 2) 230

'Approved' isn't the right word.

OneGet has the notion of 'trusted' repositories. We're likely to expand this concept a bit in the future, but for now, that's what it is.

Built-in package sources from reputable sources may be marked as 'trusted' by default, but the majority of sources should be 'untrusted' until the user makes that change.

The real trick is getting package provider plugins to tell OneGet the truth if a repository is trusted or not.

I suspect that we're going to have to introduce a level of trust with the package providers too, and expose this to the user ... somehow.

Comment Re: Oh boy, another infection vector (Score 1) 230

You've got a really good point.

We're tossing around some notions about different factors that make a 'package' or 'repository' trustworthy.

I'm sure we can do some stuff with signed repositories and signed packages to detect when things 'change' and/or keep unsigned repositories 'untrusted'.

Really, our first target for this stuff is developers and admins, not my mom...

Comment Re: Oh boy, another infection vector (Score 1) 230

Well, considering that the chocolatey provider for OneGet points to the community-controlled repository, I'll have to take that as a win :)

The concept of curated repositories is one that we're really trying to come up without screwing it up.

Regardless, with OneGet, the *user* maintains control. Which repositories they connect to, what software they install.

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