So, basically, we should all start watching The Last Ship? :\

In fact... Most astronomers counter this opinion by saying that, far from not having cleared their orbits, the major planets completely control the orbits of the other bodies within their orbital zone.

It's a bit weird that the leading paragraph exists in both articles, while the counterpoint doesn't, but there you go.

As far as I'm concerned, if it's gravitation is enough to pull it into a sphere, it's a planet. Yes, I'm happy counting Luna and a bunch of other satellites

Is the Sun a planet?

We grew up "choosing to label" Pluto as a planet.

At one time people grew up 'choosing to label' Venus as a star. Then we grew up some more and realized we may have been mistaken or at least felt we should have a more granular scale with more accurate definitions.

you may have a period of an increased number of wars

Yeah, but then GP would just say:
Frankly, what are people so concerned about? War's gonna happen, people gonna die or relocate, society will have to adapt, socioeconomic structures will adapt and so will we. It's gonna suck a lot but it's not gonna be a tangible end to anything.

Most people don't wear them, and those that wear them don't often wear them all the time.

Your argument could easily be extended:
skin color: make-up/facial paint
hair color: dye, wigs
height: pumps
age: make-up
sex: some people can pull that one off

at which point you would be saying that you don't get what good any physical description is.

how about.. along with ordering this from them.. order known faces+dna pairs and see if it's any good.

I know, I know... it's still unfashionable to RTFA. But I did it anyway, so you won't have to:
They did exactly that in a related article linked from there:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02...

At least a dozen people immediately responded that they could not guess because the images felt too generic. Among the 50 or so people who did venture guesses, none identified the man as Mr. Markoff, who is 65.

When it came to the computerâ(TM)s DNA portrait of Ms. Spangler, 31, staffers had more luck. About 10 people correctly identified her.
Although there was no close second, participants put forth the names of nearly 10 other women. About half of them were of European ancestry, half of Asian ancestry

So no, it not 'any good'... other than a very generic facial build, skin color, hair color, and male/female. The article doesn't mention eye color, and the samples given aren't clear enough to know if they get that out - but as far as I know, that should be one of the easier things to get right.

It's a glimpse of inevitable things to come, though.

Doesn't the bittorrent client download from both? I thought that was the whole idea.

That will depend on implementation. Certainly most clients do prefer whoever's getting you the content the fastest. So if you've got a client set up to max out at 10 connections, it will either actively look for the 10 fastest or settle on the 10 fastest.

I didn't read the article - don't want Lumpy chiding me again ;) - but I'd almost think that AT&T would be planning on intentionally slowing down P2P traffic that goes outside of their own network (or whichever networks they pay higher fees on), making the clients automatically see the AT&T peers as being faster, and thus (mostly) selecting those anyway... even if they should have been slower.
I'm not even sure if that violates net neutrality unless each peer outside that network should be seen as competing with those inside that network.
From the comments, though, it seems more like they'd be trying to cache some bittorrent data and transparently serve that up to clients requesting it from what should have been a peer some hops down and/or redirecting requests from a particular peer (one that has high impact on the network) to another peer (one that has low impact on the network). The former should make a torrent download faster, the latter can go either way.

Wouldn't really need one - SuperFish works in such a way that it inserts itself for any site. What would it do otherwise, keep a blacklist of all the possible banking/investment/whatever sites in the world that it should ignore?

So yes, bankofamerica.com courtesy of SuperFish, but also facebook courtesy of SuperFish and YouTube courtesy of SuperFish and Mom & Pop's corner store courtesy of SuperFish.

It's a nasty piece of software in that its intent is to serve up ads (and/or collect information, of course), but this sort of thing is also readily available on the market for parents who want to keep tabs on little johnny's browsing habits or bosses who want to keep tabs on their employees. Unless johnny/employee / their browser checks the certificate and notices it's probably not what it's supposed to be despite being perfectly valid, bob's your uncle.

[citation not needed]

The citation isn't needed not because that rant-with-a-personal-slant didn't require citation, but because it's off-topic. I'm not sure how his comment got modded 'Informative' - unless this is not Slashdot, but Buzzfeed, or Us magazine or some other gossip rag.

Without defending whatever nastiness went on in his restaurants, how does that relate to malware being on a website? It's highly unlikely that he personally oversees the restaurants, and even less likely that he personally oversees the website. At best one can fault him for having certain ideas about how to run things, that in turn lead to both restaurateurs and webmasters cutting corners and dropping the ball.

What's next? A report comes out about Forbes being hacked ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/th... ) and we point out how they let an article that was then vastly criticized by its subject ( The Oatmeal - http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tes... ) through as some sort of 'goes to character and general reputation'?

4) People enable it on their servers and those with browsers that do support it enjoy the benefits (and possibly some of the side-effects) that it brings, while everybody else will either chug along on HTTP/1.1 or even HTTP/1.0, or switch to a browser that does support HTTP/2, and whether or not older versions of IE support it remains a non-issue.

Got it, so I'm safe working for Dropbox as long as they don't store any copyright protected motion pictures on their system - ie I'm not safe working for them.

If you become rather aware of it (like that guy) and that they're not doing anything much about it (like megaupload) and you then continue to work for them (like that guy) - you're right, you wouldn't be safe working for them. Up until that point, though, I'm not sure what they'd have on you.

Proactive facilitation of copyright infringement? Does that mean that when you sign up for an account with them they go ahead and load copyrighted material on it before you even get a chance to do it yourself?

It means that they encouraged people to upload copyrighted material (to which they had not acquired the appropriate licenses for distribution etc.etc.) and even did so themselves (iirc).

Or does it just mean that they comply with the DMCA and take stuff down when they're asked to?

As far as I know, both (MegaUpload and Dropbox) comply with DMCA requests. One was just a little more 'meh' about it than the other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

I didn't realize that the court and/or the programmer read the minds of the people behind MegaUpload. That's utterly fascinating - please, do tell me more about this aspect of the legal process.

Nomm further admitted that, through his work as a computer programmer, he was aware that copyright-infringing content was stored on the websites, including copyright protected motion pictures and television programs, some of which contained the âoeFBI Anti-Piracyâ warning. [...] Despite his knowledge in this regard, Nomm continued to participate in the Mega Conspiracy.

Aw, turns out he didn't need to read minds after all.

Besides, remember that thing where some Dropbox user couldn't share something publicly because it was flagged by Dropbox's DMCA filters?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

Weird. Seems like Dropbox is even taking a proactive stance to prevent the very thing that MegaUpload proactively facilitated.

I feel like this keeps coming back up, though - along with "TPB and Google are functionally equivalent!". Maybe just read previous arguments:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...

So, uh, guess I shouldn't get a drop working for Dropbox or Google, right? You do realize they let people share arbitrary files for download by anybody on the internet.

Yes, but he wasn't arguing that letting people share arbitrary files for download was a problem.

What he said was:

A) That the purpose (or at least one purpose of the site) was to aid copyright infringement (or other illegal thing)

So you'd have to argue that at least one purpose of Dropbox and/or Google Drive is to aid copyright infringement.

Now here's the difficult bit. 'purpose'. The courts have established (uhhh... I think they have anyway, the MegaUpload case is a clusterf*ck) that piracy was one of the purposes of MegaUpload. I don't think anybody has established that one of the purposes of DropBox is piracy. It's one of its uses - in that some people use it for that - but not a purpose.

I don't think I have any DVDs that have that feature - but last time I saw it demonstrated, there was no feedback for the various angles in the current view. Couple that with the delay before it would start showing that angle, and it was just not very impressive.

The YouTube demo seems a lot better (minor skipping aside) because it puts the various views on the screen so you can see what's happening on other views, and decide to change the view if you so desire.

I also think the subject matter works for this - concerts, maybe sports events, etc. I have no idea how this would play out for narrative media like a full length film. Why would I event want to watch an angle in which a punch can be clearly seen to miss, when the director-chosen angle looks somewhat convincing as long as I don't look too closely or start frame-by-framing the thing.

Sorry, device charging doesn't work that way. If it did, you'd just hook your mobile device up directly to your car battery and have it charged in minutes.

The device itself determines how fast it gets charged by drawing a certain amount of current. Based on passive or active measures, it might draw more current (say, 2A max) from e.g. a wall charger than from a computer USB port (say 500mA max), but if you decided to just wire two wall chargers together, the device isn't magically going to draw 4A.

As for your Kindle, depending on the model you have (Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Fire? big difference), it really should charge in just a few hours to the point where it decides it's charged (based on LiPo voltage levels). Sounds to me like the internal battery in your unit may be worn and either the charge controller is dropping charging current way too early, or the battery's voltage level takes too long to reach the 'charged' state during the voltage phase. If it's within its warranty period, try exchanging it.

Of course the other possibility is that your nights are very short :)