Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re: Say what you will but this is cool (Score 1) 52

So where does the liability lie when these things fall out of the sky, or collide with helicopters, planes, trains or automobiles? How will they "innovative" around that?

Where does the liability lie when a UPS truck backs over a baby stroller, or a FedEx delivery person loses control of a handtruck full of boxes and breaks someone's ankle? Where's the liability when an aircraft flown by DHL crashes short of the airport and burns a row of houses to the ground?

You make it sound like small plastic/foam flying wings with four battery-powered motors are the first dangerous thing that business has ever considered operating, and that there's no such thing as the liability insurance industry. Which means you're clueless about the real world, or just trolling. Or both.

Comment Re:Say what you will but this is cool (Score 1) 52

Because everyone knows they just wouldn't work in our current world, let alone the laws that would prevent its flight.

But we have laws, passed by the legislature, that mandate the FAA publish new rules specifically covering the integration of this sort of thing into the NAS by 2015. The Obama administration has said, though, that they won't comply with the law, and are taking every opportunity to hinder this sort of thing. There's a reason that outfits like Google are now spending money, hiring, and testing in other countries: because those countries are less hostile to ventures like this.

There's absolutely NO reason in the world why the tests that Google is doing in Oz couldn't be done with farmers just like those in the article, but living instead in rural Iowa or Ohio or California. But no, the administration keeps releasing increasingly bizarre, increasingly punitive, increasingly job-killing "interpretation" of the 2012 law, with spin that runs exactly counter to the plain language and intent of congress. Thank you, Mr. Obama, for chasing ever more innovation and growth out of the country.

Comment Re:old but somewhat effective (Score 1) 98

How many times will we hear a claim of "Russia invaded the Ukraine" and have that proven false before people ignore it completely?

So, just out of curiosity, what do you get out of spinning your particular flavor of nonsense? Who benefits from you trying to convince people that - despite what they can see with their own eyes - Russia didn't just annex Crimea? That columns of Russian armor with their insignia painted over didn't just roll across the border into southeast Ukraine? Your contention has to be that those events didn't actually happen, despite untold thousands of witnesses pointing out the exact opposite. So, what's your point? What you're saying is so blatantly false and disingenuous on the face of it that - unless you are actually delusional - even you have to know it, even as you type it. So I'm genuinely curious. Are you getting paid to push propaganda, even as you say that propaganda is bad? Or are you just basically a low-grade troll that assumes his audience is utterly uninformed?

Comment Re:It's all a matter of energy (Score 0) 141

but the actual neutrino's observed then (and until now) were high energy electron neutrinos

I don't know why these observations are being thought of as a big deal. Why go to all the trouble of building some big underground Italian detector when we can see, right here, that passing neutrinos hit the /. servers and cause apostrophes to appear randomly (but due to a quirk of quantum behavior, almost always right in front of the letter 's').

Comment Re:The death of leniency (Score 1) 643

If cops couldn't let thousands of people off per day on minor things, those minor things would cease to be illegal and our legal code would finally have some semblance of sanity.

You're right. If a cop sees you step outside the crosswalk at an intersection, he should have NO choice but to cite you for jaywalking, and generate all of the paperwork and costs involved, whether or not the reason you stepped out of the cross walk was to avoid walking through a big puddle of hydraulic fluid that was just spilled by a trash truck. It's situations like that where a cop's body cam might very well record such an infraction, and in the name of ridding society of any potentially abused judgement calls, we should use that technology to make sure that everyone involved toes the line, literally and figuratively. We can't have judgement calls! Your judgement call that we shouldn't is good enough for me.

Comment Re:The death of leniency (Score 2) 643

It seems to indicate that the poor, defenseless disenfranchised police officers are the victims in all of this

No, the victims are the residents and business owners in a trashed place like Ferguson where a bunch of idiots decided that wrecking the place is the right reaction to events like that lovable big lug, Mike Brown, being shot for no reason whatsoever. We know it was for no reason because thoroughly reliable witnesses (like, the guy who was within him when Lovable Big Mike, the 6'-4" 300-pound Gentle Giant was intimidating a retail clerk) said so, and the witness who said he was "shot in the back, execution style" said so. Except both witnesses are full of crap, and they know it. The cop who got his face mashed by this giant guy would indeed have had an easier time of it if Lovable Giant Mike's altercation with the cop inside the cruiser had been recorded. But more importantly, there's a chance that a lot of people's businesses wouldn't have been wrecked by people who came in from out of town specifically to trash the place and steal stuff with the tacit blessings of guys like Al Sharpton.

Comment Re:Maybe he should consider learning a language (Score 1) 548

For those who aren't aware, an idiom is a group of words that have a meaning other than their literal interpretation.

And in this case, the idiom is "I couldn't care less." Most of the time it's not literally true, but it conveys the sense that the person using the idiom considers whatever it is being described as being at or near the very bottom of the list of things he cares about. So low on the list that in practical terms, he couldn't care less.

So when someone says the opposite of that ("I could care less"), it's not even a nod to the actual concept - it's just someone making sounds similar to the sounds in the idiom, without actually thinking about the words they're saying. By your thinking, "I wooden flare lens" would also be an idiom because if you mutter it badly enough it also sounds like the real idiom.

Comment Maybe he should consider learning a language (Score 2, Insightful) 548

Like, perhaps, English. So that he could - after all these years as a professional who types out strings of characters that very specific meaning - understand that when he says "could have cared less about my career," he means "could NOT have cared less about my career."

Maybe he's been working all these years in languages that don't incorporate the concept of "not" or " ! " in evaluating two values. Are there any? I couldn't care less. Grown-ups who communicate or code for a living should be able to handle that one correctly.

Comment Re:No, not the cause of the breach. (Score 1) 89

another car ran a red light and you plowed into them it would be all their fault?

Yes. The accident, as simplistically as you're describing it - which implies that "failing" or not, "you" were still able to drive around - is the fault of the driver that broke the law by running the red light. Without that driver's bad driving, the accident would not have occurred. Just like without the Chinese deliberately cracking in to take medical records, they wouldn't have thus been in receipt of those records. Which part of "the data theft cannot happen without a data thief actually acting to do the crime" are you unclear about? Though your car analogy is a bad one, it's very similar to, "You can't be in a collision with a person driving a car through a red light without that other person actually running the red." It's not complicated.

Slashdot Top Deals

Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz

Working...