Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Must hackers be such dicks about this? (Score 1) 270

Replace "tweet" with "stand up and announce" and "laptop" with "metal pipe" and the story becomes "Man stands up in aircraft cabin and announces he 'could disable flight instruments' with metal pipe." Not that he necessarily was going to. Just that he could...and he's got to the tool to do so right here...kinda maybe thinking about it...

How would it be "unreasonable" to seize the man's metal pipe on the spot? No warrant required.

Let's fill out your analogy more completely...

* An expert researcher on the use of metal pipes for their use in disabling various things
* Who had done known research on the use of metal pipes for disabling aircraft instruments
* Which is interesting because it's not generally known or understood that metal pipes can disable aircraft instruments
* Is going to a conference to give a talk (on the use of metal pipes for disabling aircraft instruments?)
* Announces -- to fellow professionals in the field of disabling things with metal pipes -- that he knows how it's possible to use metal pipes to disable flight instruments, contrary to the general understanding

Yep, no matter how you dice it, detaining the fellow and seizing his metal pipe still seems ludicrous.

Comment Re:Accepting a story from Florian Meuller? (Score 1) 110

So far their acclaimed commitments seem to be mostly fluff with very little real substance in them..

How about completely opening .Net, moving their build system to GitHub, and moving the compiler to LLVM? Those seem to have some real substance to me. Then there's them embracing Docker for Windows Server 10 and open sourcing that work. This is not your fathers Microsoft.

...and how much of that is usable on any non-Microsoft platform? A percentage would be fine as an answer.

I think it's close to 100%, on mac+linux. When Microsoft open-sourced their VB+C# compilers a year ago, Miguel was on stage as well to show it running on mac.

Comment The Cloud (Score 1) 446

The answer is still the cloud.

You're not vulnerable to hackers because you encrypted it before uploading it.

You're not vulnerable to the company going out of business because you still have your local machine. The only vulnerability is that the company goes unexpectedly out of business with no advance warning on the same day as your house is burned down. The great thing about two such radically different forms of storage (home + cloud) is that their failure models are uncorrelated and so vanishingly less likely to both fail at the same time.

Comment Re:Yeah, right. (Score 1) 892

From your first link:

"The holdout cities — those where the earnings of single, college-educated young women still lag men's — tended to be built around industries that are heavily male-dominated, such as software development or military-technology contracting. In other words, Silicon Valley could also be called Gender Gap Gully."

Comment Re:wildfires? (Score 2) 304

So I agree entirely with your sentiment, except I chuckled when you wrote that you live in Seattle.

What's funny about that is Seattle is also full of rich dumb people that make dumb decisions.

If you've done the Seattle underground history tour, you know that Seattle basically sunk into the sound long ago. The whole city history is replete with stories of stupid people that fought nature and lost.

Recently, the highway 99 project comes to mind :)

Comment Re:no future for non-veterans (Score 3, Informative) 69

Most who qualify as veteran achieved that status before President Obama was elected. It has nothing to do with serving HIM but rather serving the country. Veterans have a higher unemployment rate than the general public, mostly because most employers don't recognize the skills they bring and that their military training doesn't always translate clearly into civilian HR job listings.

Also this isn't a jobs program but a training program. If the economy doesn't create 75k jobs for those trained through this program it won't help them. But if the market is there then they will have the training to work in the field.

Comment Re:Why.... (Score 1) 191

And of course there is the fact that such events are most commonly set to all go off together so by the time the Feds react to the first boom, and issue the order to shut down the cell networks, all the other bombs have also detonated. And now mass panic ensues because family members can't reach out and confirm safety to one another.

Real life attacks are rarely if ever as scripted out as in the movies, which is the only place you find an evil mastermind who sets a series of timed bombs being set off at different times for maximum evil doing.

Comment Re:Speaking as an outsider (Score 2) 159

Currently, I use one of the many Linux Desktop Environments that lets me configure the look and feel of the desktop the way I want, not the way somebody else wants.

Yeah, you were able to configure Windows8.1 to look and feel pretty much like XP. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Did you require the configuration to be in-the-box with no manual tweaking? or something else?

Comment Re:This map is highly suspect (Score 0) 143

We were fighting these beetle infestations back in the 70's when we were worried about global cooling. The beetles are not new, their presence is not a result of global warming but rather of our meddling with natural burn patterns for so many years.

In un managed forests a fire sweeps through every couple decades killing off the beetle killed trees and most the beetles in an area, the healthy trees are singed but not really harmed and are thus protected by the killing of most the beetles. In managed forests where we basically stopped all fires as soon as they started, the beetles killed a few trees, then a few more then a lot more and so on. After several years a dead tree might finally fall over allowing new growth to come up in it's place but mostly they just stood as forests of reddish grey dead trees.
Now we try to allow some burns, manage others and intentionally set many management fires each year. But thanks to the decades of mismanagement managed and natural fires are frequently getting out of control due to the massive swaths of beetle killed trees.

Once burned those forests will at last begin to naturally regenerate. Not right back to the forests of standing conifers, but through the natural stages often first of grasses and shrubs then deciduous trees like quaking aspens and scub oak and then over decades back to conifers. Depending on the water cycle in the area. Other areas with more moisture will get back to the conifers more quickly.

Slashdot Top Deals

The Tao is like a stack: the data changes but not the structure. the more you use it, the deeper it becomes; the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

Working...