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Comment Insurance (Score 5, Informative) 249

As someone who has moved overseas and back four times; you are worried about the trivial details. Take a good hard look at the shipping contract concerning damage coverage. The contract may also prohibit certain hazardous materials like lead acid batteries and cleaning products.

Have your property packed out by a company experienced in shipping belongings overseas. No amount of silica packages will protect your stuff if the container is lost at sea or gets sea water inside.

Document the condition of your belongings before they are packed up. Also make backups of important data and papers and keep them separate from your shipment. So that in the event that the worst happens, it's just a matter of getting reimbursed for damages and buying replacements. While that can be time consuming and annoying, it is better than losing irreplaceable photos or legal records.

Good luck and enjoy your new country.

Comment Re:It's well deserved. (Score 2) 296

Why is it that it's always company intranets that break with new browsers?

Because company intranets/portals contain lots of links to third party apps and are limited by what those vendors support. When you have major software companies like SAP which have products that only added IE 9 support in major upgrades provided in the last two months, it is no surprise that lots of corporations aren't on the leading edge of supported browsers. Support for Chrome or recent Firefox (including extended support release 10) is virtually non-existent among lots of enterprise software, so those aren't options either.

Comment Re:Eco fraud (Score 1) 1181

Just a quick application of logic shows this to be a straw-man argument. The depth of some ice deposits has absolutely no relationship to the volume of ice overall, or when it was deposited.

Not sure why I'm debating with someone who just makes claims without any facts, but here is some more information for you to consider.

Average Ice Depth In Antarctica
Basically, Antarctica is a snow and ice "factory" with ice depths on the Polar Plateau reaching 15,000 feet (the continent's average ice thickness is 7,000 feet). Thus, one of Antarctica's most important resources is its ice. It is said that Antarctica's ice accounts for 70% of the world's fresh water.

Now when you consider that Antarctica is essentially a desert that only averages two inches of snow a year, think about how long it takes to build up 7000 feet of ice.

Comment Re:Eco fraud (Score 1) 1181

Most of the antarctic and arctic ice is recent ice as in less than 10,000 years old.

Where did you get that idea from?

Just a quick search finds obvious differences from that concept:
Ice cores:
The length of the record depends on the depth of the ice core and varies from a few years up to 800 kyr (800,000 years) for the EPICA core.

Lake Vostok:
Lake Vostok is the largest of more than 140 sub-glacial lakes and was recently drilled into by Russian scientists. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleoclimatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for 15[3][4] to 25 million years.[5]

Now Arctic Ice (as in the Arctic Ocean), is sea ice, so yes it is relatively young. But please get a better set of sources before you try to pass stuff off as facts.

Comment Re:Ron Paul (Score 2, Insightful) 565

Feingold was part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, which I would say makes him a limiter of free speech.

I would argue that you are falling into the same mistake the Supreme Court has made repeatedly, equating money with free speech. Money is not speech, money is power. Misuse of this monetary power is what has seriously corrupted the US political process.

While McCain-Feingold may not have been perfect, it was a step in the right direction to limit the influence of money on the US political system. It is one of the great ironies in that international election observers would consider the US campaign contribution system highly corrupt if it were replicated in any election they were monitoring.

Comment Re:Is it an issue or not? (Score 2, Insightful) 182

The vendor refused to acknowledge it was a security issue.

Then it's either a feature or a regular old non-security-related bug, and I don't see the problem with announcing it to everybody. Right?

If you are really certain it is a valid issue, take a look at their marketing page and find out who their reference customers are. If you can get some of their important customers to raise this issue as well, you may have better luck getting some action on it without disclosing the vulnerability to the world at large.

Java

After Learning Java Syntax, What Next? 293

Niris writes "I'm currently taking a course called Advanced Java Programming, which is using the text book Absolute Java, 4th edition, by Walter Savitch. As I work at night as a security guard in the middle of nowhere, I've had enough time to read through the entire course part of the book, finish all eleven chapter quizzes, and do all of the assignments within a month, so all that's left is a group assignment that won't be ready until late April. I'm trying to figure out what else to read that's Java related aside from the usual 'This is how to create a tree. This is recursion. This is how to implement an interface and make an anonymous object,' and wanted to see what Slashdotters have to suggest. So far I'm looking at reading Beginning Algorithms, by Simon Harris and James Ross."
Space

Pluto — a Complex and Changing World 191

astroengine writes "After 4 years of processing the highest resolution photographs the Hubble Space Telescope could muster, we now have the highest resolution view of Pluto's surface ever produced. Most excitingly, these new observations show an active world with seasonal changes altering the dwarf planet's surface. It turns out that this far-flung world has more in common with Earth than we would have ever imagined."
Software

The Final Release of Apache HTTP Server 1.3 104

Kyle Hamilton writes "The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.42 of the Apache HTTP Server ('Apache'). This release is intended as the final release of version 1.3 of the Apache HTTP Server, which has reached end of life status There will be no more full releases of Apache HTTP Server 1.3. However, critical security updates may be made available."
Microsoft

Visual Studio 2010 Forces Tab Indenting 390

An anonymous reader writes "For years, Microsoft has allowed Visual Studio users to define arbitrary tab widths, often to the dismay of those viewing the resultant code in other editors. With VS 2010, it appears that they have taken the next step of forcing tab width to be the same as the indent size in code. Two-space tabs anyone?"
The Almighty Buck

How Do You Measure a Game's Worth? 188

RamblingJosh writes "Video games can be very expensive these days, especially with so many great games on the horizon. So I wonder: how exactly do you get the most gaming entertainment for your dollar? '... the first thing I personally thought about when approaching this was money spent versus time played. Using Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions as an example: I bought the game for about $30 Canadian, and played it for roughly 85 hours. That comes out to 2.83 hours per dollar spent, a pretty good number. In this case, the game was a lot of fun and it was cheap, and so the system works fairly well. There are so many other things to think about, though. What if the game wasn't so good? What about the fact that it's portable? ... What about the new content? Multiplayer?'"
Games

Revisiting the "Holy Trinity" of MMORPG Classes 362

A feature at Gamasutra examines one of the foundations of many MMORPGs — the idea that class roles within such a game fall into three basic categories: tank, healer, and damage dealer. The article evaluates the pros and cons of such an arrangement and takes a look at some alternatives. "Eliminating specialized roles means that we do away with boxing a class into a single role. Without Tanks, each class would have features that would help them participate in and survive many different encounters like heavy armor, strong avoidance, or some class or magical abilities that allow them to disengage from direct combat. Without specialized DPS, all classes should be able to do damage in order to defeat enemies. Some classes might specialize in damage type, like area of effect (AoE) damage; others might be able to exploit enemy weaknesses, and some might just be good at swinging a sharpened bit of metal in the right direction at a rapid rate. This design isn't just about having each class able to fill any trinity role. MMO combat would feel more dynamic in this system. Every player would have to react to combat events and defend against attacks."

Comment Re:WTF? (Score 0) 189

I think they were shooting for influential in business, in relation to open source. Still, I think they missed their mark considerably.

Definitely missed their mark. Seriously, look at the "mentions" - Steve Ballmer. Would really need to see the way they worded the survey to see how that name made the list.

It's funny.  Laugh.

Finding a Personal Coding Trifecta 188

jammag writes "For Seinfeld's George Constanza, his dream of the ideal moment was having sex while watching TV and eating a pastrami sandwich. He called this Nirvana state 'The Trifecta.' Developer Eric Spiegel adapts this concept of Nirvana to the act of writing your best possible code. He examines all (or most) of the possible things that might contribute to the 'The Trifecta' for developers — food, beverages, time of day. Spiegel also describes his personal Trifecta."

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