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Comment Ya know Lincoln comment on this - (Score 1) 398

When he said that "you can't fool all of the people all of the time". Which is just a version of the the genus of crowds. Toss in Crowd Sourcing ... just because.

And what has the crowd, the American Public, said about Snowden's comments on the aggressiveness of the NSA? "Yawn. It's nice to know were getting our money's worth out of them."

I think Americans think of it this way: "You can have either a hunting dog, or a lap dog. You can't get a dog that's both. If you have a hunting dog, it's going to get out sometimes and chase stuff. I'm not going to be angry that the hunting dog is hunting. I'll think about a new leash, tomorrow. I'm too busy doing other stuff today. Oh, and by the way, telling the truth, sometimes, is a crime."

For me, I agree with the American people. As for his concerns that his supervisors would punish him for speaking out - they very well might have. There are two other branches of government. The NSA has critics in the Congress and the Courts. He should have exhausted his other options before this. Failing to do so is a crime and he should be punished for it. It is the same as refusing to report a crime because you're convinced the police are corrupt. Did you try the State Police? The FBI?

Next question, will I be modded down as flamebait because someone disagrees with me?

Comment Is this to make it work on tablets better? (Score 1) 1191

After I posted my last comment I had a thought. Is this to make /. work on tablets and touch screens better? If so then it should be said so. Not some bull that it is to make things more clear. It doesn't. If it is to try and get ahead of some paradigm shift then say so. I may not agree but at least there will be a reason besides some sold some idea to some manager and now he is going to shove it through so HE doesn't look like an idiot.

Comment Is this a done deal? I saw no positive comments (Score 1) 1191

If this is the management of Dice saying we are making Slashdot us and not what Commander Taco made, then it is time to go. Everything about it is wrong.

I have never seen anything so universally hated on /. before. The design is horrible. It wastes space and what goes with what is unclear. Every new complaint is correct.

Comment Bad. Very bad. This isn't Slashdot. (Score 1) 1191

Do not deploy this beta. This beta is terrible. It looks like the mobile site, which is why I stopped looking at Slashdot on my mobile devices. You will destroy this site.

First, Ditch the pictures. This is about reading. Then ditch the rest of the bling. They don't do anything. Nothing here helps me. It just gets in my way. You could ditch the whole website and run Slashdot as a simple BBS and it would work. Everyone who comes to Slashdot -- please post if I'm wrong -- is comfortable with a CLI. No one needs another bad copy of Gnome or KDE, which are already bad copies of Windows and MacOS.

I come to Slashdot and not Reddit or Digg because it is edited and moderated. There are some smart people picking and choosing from what is going to be put up. It is a place for nerds, people who are very comfortable with text and typing to get together and type and read. None of the rest helps.

Comment A cellphone is replacing family!!?? (Score 4, Interesting) 682

Just so you know, I am a Stay At Home Dad and have been nothing else for 20 years. When Marissa Miller pulled the plug on working at home it was this sort of half halfheartedness that she was shaking out of Yahoo's business model. If your are working, then work and give either your employer or customers your complete attention. If you find yourself unable to separate from your child then stay home. You can't do both. Don't lie to yourself and your child that a cellphone is a replacement for your being there. It's not. When I married my wife we decided that childcare was of paramount importance. Since she was a well paid professional and I was a struggling student (Yes, I got that lucky), I stayed home. The son went to school in the day and I went at night, or he stayed with family. Yes, Family! You didn't disturb Mommy; Auntie, or Grandma, or Uncle or me or whoever took care of what needed doing. There was somebody who's job it was, and is, to take care of my son. As more children arrived my duties - Think about that word for a moment - Duty; ... my duties have continued. And by the way, Yes, that means I finally didn't finish my degree. Instead, I am there for my children. Yes I've had to sacrifice to do that. My children are worth it.

A 4 year old is not able to handle a phone and is too young to be allowed to make the judgement of when to call you. They need to know to call 911 in an emergency and stay on until help arrives - unless there is a fire, then they get out! Go to someone trusted and have then call for help. That is it. They should be cared for 24-7 and their caregiver will make any calls needed. If you can't trust your child's caregiver to make every fucking decision that needs to be made get another caregiver or do it yourself ! A cell phone will quickly become a stick to bully whomever is the caregiver. "If you don't give me more ice cream I'll call daddy and he'll be angry at you"

Save your money and send your kid to a good school. I always recommend a Montessori if at all possible. You will learn that one of the first steps to raising a healthy, happy and independent adult is having them learn to separate. They start to learn this at about 4. Yes you go away, and yes you come back. At school they learn to operate as a member of a society with rules and responsibilities. With family you learn to be part of a family. A mutually dependent social structure. That means every member needs every other. This is what you want, to raise a good person.

Comment Please explain why I'm supposed to Freak out again (Score 1) 513

Hmm. I tried to post a link to this to my Facebook account using Firefox, but couldn't. I block ads and trackers (and Flash) so all of this web interconnectedness just stops working. Safari hung so I was left running this though Goggle's grubby little, but not doing evil, fingers using Chrome. I use Little Snitch (Do you?) I connected to the NYTImes.com and Facebook only, but 51 servers were called. Why? What oversight do any of these extra servers have? Who are they? Why do I have to provide a unique bar code to get a sale price at Walgreen's? The Supermarket? How is this NSA graph different then Facebook Graph Search?

And still, all of these posters want me to freak out over this. Why? What is that obvious thing I am missing?

If the internet is a commons then what expectation for privacy do you have? If you walk around in the street you can be watched. Anyone can go though your garbage once it's off your property. Someone can glance over the mailman's shoulder and see what mail you are getting.

To Quote Steve Fankuchen of Oakland CA on the NYTImes web site (Am I allowed to do this, or is this the private property of the New York Times Inc and must be defended with my many guns?)

Why anyone ever thought any of what they did online was private has always been a mystery to me. But, then again, I am a dinosaur, veteran of earlier versions of the same sort of activity.

Unfortunately, what people, especially young ones, don't seem to get is that as odious and unconstitutional as government spying on Americans is, there is at least some accountability there. The reality is that individuals (whether you want to call them whistle blowers, hackers, traitors, or patriots) in the government have access to and can release information whenever they want. (Snowden is an excellent example.)

Worse, corporations have no real accountability for their actions regarding the amassing and release of data, and if you think Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg can be voted out of office, let alone go to jail, you have been doing way too much drugs. (Here one might consider the banks as a somewhat parallel example.)

I expect it will take a generation or two coming of age with this reality before people start changing their online behavior. Once the technology is there, laws are only effective at the margins.

A comic strip many years ago (it may have been Pogo) had two kids talking on tin can phones. A third has his off to the side, connected to their line. One of the two says to the other, "Who's he?" To which the other replies, "Oh, he works for the government."

Tin can phones? Yes, I am dating myself.

I think the people posting on and on and on about their privacy need to grow up a little and realize what he internet really is not. Private or Free. The fundamental deal of the internet is that you give away your privacy in exchange for free data.

Comment Re:A question (Score 1) 165

As noted IANAL

Regardless: the proposed activity is not simply "to distract a cop"... it's to highlight the shaky and arbitrary foundations of a poorly thought out law. I'm not saying a policeman is going to welcome that interpretation, but the prescribed defense is a whole lot more than "I was just trying to distract a cop". Was Rosa Parks just trying to make the bus late?

This only works if Rosa Parks was texting while driving the bus. I don't know of any particular civil right to text while driving. A cop seeing you provides all of the cause needed to check your records and see if texts were sent and received in the time span in question. Fiddling with the radio, or anything else, is harder to prove. This makes a texting ban enforceable. What else do you want out of a law?

Comment Re:A question (Score 2) 165

I think you would get slapped twice. It's the cops word against yours. ASAIK IANAL the cop is automatically believed by the court. You have to disprove them. Also, simulating a crime just to distract a cop is a separate crime.

As for the law's logic. you can't ban being distracted, you can ban specific behaviors in specific places. You can get a ticket for putting on makeup while driving. You are operating a vehicle in an unsafe manner. I knew someone it happened to. It was the cops word against her's.

Comment Okay, I'll buy this. (Score 1) 165

I was just driving in NY State and there are tons of signs up about the anti-texting law. Some of the rest stops had free wi-fi and some didn't. I don't think this will stop stupid young people from texting, that would require them to stop being stupid young people. But for the rest of us it may well help. When texts came in from my college age kid I found it hard to ignore them. Having my wife with me to read them and respond and tell me to stop dithering and drive was a great help.

These days when ever I drive with someone I give them my phone, it's just easier that way. If I'm alone I turn on Do Not Disturb and use a jawbone earpiece. Actually that isn't true, lot of the time I just turn off the sound and listen to the radio. I need to call out, not take calls. I spent twenty years driving without a cell phone. It can wait, really it can. Or, solve it yourself, You're a grown up now, you can do this.

Comment It seems that CCC proved Apple's point. (Score 1) 481

CCC has proved that a targeted attack where the attacker has access to the person and the iPhone and a sophisticated skill set can overcome the finger print sensor on an iPhone 5s. So if I'm walking down the street and some thief takes my iPhone 5s I'm good to go. Walk into any Apple store or Internet Cafe, log in to my iCloud account and wipe the thing. Even if they knew how to do preform this hack, it would still take hours.

I can't tell you the number of times that I've had people watch me in dumb struck amazement as I switched out their ram in a few minutes. A new hard-drive in a ATX case is a ten minute job. I already have the tools and the knowledge. My point being these simple skills are not common, what CCC does is very uncommon even in the DIY crowd. A common person can expect to pay hundreds of dollars buying all of the tools needed and then days or weeks practicing to be able to do this hack.

Sorry, this proves that the fingerprint sensor is a good idea in it's context.

Submission + - Should more math and equations be used in the popular press? (nytimes.com) 1

raque writes: The NYTimes (standard disclaimers apply) published two OP-EDs in their Philosophy section (first here second here), The Stone, discussing how Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle is abused. The second is a followup to the first. The author struggled to make clear his point and left the impression he was creating a strawman argument. In his followup he said that he was avoiding equations due to his writing for a general audience. I replied to both articles as Rtbinc, in the second I put up the following comment:

One of the issues is that Dr Callendar has is a fear of Math and equations in popular reading. A lot of other people are afraid of these few very pretty symbols. Lets do an experiment and see if using some equations and symbols drives readers into fits of terror and prevents their understanding as they cower shivering under their chairs.

The below is from Heinz Pagels in the Cosmic Code (available on Kindle from Amazon and Nook from B&N for about 10 bucks). It shows up on Google books too. Go look, it's fun.

One part of the Uncertainty Principal is (p)x(q)h – where p and q (the is pronounced delta, e.g., delta-p) are the sums of all of the uncertainties — or differences — in a huge pile of measurements of the position and velocity of some particle we're measuring – and h is the tiny, but still not zero, number called the Plank constant. The mathematical symbols haven't changed meaning, so if h ain't zero, neither p or q can be either. We can be as precise as we like, until we hit the Plank Constant. This is not some mathematical oddity, it is how the universe operates. That is weird, and that is one example of quantum weirdness.

The question for the experiment is: Would Dr Callendar have done better to use the equation in the first article instead of metaphors from TV and Movies? Or, did they so frighten you that you need a good stiff brandy and a foot rub.

So I'm asking the same question to everyone on Slashdot. Would Dr Callendar been better off just diving in and dealing with Heisenberg and quantum mechanics using the tools that were developed for it.

Comment Re:just wow (Score 1) 421

Okay – I'll assume you're just trolling, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. I have lived that life for the last 20 years as a male and I'll give you, and the rest of Slashdot, some insights. Any ladies can chime in if I've missed or misrepresented anything.
In no particular order:

You exist for the sake of "The Other", who ever that may be. There are usually several. What you want and need doesn't matter any more. You service the needs of others - in every way that can be used - and *must* make that the source of your joy in life. Think about that one for a minute. You fulfill someone else's wants and needs and that *is* how your wants and needs are fulfilled. Having a want or a need that isn't fulfilling someone else's want or need isn't part of the definition.

It's a low level management gig. You have no control over what sort of revenue stream you have, but still have to get stuff done. You can't fire anyone, all you can do is quit.

It doesn't get more back office.

Children don't make for interesting conversation, are endless sinks of want's and need's, aren't grateful, and success in parenting is to make yourself irrelevant.

You are now officially stupid. In matters of any importance no one cares what your opinion is. All status in America and in the West stems from your JOB! Think abut that.

It is boring. How many time can you make the same set of healthy reasonable priced meals and sweep the same floor.

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