Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment None of those things are private (Score 1) 109

I am disturbed by this as well. Unless Ted Kacynkski signed a waiver to allow the government to auction off what can be considered private records, I don't see how the government should be allowed to do this. Selling off other property to pay restitution to his victims, I don't have a problem with.

As long as you're not a criminal, you don't have to worry about it too much. The government can't take your stuff away and sell it unless you cause them to by, for example, mailing bombs to innocent victims.

None of the items mentioned can be considered private records. Driver's licenses, birth certificates, deeds, and academic transcripts are publicly accessible anyway, even before they become evidence in a criminal trial.

The other items became public information or government property once they were entered into evidence in the court proceedings against him, unless Kaczynski's attorney won a court order to have the evidence sealed or to have the items returned to him - which he didn't.

Comment Would you rather have the extra radiation or not? (Score 1) 277

Pretty typical logic, Occupational Exposure limits are very tight in the US, but diagnostic exposure limits are very loose. It's kind of schizophrenic for us working in dental offices where we're limited to an exposure of about 1/10 on the job of what we get as a patient from the same machines.

Not really, unless you believe that individual patients should really really be x-rayed every year*.

*which seems like in most cases it might just be a way to pad their bill.

Comment Most frustrating show ever (Score 1) 66

The show being projected is: Gerry Anderson's UFO (TV series 1970–1971) Episode 12 The Psychobombs http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0735638/

Was there ever an episode of UFO where something actually happens?

I've watched a bunch of them and it's always just one or two things happening, never a complete story. So unsatisfying given the work that went into the visual look of 1969's version of 1980.

I wonder why the shirts made of string never caught on.

Comment Theater sound is very often subpar (Score 1) 178

The picture quality is often poor too.

Because you don't have a 100ft wide screen with more than 7 channels (movie theaters have many more channels than 7).

I bet you also listen to your iPod rather than going to see a musician live...

Since your technical arguments aren't valid you throw in an ad hominem attack. I guess you're not going for any positive moderations, and that's ok.

Turns out you don't need a 100ft screen if you sit closer to it - like you can in your own home. We have a 108" picture from our projector and it is a better picture than I've seen in a number of the local theaters.

The number of channels is irrelevant if they are not set up properly. Even as recently as a couple of months ago I've sat through muddy sound in a theater. It's not like I live out in the middle of nowhere either, there are a lot of theaters in the area so you'd think they'd want to stay on top of their game to compete with each other.

Pretty much all decent modern surround sound receivers will do automatic calibration - if the theaters did this too, we'd probably be much happier theatergoers. My receiver supports 11.2, which is in fact more than 7 channels, and it wasn't expensive. Our low frequency setup is the envy of our audiophile friend, and it wasn't expensive either.

As it is now, we only go the theaters as a social occasion with friends.

Comment Not a single product; good design a la Dieter Rams (Score 1) 198

2. Sealed batteries, smaller sim cards and the like are critical paths to Apple's future product plans.

So what sort of future product would cause a problem with current products having replaceable batteries?

It's not a single product that would be hurt by those things - it's that they are anathema to Apple's design principles.

The guiding set of principles at Apple are a constant movement towards Dieter Rams' ideals of "good design".

  • Good design is innovative.
  • Good design makes a product useful.
  • Good design is aesthetic.
  • Good design helps us to understand a product.
  • Good design is unobtrusive.
  • Good design is honest.
  • Good design is durable.
  • Good design is consequent to the last detail.
  • Good design is concerned with the environment.
  • Good design is as little design as possible.

Good design means eliminating parts that the user interacts with (the battery cover, physical controls, etc).

Good design requires reducing parts count where practical - the battery cover, the battery connectors, the casing a replaceable battery must have, for example. I have a first generation iPhone in my pocket which is still on its original battery, so I'm not too worried about the difficulty of replacing it. I'd rather have a physically smaller phone or a better camera in the same-size phone than a replaceable battery.

Any time a designer adds yet another button, or another removable part, they're moving away from that ideal of "good design".

Now, wether you agree with that philosophy or not is up to you and there are a wide range of products on the market if you don't - you aren't required to buy Apple products to fulfill your needs or wants. The idea that Apple can lock down the entire market is a fallacy often professed by anti-Apple trolls in these discussions.

Of course, Jonathan Ives is just copying the old Braun products

, but that's not such a bad set of products to copy.

Comment When it's not a legal service (Score 3) 146

Can someone remind me how can a government say "no" to someone operating a legal service again?

When it looks like you're operating it in a way that does not comply with all of the laws.

You can read into that the Japanese government believes that PSN is not a legal service in Japan if PSN does not protect the privacy of the users.

Comment Why can't they come up with a unique acronym? (Score 1) 77

The equipment vendors are aware that "deep packet inspection" has negative connotations, and at least some of them are now using the term "traffic and policy management" or TPM.

Doesn't that sound nice and innocuous?

Great. Nobody would ever confuse it with the other TPM.

You'd hope these acronym buffoons would eventually try Googling their three-letter combinations to see if they've already been used in the computing field.

Comment You may be doing that more often than needed (Score 4, Insightful) 645

I've had Windows XP for almost ten years now, and I don't have to "manage" anything. Every year or so I wipe the drive with a fresh XP-CD install, and need to reinstall my favorite programs, but that would be true of any OS, whether it's Mac, Lubuntu, or Chrome.

Seriously? Do you really need to?

I've got a Windows 2000 install that's still going strong at 10 years old, and a couple of XP installs well over 5 years old. We even have a couple of Linux systems that have been running continuously longer than you keep Windows XP around - we only had to restart them during a UPS replacement. The Mac OSes only get upgrades (which counts as an install, I guess) when The Steve unveils a new version, so the system OS install I'm using right now is however old 10.6 is (about a year and a half). I have an install of OS X 10.5 on a PPC Mac at home that is still working just fine after 5 years.

So, this begs the question, what are you doing to screw up your XP installs in a year?

Even my boss, the resident malware catcher (seriously, I think he actively tries to get malware on his system) is using a three year old install of XP.

I think you'd be safe to extend your reinstall interval.

Comment All sellers charge a markup, not just Apple (Score 1) 660

Apple requires you to charge the same price in-app that you do elsewhere. You can't just do the logical thing and add 30% to the price to cover the Apple overhead.

That's the same retail price - not the wholesale price.

Don't retail outlets charge a markup too?

Surely Barnes & Noble is getting some cut of the $5 they charge for a magazine. Might even be more than 30%.

Wouldn't you expect that Amazon make a profit on things sold via their website?

The only difference is that we can all see what Apple's cut is.

Idle

Submission + - Dirty IT Jobs: Partners in Slime (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: "Carcasses, garter belts, anthrax — there is no end to nasty when it comes to working in IT, as the fourth installment of InfoWorld's Dirty IT Jobs series proves. From the systems sanitation engineer, to the human server rack, surviving in today's IT job market often means thriving in difficult conditions, including standing in two feet of water holding a plugged-in server or finding yourself in a sniper's crosshairs while attempting to install a communications link."

Comment This is a prime example (Score 3, Insightful) 220

This is a prime example of why people without legal training should not attempt to critique court decisions.

Words that mean one thing to lay people mean something else to the courts.

On top of that, couldn't this have been summarized in some compact format so that readers know if they want to read the entire wall of text or not?

Comment Ok, but that's not workable in the real world (Score 3, Insightful) 396

teach users proper data hygiene Totally impossible. They don't care and you can't make them care.

Totally easy: 1: Here's not how to be an idiot. 2: If you're an idiot, you're fired without severance or health benefits.

Can you tell me how I can fire my boss? There's basically nobody above him in the organization, so I'm just wondering how you'd apply your totally easy method in this case?

There are also the cases where an employee is main rain-maker for the company, but hasn't a clue how to keep from getting malware on their computer. A law firm is not going to fire an attorney who brings in $30 million a year just because they keep getting malware on their pc, for example.

Slashdot Top Deals

"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds

Working...