If one wanted, one could design a scanner whose only data-output path was an audible tone. You could download a list of license numbers into it (using a unidirectional data transfer, e.g. via a serial port with the device's TX pin removed), and then it would beep if it saw one of the plates in the list, and that's all it would do.

To hack it to output a list of license plates it had scanned that day would both require hardware and software modifications -- not impossible, but inconvenient enough that it's unlikely most police departments would be capable of doing it.

Completely agreed. And moving the "number of comments" link to the title bar was just batshit, since now you can't just scan down the page seeing what stories are popular.

A bit rough around the edges, but I put together a userstyle to adjust these two things. It looks like this. Feel free to fix/adapt it:

@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
    #firehose article header span.topic {
        top: 45px;
    }

    #firehose article .comment-bubble {
        right: auto;
        top: auto;
        left: 30px;
        bottom: 5px;
        border: none;
        background-color: inherit;
        font-size: 90%;
        width: 38px;
        height: 25px;
        line-height: 1.6rem;
    }

    #firehose article span.comment-bubble::after {
        border-color: rgb(1, 103, 101) transparent transparent;
        border-width: 5px 5px 0 0;
        bottom: -5px;
    }
}

I have a feeling that we're seeing the start of a very gradual rollout of Beta. Fuck that noise.

Yes, this topic at the same time as Sony is killing of the Aibo.

Perhaps it should be?

True, but the end result is the same. All the same people will continue to pretend that the language is built for classes and ignore prototypes, but now even more will just use the classes interface since it's "official" now. This leaves projects or developers who do use prototypes even farther out in left field, since classes have become an even more common practice.

I'm not going to say it's good or bad thing in a productivity or business sense, since classes are clearly more common and familiar to most people. But from just a language identity standpoint, it's a loss and that's too bad.

So they just gave up on the whole prototype system and duct taped class-based OO on top of it? That's actually kind of sad -- It was a special aspect of Javascript that set it apart from other languages, and homogenization is boring. I guess maybe today's "Javascript developers" just couldn't wrap their heads around it.

Here's a rundown of the new features if anyone else hasn't been following ES6 and is curious. A few of note are

scoped and const declaration via let and const,
lazy iterators and generators,
format/heredoc strings,
and varargs ala Lua.

Overall this looks like a good step in bringing Javascript closer to being on par with more modern languages.

Is making the hyper loop even faster considered desirable? Unless they can find a way to make the path of the track/pipe perfectly straight, the passengers will experience g-forces proportional to the velocity of the vehicle whenever they go around a curve. Too much speed could make the ride rather uncomfortable. (You can reduce that by making the track straiter, of course, but that reduces your flexibility in placing the track)

Not on that, but it was collapsed to just the title of the post (at least for me). I skipped over it earlier as an inane Idle post, but looking over again decided to expand the title to at least RTFS.

Why are you guys trying to kill polls?

It's good that you're confident in your company's abilities; but in order to win the contract, you'd have to gain the confidence of the decision-makers in the school district as well. As any company involved in outsourcing over the last decade can tell you, a cheaper up-front quote is no bargain if the delivered product is screwed up.

This is why it's so critical to include scheduled malfunctions in your control logic. That way you'll get called in every 6-9 months to "fix" the system, which you'll be able to do very quickly since it is just a matter of resetting the timer for next time. You'll make a few hundred dollars each time, and everybody will recall you fondly as the indispensable genius who is the only person who knows just how to keep the system running. Just be sure to randomize the timeouts a bit so that nobody catches on ;^)

(disclaimer: I'm joking; I don't really advocate doing this)

All well and good, if the failures are in fact randomly distributed.

OTOH, if the failures are caused by particular entry conditions (aging/temperature/pressure/whatever) and all of the valves are experiencing those entry conditions simultaneously, then the likelihood of all valves failing simultaneously may be much higher.

Which is the beauty of the Firefox addon system. The baseline browser as a framework is extensible in an almost unlimited fashion, which should allow them to keep the default web browser lean and focused on browsing the web. If someone wants add chat client or "read it later" functionality, users can choose to install that addon. Mozilla could even show a "suggested addons" page the first time a user runs Firefox that includes stuff like Pocket and the absurd Firefox Hello crap. For that matter, they could even bundle addons for things like Hello, making it easy for users to remove addons they have no interest in.

But no. Mozilla is filled with people hell-bent on destroying Firefox the web browser and and replacing it with Firefox the Platform. I'm just waiting for them to start decommissioning the addon framework, which they've already started by requiring all addons to be signed by Mozilla, or they won't be loaded. It's sickening.

It is pointless, in a single-user environment, where all the software was written by the same guy, with no networking, who never makes coding errors.

Admittedly that's a pretty specific use case, but it works for him. It reminds me of coding on the Amiga, back in the day. Bad pointer dereference? Oops, total OS crash and reboot, and if you're really lucky now your filesystem is corrupted and you've lost the source code you were working on. That'll teach ya... ;)

What Clippy gets is a good swift kick in the pants. Siri should count herself lucky to only get 76.5% of that.

It's a cost of doing business? If you think Apple is bad, try developing games for Nintendo.