Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Nice laptop, but dislike the keyboard design (Score 1) 592

by Carewolf (#48846835) Attached to: Why Run Linux On Macs?

A recent employer issued me a new 15" MacBook Pro. I really liked the weight, battery life, screen quality, and the feel of the keyboard. But the non-PC keyboard layout drove me nuts. I.e., the absence of stand-alone keys like home, end, page-up, alt, etc.

You should happy they removed home and end. At least if you are running OS X. You might end up hitting them otherwise, and then chaos and stupidity ensues. It seems Apple instead of fixing the retarded behavior of home and end in OS X just removed the buttons so users would hit them and be thrown around and lose the position in the document they were working on. Typical Apple; fixing the problem, not by admitting any fault but by removing user options.

Comment Re:Here's an interesting follow-up idea (Score 4, Insightful) 291

by Carewolf (#48842007) Attached to: Innocent Adults Are Easy To Convince They Committed a Serious Crime

What would be interesting would be to see what a polygraph says about their false memories. Can it distinguish between an event that occurred and one that was from a false memory? If not, that would be the final nail in the coffin.

What coffin? Polygraphs are a hoax intended to scare stupid criminals into confessing. It does even work on real memories, why would it work on false ones?

Comment Re:Microsoft: No evidence flaw successfully exploi (Score 1) 263

by Carewolf (#48832077) Attached to: Google Releases More Windows Bugs

Uh, isn't that what Google's proof-of-concept does - demonstrate the flaw being successfully exploited? Does Microsoft need to see N. Korea exploiting it before they believe it's real?

If you personally create a remote account for a North Korean spy and he uses this exploit to see you power control settings. You really were asking for it, not sure what but something.
Open Source

Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users' 551

Posted by Soulskill from the disagreeing-is-not-ignoring dept.
M-Saunders writes: Systemd is ambitious and controversial, taking over a large part of the GNU/Linux base system. But where did it come from? Even Red Hat wasn't keen on it at the start, but since then it has worked its way into almost every major distro. Linux Voice talks to Lennart Poettering, the lead developer of Systemd, about its origins, its future, its relationship with Upstart, and handling the pressures of online flamewars.
Crime

Parents Investigated For Neglect For Letting Kids Walk Home Alone 784

Posted by samzenpus from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-walking-children? dept.
HughPickens.com writes The WaPo reports that Danielle and Alexander Meitiv in Montgomery County Maryland say they are being investigated for neglect after letting their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter make a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. "We wouldn't have let them do it if we didn't think they were ready for it," says Danielle. The Meitivs say they believe in "free-range" parenting, a movement that has been a counterpoint to the hyper-vigilance of "helicopter" parenting, with the idea that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to progressively test limits, make choices and venture out in the world. "The world is actually even safer than when I was a child, and I just want to give them the same freedom and independence that I had — basically an old-fashioned childhood," says Danielle. "I think it's absolutely critical for their development — to learn responsibility, to experience the world, to gain confidence and competency."

On December 20, Alexander agreed to let the children walk from Woodside Park to their home, a mile south, in an area the family says the children know well. Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them. Alexander said he had a tense time with police when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world. The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services which showed up a couple of hours later. Although Child Protective Services could not address this specific case they did point to Maryland law, which defines child neglect as failure to provide proper care and supervision of a child. "I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing," says Alexander. "We feel we're being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with."
Businesses

Study: Belief That Some Fields Require "Brilliance" May Keep Women Out 218

Posted by samzenpus from the you-can-go-it dept.
sciencehabit writes Certain scientific fields require a special type of brilliance, according to conventional wisdom. And a new study suggests that this belief, as misguided as it may be, helps explain the underrepresentation of women in those fields. The authors found that fields in which inborn ability is prized over hard work produced relatively fewer female Ph.D.s. This trend, based on 2011 data from the National Science Foundation's Survey of Earned Doctorates, also helps explain why gender ratios don't follow the simplified STEM/non-STEM divide in some fields, including philosophy and biology, they conclude.

Comment Re:"Forget about the risk that machines pose to us (Score 4, Insightful) 227

by Carewolf (#48825337) Attached to: An Open Letter To Everyone Tricked Into Fearing AI

No, forget you. Yes journalism is crap and yes sensationalism rules the day. That doesn't make AI in 2015 and ongoing any less persistent a threat to humanity.

You are right, it doesn't make it any less of a threat, which is to say any less that non existing. You are exactly who this article is about, you have been conned into thinking AIs are actually real and could in any near future cause a threat to you, when that is in fact not the case. AI do not exists, all those software emulating AI are all smart systems working either deterministic based on specific rules set out or does stastical modeling to make guesses at what you mean or what they are looking at. Stastical modeling that makes a black yellow striped pattern look like a school bus, because it has no concept of anything and not intelligence in any sense of the word and that is the just what fits the statistical model.

Comment Re:Fuck Me (Score 2, Informative) 553

by Carewolf (#48815603) Attached to: SystemD Gains New Networking Features

Kind of hard to do on Debian.

"apt-get install openrc" is hard???

Why are you trolling? Debian might BE switching to systemd, but it is still optional in Jessie, all the other init systems still work.

Besides systemd is modular, you only need to install the modules you want and need.
Debian

SystemD Gains New Networking Features 553

Posted by samzenpus from the making-things-better dept.
jones_supa writes A lot of development work is happening on systemd with just the recent couple of weeks seeing over 200 commits. With the most recent work that has landed, the networkd component has been improved with new features. Among the additions are IP forwarding and masquerading support (patch). This is the minimal support needed and these settings get turned on by default for container network interfaces. Also added was minimal firewall manipulation helpers for systemd's networkd. The firewall manipulation helpers (patch) are used for establishing NAT rules. This support in systemd is provided by libiptc, the library used for communicating with the Linux kernel's Netfilter and changing iptables firewall rulesets. Those wishing to follow systemd development on a daily basis and see what is actually happening under the hood, can keep tabs via the systemd Git viewer.

Comment Re:doesn't meaning anything ... right? (Score 1) 393

by Carewolf (#48809943) Attached to: Is 'SimCity' Homelessness a Bug Or a Feature?

It sure is a good thing that players' behavior as modeled in games has no effect whatsoever on their offline behavior, or in any way informs us about their attitudes toward the real world. That might be disconcerting.

That is not the interesting part. The players behavior might not match their offline behavior, but it does match the offline behavior of some politicians.

Submission + - UK Prime Minister seeks to resurrect the zombie of compulsory key escrow

Submitted by Dr_Barnowl
Dr_Barnowl writes: The BBC Reports that UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has vowed to introduce a "comprehensive piece of legislation" aimed at there being "no piece of communication" .. "which we cannot read", in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.

The only logical means by which this could occur would be by the introduction of compulsory key escrow, and the banning of forms of encryption which do not use it. While the UK already essentially has a legal means to demand your encryption keys (and imprison you indefinitely if you don't comply), this would fall short if you have a credible reason for not having the key any more (such as using an OTR plugin for your chosen chat program).

The US tried a similar tack with Clipper in the 90s.

As we all know, terrorists with any technical chops are unlikely to be affected, given the vast amount of freely available military-grade crypto now available, and the use of boring old cold war tradecraft.

Ironically, France used to ban the use of strong cryptography but has largely liberalized it's regime since 2011.

Comment Re: Who gives a fuck (Score 1) 104

by Carewolf (#48791651) Attached to: Chrome For OS X Catches Up With Safari's Emoji Support

While it is absolutely the case that emoji has no place in certain text fields, as a web browser it is Chrome's responsibility to handle all valid and compliant UTF-8 symbols, including emoji symbols, within the application. Emoji are not some imaginary pseudo-symbol type or image format sent in-line. Where the symbol is seen, an image from a font will be displayed instead of a conventional character. As such, is it really that different than needing to support Cyrillic characters in text fields?

It was already working. This was just allowing Chrome to use the color fonts for Emoji on Mac. They were already supporting color fonts on Linux.

Slashdot Top Deals

Your computer account is overdrawn. Please reauthorize.

Close