Comment Re:No problem. (Score 1) 137
You must be new here.
Comment Oh No! (Score 1) 153
A blinding flash of the obvious!
Comment Re:I'm quite surprised it wasn't (Score 1) 523
Perhaps, but, statistically, a failing rocket will not fall on your head, but nearby. Then you care if your land is only burned and poisoned or irradiated, burned and poisoned
FTFY. Rocket fuel (hydazine) is highly toxic. If a rocket goes down near your home, you WILL be in trouble no matter what.
Real Steampunk Computer Brought Back To Life 81
New submitter engineerguy writes We discovered a 100 year old 19th century computer that does Fourier analysis with just gears spring and levers. It was locked in a glass case at the University of Illinois Department of Mathematics. We rebuilt a small part of the machine and then for two years thoroughly photographed and filmed every part part of the machine and its operation. The results of this labor of love are in the video series (short documentary), which is 22 minutes long and contains stunning footage of the machine in action — including detailed descriptions of how it operates. The photos are collected in a free book (PDF). The computer was designed by Albert Michelson, who was famous for the Michelson-Morley experiment; he was also the first American to win a Nobel Prize in physics.
Comment Re:Congratulations! (Score 5, Informative) 188
The mission in it's entirety, including the planning stage, took around 25 years. Or so they said during the post-landing press conference.
Comment Semi-live coverage for the bandwidth-impaired (Score 5, Informative) 74
EU Court Rules Embedding YouTube Videos Is Not Copyright Infringement 68
Maurits van der Schee writes "The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that embedding a copyrighted YouTube video in your site is not copyright infringement. From the article: "The case in question was referred to EU’s Court of Justice by a German court. It deals with a dispute between the water filtering company BestWater International and two men who work as independent commercial agents for a competitor. Bestwater accused the men of embedding one of their promotional videos, which was available on YouTube without the company’s permission. The video was embedded on the personal website of the two through a frame, as is usual with YouTube videos. While EU law is clear on most piracy issues, the copyright directive says very little about embedding copyrighted works. The Court of Justice, however, now argues that embedding is not copyright infringement."
Comment Re:About CVS Only! Not SVN! (Score 1) 245
Heh. It IS a feature in the use case for which it was designed. Making it work the way you'd want it to would break the original use case.
Comment wtf is up with that summary (Score 1) 282
I mean yeah this is slashdot but it feels like it's been quiet a while since I read such an opinionated summary here. How can you publish that crap? Oh right. Slashdot.
Comment Re:What this isn't about... (Score 2) 385
Whether legislation is the right way, I don't know; in my experience people often resent rules and laws that are imposed on them, even if they agree on the sentiment behind them. Basically, it is about respect; we should certainly respect other animals on their terms, but having rules imposed on you doesn't feel very respectful.
You mean rules like "Don't murder little Timmy"?
If you accept that some animals are much closer to us than to other kinds of animals, that they have personality, feelings, emotions, intelligence and all, then rules for dealing with them are no longer optional, they're mandatory. Just as some rules are mandatory between humans. Whether you like it or not is irrelevant.
Comment Re:Slashdot Response (Score 1) 774
B. Systemd is vulnerable to a problem/attack/etc which was already present in previous init systems, but for no reason this bothers me in sytemd.
Personally while not liking systemd, I wouldn't use that argument myself. That said, there is a difference in complexity between init (which does nearly nothing) and systemd. Higher complexity, I'm sure I don't need to tell you, always brings with it a higher risk of errors.
Comment Re:Slashdot Response (Score 1) 774
Wooden house? Maybe read that again?
Comment Re:On the ignorance of this debate (Score 1) 774
I think we can all agree that the old sysv init is obsolete and must be replaces with something more powerful. But as a *nix enthusiast, I'll want to keep what defines *nix: KISS. Things like grep are just right: they do one thing and they do it well, and you can use them for.. whatever, really.
I haven't tried systemd yet. What really scared me off the most is that the authors think they can do everything better than everyone else, and that it all should integrate with their one solution for booting (which basically, was a set of scripts up until now before they showed up).
It's like someone with a Sauron complex, handing out rings to everyone to make them all dependant on systemd and then do something sinister and unspeakable, weilding The One Ring...
Comment Re:Reality Check (Score 1) 774
Now that's a totally practical suggestion! I'll get right on it!
Comment Perhaps... (Score 1) 774
Perhaps they should just drop the 'd' in the name and write their own kernel to go along with their... thing. Voila, no more problems with ill-tempered Linux kernel developers! And they could all integrate it in one huge, funky ball o' bits!
