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Comment Re:It is time to get up one way or the other (Score 1) 1089

Did Pero get none due to the winner of the state taking all of that state's EVs or did he not carry a single precinct? Think the "winner takes the state's EVs" rule kinda disenfranchises a lot of folks, esp in states like New York where the red rural areas *always* loose out to the Big D Big Apple.

Comment Re:Will it work... (Score 1) 149

Who cares. I found my Loki Publishing copy of Descent3d a few weeks ago, and I have access to a planetarium dome projector that runs at 1600x1600 :) ....

Gonna see if I can get it running on a current kernel w/ a relatively current (ie, only 6 year old) nVidia card, then see about at least recording and then projecting on teh screen if thats what it takes...

Comment Re:What do her colleagues use? (Score 1) 385

Indeed, if it comes down to having to pick the OS based on what software package(s) you need/want or might need/want in the future because of what a coworker/costudent did/does/wants to do, then I'd start with a Mac laptop. You can virtualize a machine (or three) if you need Windows, Linux, BSD, whatever other environment available, but AFAIK for non-Mac hardware there is no (legal) way to run OS X. Load it up with RAM, make sure you have several large external drives for backing up stuff, and off you go. If you knew you would absolutely never need OS X based software then get PC based and shop based on percieved hardware quality and warranty.

As to her study abroad stuff, may want to make sure whatever she ends up with the warranty can be used wherever is she is going to physically end up wtih the device. Would suck to be working in Europe but need to get a service call from the US, or having to ship back and forth for repair...

Comment Re:Only on some... (Score 3, Insightful) 155

Heck the govn't has its own TLD and doesn't even use it for all of their hostnames...

Quick - where is the "official" place to get your free annual credit report? Is it freeannualreport.com or freeannualcreditreport.com or what? Wouldn't it be nice if it were creditreport.ftc.gov ? I (and most other slashdot users who get a little paranoid about this type of thing) simply go to the FTC site and follow the link from there, but having it on a .gov domain would let me know for sure some squatter didn't get ahold of it...

Comment Well and good... but mines (Score 1) 31

Finding the new bombs, etc. is well and good - and needed! But, there are still LOTS of issues with old mine fields still...

Might it be better to work on some (slightly) ground penetrating radar of some sort that can search for impact craters as well as large hunks of metal a few inches under ground? Solve a few issues at once that way....

Comment Re:"Illegal" drugs? (Score 1) 1081

they need to test the purity for trial

No they don't. Container weight, transport medium weight, etc. all get counted in as teh weight of the drug.

Think 20 micrograms of LSD, mixed into a half gram or so of water... on a 1 gram sugar cube. There you have someone who had 1.5+ grams of LSD...

Comment Re:There is no way. (Score 1) 1081

Oh, lets stir the pot a little more...

If New York, and New York City, would allow individuals to take personal responsibility for their well being and carry a gun, I'm pretty sure that either the crime rate would drop, or there would be more than a few dead gang members who tried to attack random people....

Comment Re:This sucks. (Score 2) 299

If you are gonna extrapolate from one of the 10 commandments, perhaps you should just read it in the original Hebrew.

IIRC (and its been 30 years since I've read it and I know longer remember any of my Hebrew) the exact translation is more along the lines of "thall shal not murder". Killin' is ok when someone *needs* killin' but no outright murder

Comment Re:Don't confuse them (Score 1) 215

On the flip side, near instant gratification of "getting it to work" is good for education - keeps students interested and involved if they have quick successs.

Of course, once it is "just working" *then* you can start getting your students to think about edge cases, logical errrors, validating user input, etc.

Comment Re: Yes, I agree (Score 3, Insightful) 564

No angst here about it - I make beer money every so often just by backing up a users actual data files they care about, browser profiles, mail client storage, wipe windows and reinstall, all updates, etc. and then put their data back. If you wanted to dedicate yourself to running a business with yourself and maybe a couple of part time PFY employees, you could make a very good living fixing these issues that are the result of what you consider poor design, and the stupid decisions users have made.

Comment Re:OpenMeetings (Score 2) 164

Similar is Big Blue Button (a google summer of code project) - whiteboard functionality, upload files and do the "john madden football commentator thing" to them, voice and cam sharing, ability to mute, etc. And can be set up to record meetings/conferences/etc. Tested it a while back stand-along on a linode that would be $10/mo now (it was a $20/mo plan then), and it was enough to support 15 users at once as long as they all weren't connected via the same wireless link to the LAN to get out to the World

Comment Re:disclosure (Score 4, Insightful) 448

"Here's 1.2 mil. We want you to tell us that it is possible that global warming is being caused by the sun"

A few months of well funded but blindly done research - ie, you know the answer to the question, what can we do to prove it? - and wallah! A paper. That is then submitted to a supposedly peer-reviewed journal, where of course no such review takes place (there have been several stories about that on /.).

So... are we shocked that the NRG Industry went shopping for the answer they wanted to hear? Are we shocked that a person who either needs to be top in their field or at least bringing in grants accepted a grant to do research? Are we shocked that a peer-reviewed journal is in fact not very often reviewd by the peers?

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