Comment the futile irony of it all (Score 1) 583
I wish I'd known that loyalty and initiative will be punished by the insecure and incompetent ones above you.
Comment Re:Of course it bombed (Score 1) 205
Of course the poor box-office of Tomorrowland is one data point, which the superstitious oracles at Disney have taken as an omen that any film which has certain factors in common with it will also fail.... rather than an indication that maybe this movie was specifically not very good, or not properly marketed.
Comment Blank screen (Score 1) 327
The perfect presentation slide is blank. Because I am giving the presentation, and I expect people to listen to what I have to say.
...laura
Comment My first Windows (Score 1) 387
Windows 3.0 was the first version I used to any significant degree. It looked so high-tech, though to 2015 eyes it looks like something from the old stone age. It did some cool stuff. It also gave us General Protection Faults, the predecessor to the Blue Screen Of Death.
For a long time I recommended Windows 98 to non-technical users. Some people claimed there was a USB implementation for Windows 95, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion they were mistaken. My first exposure to Windows 95 was an early alpha (I worked for the evil empire at the time) that crashed and required reformatting the hard disc after attempting to reconfigure the mouse.
I was intrigued by some of the other options out there. I sent my resume to Quarterdeck - I thought DESQview was neat - but only got a thanks-but-no-thanks postcard back.
...laura
Comment Re:What is it you want again? (Score 1) 313
He wants a phone that can't understand the meaning of "closest to".
Oldest Stone Tools Predate Previous Record Holder By 700,000 Years 103
derekmead writes: The oldest stone tools ever found have been discovered by scientists in Kenya who say they are 3.3m years old, making them by far the oldest such artifacts discovered. Predating the rise of humans' first ancestors in the Homo genus, the artifacts were found near Lake Turkana, Kenya. More than 100 primitive hammers, anvils and other stone tools have been found at the site. An in-depth analysis of the site, its contents, and its significance as a new benchmark in evolutionary history will be published in the May 21 issue of Nature.
Comment cheese (Score 1) 50
You mean Phobos and Deimos are also made of cheese?
Comment Fiber is fast! (Score 5, Insightful) 221
Fiber is amply fast.
The bottleneck is the cavalier attitude of web designers to network resources. You do not need to load 25 different URLs (DNS lookups, plus autoplay video and all the usual clickbait junk) to show me a weather forecast. Or a Slashdot article, for that matter...
...laura
Comment Monkey scribes (Score 4, Funny) 270
Empirical evidence demonstrates that it took only a finite number of monkeys a finite period of time to "randomly" produce the works of Shakespeare.
Kepler Observes Neptune Dancing With Its Moons 19
New submitter Liquid Tip writes: NASA's K2 mission has the capability to stare continuously at a single field of stars for months at time. A new video shows K2 observations spanning 70 days from November, 2014 through January, 2015 reduced to a time-lapse of 34 seconds. During this time, we see some distant members of our Solar System passing through the K2 field-of-view. This includes some asteroids and the giant outer planet Neptune, which appears at day 15. A keen-eyed observer will also notice an object circling Neptune: its large moon, Triton, which orbits every 5.8 days. The fainter moon Nereid can be seen tracing Neptune's motion.
Comment Sounds about right (Score 1) 361
I came of age in the late '70s and early '80s, and my musical tastes reflect that.
There have been some new discoveries along the way. I adore Sheryl Crow, and thought Lady Gaga was a breath of fresh air. With those exceptions (and a few others) I haven't heard much of interest since the early '90s.
I remain baffled by rap.
...laura
What Happens To Our Musical Taste As We Age? 361
An anonymous reader writes: New research from Spotify and Echo Nest reveals that people start off listening to chart-topping pop music and branch off into all kinds of territory in their teens and early 20s, before their musical tastes start to calcify and become more rigid by their mid-30s. "Men, it turns out, give up popular music much more quickly than women. Men and women have similar musical listening tendencies through their teens, but men start shunning mainstream artists much sooner than women and to a greater degree."
Comment Dinosaur? Hipster? (Score 1) 461
If I saw somebody with an aol.com email I'd wonder if they were a tech dinosaur, a total hipster, or somebody who had simply stuck with something that worked.
I've had my Hotmail email address since 1996, prior to Microsoft taking it over. I've stuck with it because it works. It does exactly what Hotmail promised from the start, providing email that is independent of my ISP or employer.
...laura
Comment Yes (Score 2) 435
Yes, they do.
An early example of getting it wrong was the City & South London Railway, the first deep-level underground rail line in London. The designers of the rolling stock didn't bother with windows because there was, supposedly, nothing to see. Passengers hated the "padded cells". Even if all you see is tunnel walls rushing by, people need to see outside.
I could see the utility of an airliner with no windows but cameras and viewing screens - it would solve some engineering problems - but for a car, the simplest is still the best. Windows.
...laura
Comment airplanes have windows (Score 4, Insightful) 435
Airliners only need one set of windows at the front, for the pilots. But there's a row of windows on either side, and the seats next to those windows are the second-most-popular (after those on the aisle) despite the fact that they're the most difficult to get in and out of, have no access to the overhead bins, and offer less head/foot room. See also: trains, buses, passenger ferries. So I think the answer is yes: robot cars will still have windows.
