Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 108

by castle (#43071697) Attached to: Nearly Every NYC Crime Involves Computers, Says Manhattan DA

Sorry, look up Rent Seeking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Benito Mussolini was a socialist before he was a fascist. Authoritarian cute fuzzy awesome nice left wingers are still Authoritarians. Assertions that Money corrupts Politics are at a similar level of naivete as saying that Oxygen is responsible for the corruption of your favorite forest by enabling Fire.

Not that Money doesn't exist in a finding of corrupt behavior, it's one of many things that fit into that mix. Money itself is an Amoral entity.

Comment Re:Gamers are not idiots ... (Score 1) 393

by castle (#42946643) Attached to: The End Is Near for GameStop

...countdown.

Been at this a long time. So have gaming companies.

My main console gaming is now done on a PS3, if Sony decides to not allow used games on PS4 I won't buy a PS4. XBox has already become irrelevant to me, mainly due to their online services being so overpriced and underfeatured. And microsofts tendency to tie everything to their other products in terms of their infrastructure.

Plus, my UID is lower than all previous.

Instead of computer gaming so much, make time to learn the fine arts of pen and paper gaming, and throw in archery/shooting/hand-to-hand combat and farming. While the plants are growing, gaming is a great way to pass the time, just don't waste all your time doing it.

(Absolute prohibitions and excessive specialization are for insects.)

Comment Re:what about slashdot? (Score 1) 595

by castle (#39847101) Attached to: Not Just Apple, How Microsoft Sidestepped Billions In State Taxes

Left wing crazy? I thought that was you!?!

In short, Right Wingers that think government should be an activist one doing a whole bunch of shit on the dime of their taxpayers aren't really Right Wing, those that think they should be in some cases (War and Drugs and War on Drugs is Different, see, honest, but paying for them Educations is a violation of my rights) are actually what most American political types are... Stark Raving Mad Busybody Hypocrites who operate under a delusion of pragmatism in a haze of Prozac tainted water.
Government

Feds Now Plans To Close 1,200 Data Centers 148

Posted by timothy from the hand-the-keys-to-carl-malamud dept.
1sockchuck writes "The U.S. government now expects to shutter at least 1,200 data centers by the end of 2015 in its data center consolidation project. That's about 40 percent of the IT facilities identified in the latest update from federal CIO Steven VanRoekel. The number of government data centers has grown steadily — jumping from 1,100 to 2,094 and now to 3,133 — as the Obama administration has identified more facilities than expected, and expanded the initiative to target telecom closets. The CIO's office says it is on track to close 525 facilities by the end of this year, and has published a list of data centers targeted for closure."
Security

Diebold Marries VMs with ATMs to Secure Banking Data 151

Posted by timothy from the do-you-machine-take-this-data dept.
gManZboy writes "Automatic teller machine maker Diebold has taken a novel approach to protecting bank customer data: virtualization. Virtualized ATMs store all customer data on central servers, rather than the ATM itself, making it difficult for criminals to steal data from the machines. In places including Brazil, customer data has been at risk when thieves pulled or dynamited ATMs out of their settings and drove off with them. With threats increasing worldwide at many retail points of sale, such as supermarket checkout counters and service station gas pumps, Diebold needed to guarantee the security of customer data entered at the 50,000 ATMs that it manages. Diebold last year partnered with VMware to produce a zero-client ATM. No customer data is captured and stored on the ATM itself." Perhaps Diebold should take the same approach to vote-tabulating machines.
Canada

Toronto School Bans Hard Balls 319

Posted by samzenpus from the watch-how-you-play dept.
In an attempt to finally "think of the children," Earl Beatty Public school has prohibited students from playing with balls after a "few serious incidents" in which students and staff were hit or almost hit by balls. From the article: "The happy days of kicking a ball around at recess ended Monday after students took home a letter advising that henceforth, no child could bring a soccer ball, football, volleyball or even tennis ball to the junior and senior school in the area of Coxwell and Danforth Aves." I assume all lunches will soon be taken via feeding tube to minimize choking hazards.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 569

by castle (#37846506) Attached to: HPV Vaccine Recommended For Boys

It's good that you reveal that your vested interest is in saving your place saving the world for your pharmaceutical corporate employer, keep up the rent seeking. It's good that you're honest about it.

You probably are doing some good, but you are a part of a machine that isn't all good. Just look at your lobbyists, and your public relations expenditures.
Japan

Fukushima's Fallout Worse Than Thought 308

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the usda-recommended-daily-dose-of-cs-137 dept.
gbrumfiel writes "A new study posted for open peer-review suggests that the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi released far more radiation than the Japanese government initially estimated. The study [PDF] uses global radioisotope and meteorological data to calculate the size of the release from the plant. Nature News reports that, contrary to official claims, the model shows that fuel being stored in a pool at unit 4 released a significant amount of cesium-137, a long-lived contaminant that has spread across the countryside. It also says that some Xenon-133 may have been released early on in the accident, suggesting that the plant was already damaged before it was hit by a tsunami. Overall, it estimates that Fukushima released about twice as much cesium-137 as the government claims and half as much as Chernobyl."
Math

The Data Crunching Prowess of Barack Obama 334

Posted by samzenpus from the mobilizer-in-chief dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, writes that Barack Obama may be struggling in the polls and even losing support among his core boosters, but when it comes to the modern mechanics of identifying, connecting with and mobilizing voters, as well as the challenge of integrating voter information with the complex internal workings of a national campaign, Obama's data analysis team is way ahead of the Republican pack. Alone among the major candidates running for president, the Obama campaign not only has a Facebook page with 23 million 'likes' (roughly 10 times the total of all the Republicans running), it has a Facebook app that is scooping up all kinds of juicy facts about his supporters and inside the Obama operation, his staff members are using a powerful social networking tool called NationalField, which enables everyone to share what they are working on. 'The holy grail of data analysis is data harmonization, or master data management,' says Alex Lundry, a Republican data-mining expert at TargetPoint Consulting. 'To have political talking to finance and finance talking to field, and data is flowing back and forth and informing the actions of each other — it sounds easy, but it's incredibly hard to implement.' Sifry writes that if the 2012 election comes down to a battle of inches, where a few percentage points change in turnout in a few key states making all the difference, we may come to see Obama's investment in predictive modelers and data scientists as the key to victory."
Security

US House 'Creator' of TSA Wants To Kill It 681

Posted by OverTheGeicoE from the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time dept.
U.S. Representative John Mica (R-Florida), the sponsor of the original House bill that helped create the TSA, has become an outspoken opponent of the agency. In a recent interview, "Mica said screeners should be privatized and the agency dismantled." Mica seems to agree with other TSA critics that the agency 'failed to actually detect any threat in 10 years.' Mica is the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman and receives classified briefings on TSA. Perhaps we should trust him more than most people on this topic.

Slashdot Top Deals

One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis

Close