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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Smartwatches have *1* purpose: (Score 2) 97

To keep you connected to that company's other things. Let's face it - a smartwatch is way too small to actually do any useful work on - heck, most smartphones are a poor excuse for a full screen experience, productive work, etc. They mostly guide you to where you do the actual work. The smartwatch will be the next link further up that chain - to point you to the phone. Companies want you to have that thing on your wrist tie you to the rest of their product line. No surprise there. The only thing that may be attractive to people is that you don't need to keep looking at your phone, you just need to keep looking at your watch - which is still just about as offensive.

Comment No. (Score 1) 156

Not all writers are journalists.

Those we know as journalists have editors, one-time or current peers, more experienced, who can tell them when they're running afoul of what good journalism is.

Those we know as bloggers have nothing more than their own judgement to guide them, which is why journalists grew editors.

Perhaps someday the two will merge, hopefully by bloggers stepping up, and not by journalists stepping down.

Kinda like in science, where you don't get to just throw up any old idea and call it science. You need to test it against replicable observations.

The 9th circuit was mostly making sure people could get press passes and there would not be an army of bloggers filing federal lawsuits.

Case in point? A million ideas about how flight 370 went down. Two weeks of egalitarian, drive-by speculation, and in the end, only one verifiable answer.

Comment Let Frank Gehry design the boxes... (Score 1) 87

... and I'm all for it. Slap another Bilbao Guggenheim-ish case on a few hundred thousand batteries and you solve two problems. You house the batteries in something better looking than a warehouse, and you give even the most culture-phobic something to look at and say "Golly, that's pretty and practical!"

Comment Problem is... (Score 1) 529

... many of these programs are extra-school (informal ed) and are too often disconnected from the everyday classroom experience. So instead of infusing students' experience with worthwhile programs (science fair, history day, OM, FIRST, etc...) they become glorified dog bones in the case of too many teachers and administrators. Compacting, accelerating, articulating... these are relatively speaking stone-age tools in education and your average teacher has barely heard of them.

I'm tired of going through the textbook to prove what a couple of prizewinning engineering students "really did". It's getting worse in the sense of decoupling from school - just got through judging our state science fair, where a larger than ever number of kids apparently walked into a professional research center, the door closed behind them, and they did something with a handful of profs or RAs and in some cases their research paper was a published journal article. When your state science fair poster has a line that includes "Support for this project was provided by NIH grant XYZ123456789" (I spit you not - I can show you the pics) then we have to go the next level on thinking about this. I'm all for students achieving as high as they can but two things need to happen: (1) they need to put these students in a separate class of "runners" so they don't mop the floor with the student who did good science on a shoestring or within the school lab* and (2) we need to weave the classroom experience and flow of content and process in every subject area to these ISE experiences.

*: yes, I see the loophole - just start hiring research-savvy PhDs to teach at your school and stock it with NMR and PCR and LRF and then it's a race to the top of personnel and experience within the school. THAT'S GOOD - past a certain level, a real writer should be teaching our kids writing, a real musician should be teaching our kids music, a real scientist should be teaching our kids science.

Comment Telomeres, baby. (Score 1) 130

Start there. Go for it.
My training in genetics was late 70s/ early 80s.
Infinitely fascinating, and as with lotsa things in science, it turned out to be the simplified version.
And now the world has expanded once again, telomeres, epigenetics, etc.
A foot and a half away from me is a copy of "The Joy Of Finding Things Out."
Man, this is a blast.

Comment Pour-over or french press or moka. (Score 2) 769

I've found only one suitable pre-made Keurig pod for me, Dark Magic Decaf.
Meanwhile, I still have opposable thumbs and can operate a french press or a Chemex or a porcelain cone or a Bialetti.
Choose your level of messiness (none horrible), but get much better coffee at at least half the price.
Yes, it can take up to ten minutes to get it, but there's something to be said for not making everything in life about pushing one button.
I can do them all with any heat source, from electric main to the trusty SnowPeak.

Comment Looking back at the rollout of the future... (Score 1) 293

James Burke's "Connections" and perhaps "The Day The Universe Changed". How small incidents can create massive changes - Napoleon's near defeat at Marengo starts the path to refrigeration, how a botched souvenir production run and an grousing cleric leads to a revolution in printing and religion. Etc. Also "The Second Self" by Sherry Turkle - to see how an emerging thread in technology can have implications elsewhere. Yes, many sc-ifi books have done this predictively, but again it's valuable to see how this plays out as it plays out with a historical record.

Comment Re:Better encourage rather than confront (Score 1) 98

I was using unblock-us for a while, and it worked flawlessly. I only stopped as there wasn't enough additional content on US netflix for me to justify paying for it.

IPv6 tunnels are fortunately free. And as I mentioned, if you have router support for it, then every Mac, PC, and Linux box in your house will automatically be provisioned for end-to-end IPv6 access to Netflix (and anything else IPv6 accessible on the Internet), along with any set-top boxes which may use IPv6 (Apple TV apparently does, but I don't own one to be able to confirm this).

Yaz

Comment Re:Better encourage rather than confront (Score 1) 98

Canadian Netflix is pretty crappy compared to the American version and we don't have much else. It's not like the content companies want to sell their products here, at least in an easy to purchase downloadable format

Pro tip:

Netflix is fully IPv6 enabled, which is actually great news for Canadian Netflix users. Just setup an IPv6 tunnel to the nearest Hurricane Electric tunnel server farm (if you have a router that supports this, you can enable IPv6 invisibly for your entire home quickly and easily. Apple's routers all support this out of the box, for example), and presto -- you'll have US Netflix.

Note that this only works on IPv6-enabled devices, of course, so your set-top box or smart TV may not benefit. And you have to ensure the browser you're using properly supports Happy Eyeballs so as to ensure it will prefer IPv6 over IPv4 (Safari on Mac OS X since Lion uses an algorithm to prefer whichever connection is fastest in responding, which can cause it to initially load Netflix via IPv6, showing all the US content you can't otherwise see in Canada, only to be blocked when you actually try to view it if OS X switches down to IPv4 for optimization purposes).

As I have IPv6 tunnelling enabled right at the router, there is no software to be installed or anything that needs to be configured anywhere once this is setup, unlike VPN/proxy solutions. It's also fast -- even though the IPv6 is tunnelled, I can't perceive any speed issues when watching content this way.

Enjoy!

Yaz

Comment Re:That's only part of the story. (Score 2) 60

$5000 per infringer (not per infringement) is the maximum. The minimum is $100, and I've heard word that the court is more likely to impose the minimum. The plaintiff either has to prove actual damages, or can apply for statutory damages, between $100 - $5000 at the judges discretion. The copyright act stipulates that the judge needs to consider whether the infringement was for non-commercial purposes, whether it was for private purposes, and whether it would constitute hardship for the defendant to pay.

Yaz

Slashdot Top Deals

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

Working...