Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Not including work? (Score 1) 245

I was going to make a similar comment but then I went started reading the report for ammunition. Right there on page 11 it reads:

We do not adjust for double counting in our analysis. If someone is watching TV and using the computer at the same time, our data sources will record this as two hours of total information. This is consistent with most other researchers. Note, though, that this means there are theoretically more than 24 hours in an information day!

So basically they say that most americans work, sleep and spend at least 4 of their other hours multitasking between TV and Computer.

Comment Re:Aha! (Score 2, Insightful) 264

I will never buy HP again. My previous laptop was a Compaq(For those out of the loop or just too young, Compaq was bought by HP) and my senior year of college, I got the motherboard replaced on warranty a dozen times or more(Our college had a program to give free laptops to students and they kept spare motherboards on hand because this was a very frequent occurrence).

My current HP had its battery replaced twice because it had died within 3 months of the battery coming out of the box(both times) and the only reason I didn't replace it more is because it was just going to fail again(Why replace faulty parts with more faulty parts? In case you couldn't guess, it died a total of three times and I just didn't care anymore after the third. My laptop is now essentially a desktop). The second time they even brought the laptop in to see if it was causing the battery failures. It was but they couldn't fix it.

Even worse, they held my credit card number ransom. They said if I didn't send the old battery in after they sent me the replacement, they would charge me for a new one. Keep in mind that they logged onto my computer to check to see if my battery was indeed dead before confirming that it was covered under warranty, but they still didn't trust me enough to return a brick that they were just going to throw away/recycle. The doesn't even mention that they could have sent me an empty box and had me send them the dead battery first since it was dead and I couldn't use it anyway.

Whatever, this article only supports me in my hatred of HP products.

Comment Re:*First post.. (Score 1) 590

While technically true, the problem comes along with people who work from home. Teachers are in fact a prime example of this in that they do almost all of their grading and lesson planing at home. So where is the line between work and play? Unless you are specifically cataloging your hours, it would be kind of hard to fight it in court.

Comment Re:Freecreditreport.com is a criminal scam (Score 4, Informative) 184

It's actually even worse than this. There is no cancel option on their website which means to stop service, you have to call them and deal with their trashy customer service. That doesn't even mention the fact that they will refuse to delete your account if you ask. They claim they have to keep the credit card for record purposes. Somehow I doubt it. The only way to get your credit card number out of their hands is to cancel it.

Comment Other reasons (Score 1) 202

Correlation does not imply causation.

What if the aliens realized it was a period of time where we were most receptive to close encounters of the third kind.

Or maybe they just realized people would blame it on too much alcohol and a drunk encounter with ID4.

The aliens are smarter than us, this idea is just us playing right into their hands!

*Puts on his tinfoil hat*

Comment Re:Contracts aren't what they used to be... (Score 2, Informative) 300

If you go online and check out each of the four major carriors, all their plans are pretty much exactly the same. They all charge relatively the exact same prices for everything. The only differences between them are what phones you get to pick from, the contract length, and which part of quality you want. Remember, you can't get both good quality signal and no lost calls. You can't get both full bars everywhere you want to be and some bars everywhere else.

Some of them have something a little special like rollover minutes or the ability to call a certain number of people outside their network(under very special circumstances), but it's more about who you know in each network and not what they offer or what they cost. I have Verizon because all of my family and friends are on Verizon. This means I can call everyone I know for free. But the fact is that with normal competition, prices should have fallen by now and they have not. It doesn't cost them $5 to send 100 text messages but that's what they charge me.

It's like two gas stations across the street from one another. They could get into a price war till neither of them makes any money, or they could silently agreed to charge the same price and split the customers. Next time you see two gas stations across the street from one another, notice if their prices are the same. Unfortunately for most of us, we can't just drive down the street to find a wireless company that isn't silently price fixing.

Comment Re:That's a man, baby! (Score 1) 137

According to AskOxford.com, Man means several things.

man
noun (pl. men) 1 an adult human male. 2 a male member of a workforce, team, etc. 3 a husband or lover. 4 a person. 5 human beings in general. 6 a figure or token used in a board game.

While you are correct in that it is not typically used that way, you'll notice that usage #4 IS Person. So technically 3-man team is an acceptable usage.

Wireless Networking

Submission + - Infrared radiation: The other wireless technology

StonyandCher writes: Although the recent auctioning of the 700MHz wireless spectrum bands have garnered great interest in the media (not to mention the billions of dollars being thrown around to own some of this), it's not the be-all and end-all answer to our wireless hunger.

New research is starting to be conducted in the area of infrared radiation. Cheap to develop infrastructure for, super fast and with huge amounts of spectrum available (literally many terahertz), is this the unlicensed answer to the dearth of wireless spectrum? This article delves deeper into the world of IR and looks at its pros and foibles.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

Working...