Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:I AM AMAZED! (Score 1) 12

Re additive technology: You're right. This is why I don't care much about the people who "make guns" with their 3-D printers. Some of them make lower receiver units because that's the legal definition of a "gun" even though in my eye's it's kind of like making the driver's door frame on a car and claiming you made a car because that's where the VIN goes.

To make a gun or anything else that needs to contain strong forces, I'll join TWX and put my faith in old-fashioned, non-groovy tools like milling machines, lathes, and drill presses. Yay, subtractive technology!

(Not knocking the 3-D print people - Fun stuff, no question.)

Hardware Hacking

Video You3dit is Working to Help Crowdsource 3D Design and Printing (Video) 12

The example you3dit (You 3D It) person Chris McCoy uses in this video is a prosthetic hand they wanted to make because one of their people lost fingers in a construction accident. Instead of drawing up plans for a new hand, they searched online -- and found enablingthefuture.org, which is all about making 3-D printed prosthetic hands. Using a predesigned hand was obviously much simpler than starting from scratch, and was totally in line with the Open Source "Why reinvent the wheel?" philosophy.

So you3dit helps make 3-D printed items of one sort or another, and can either print them for you at their place or help you find someone local to help with the printing, assuming you can't do it yourself. As you might expect, they did a Kickstarter project. It was for a product called Raver Rings. Unlike many Kickstarter projects we mention on Slashdot, this one didn't fly. In fact, it only got $2,275 in pledges against a $10,000 goal. No matter. There are many other useful things the you3dit community can make -- or help you make -- without Kickstarter.

Comment Is it like Romney's 2$ gasoline? (Score 5, Interesting) 574

Romney in 2012 made dramatic and what he thought would create shock value by promising 2$ a gallon gasoline. Obama actually saw 2$ gasoline for a brief period! Free market has a way of doing things no one predicted.

The current trend is 500 million new solar panels without any special action by any legislator/executive. Simple market forces and trend lines. Residential solar is becoming competitive with subsidies and net metering. Utility scale solar is on track to become competitive with natural gas in a few years. It is already competitive with coal for fresh installations. No new coal plant has come on line this year and last. The pipeline is dry too. Number of coal plants have fallen from 633 to 518 in the last decade. Coal has lost 20 GW of capacity in that time, and is on track to lose another 40 GW. Natural gas providing base load and solar meeting the peak load is going to become the norm in the next 10 years. No new breakthrough in energy storage, no battery wall made by Elon Musk, no widespread investment by home owners needed. Simple existing technologies, free market forces, interest rates and world flush with 2 trillion in capital not knowing where to invest for good returns.

So half billion new solar panels might happen no matter who wins, Hilary or Jeb! or Walker or Trump or Bernie. We might even look back and see Hilary's half a billion solar panels the same way we look at Romney's 2$ gasoline.

Comment Re:Export of contacts is their prodict (Score 2) 42

... But isn't that the whole point of LinkedIn? To give recruiters your contact info so they can spam you?

/quote> The point of LinkedIn is to give them your contact info so that Linked can spam all your friends, family, acquaintances, their dogs and cats. If random third party affiliates, channel partners and other assorted anonymous entities that are always pitching "new and exciting" (exciting to them) products muscle in on to their game, Linked in would be upset. No?

Comment Coming up with a joke is hard (Score 4, Interesting) 141

Creating a joke is truly a very creative innovative activity and jokes deserve full measure of copyright protection. Anecdotes are not data, but still: I have so far created less than 20 jokes in total in my life (if you don't count joining the threads like "Nate Silver is so geeky, when his code throws an exception, he catches it before the debugger").

Having said that, most people would like their jokes to be told again, if possible with attribution. So unless the creator has gone through the process of copyrighting the joke and enforcing it, it seems to be an overkill to enforce it suo motu.

Comment It would start like this... (Score 0) 132

We all know how this will end. It starts with noble intentions, and fancy presentations with large numbers like "500 million first world citizens" blah blah blah.

Then Germany and UK will claim Greece and Spain are free loading on the great programming created by their virtuous tax payers and demand that they too pay the wireless receiver license fees. Greek population will be limited to half an hour of TV per day and people will line up with their thumb drives in front of TV stations to download their daily quota of programs. Old pensioners without the stamina to stand at all those lines will break down and bawl like babies in front of the world TV cameras. CEOs of apparel hawking companies in USA will ship emergency supplies of programs....

Wonder why they insist on creating a fiscal/mercantile union without creating a political union. They envy the USA with its large market, but they don't seem to take the lessons of urban population putting up with the antics of Ted Cruz or the rural folks putting up with SCOTUS ruling on same sex marriages.

Yeah, we have a large unbroken market. And we paid for it in blood at places like Chancellorsville, the sunken road, the stone bridge, the corn field, multiple times at Manassas, Shiloh, Antietam, Vicksburg, Gettysburg...

Comment Private collection, illegal mining... (Score 1) 153

The controversy does not seem to be related to evolution or anything about it. Looks like the specimen is in some private collection and it has only sketchy notes about the location of the find. Some suspicion that it was mined illegally and the real source location is obscured, either to avoid the law or to hide it from other fossil seekers. Thus dating of the fossil is confused and there is some speculation.

Title seems to be simple click bait meant to attract creationists and their opponents.

Open Source

Video Meet OpenDaylight Project Executive Director Neela Jacques (Video) 14

The OpenDaylight Project works on Software Defined Networking. Their website says, "Software Defined Networking (SDN) separates the control plane from the data plane within the network, allowing the intelligence and state of the network to be managed centrally while abstracting the complexity of the underlying physical network." Another quote: it's the "largest software-defined networking Open Source project to date." The project started in 2013. It now has an impressive group of corporate networking heavyweights as sponsors and about 460 developers working on it. Their latest release, Lithium, came out earlier this month, and development efforts are accelerating, not slowing down, because as cloud use becomes more prevalent, so does SDN, which is an obvious "hand-in-glove" fit for virtualized computing.

Today's interview is with OpenDaylight Project Executive Director Nicolas "Neela" Jacques, who has held this position since the project was not much more than a gleam in (parent) Linux Foundation's eye. This is one of the more important Linux Foundation collaborative software projects, even if it's not as well known to the public as some of the foundation's other efforts, including -- of course -- GNU/Linux itself.

Comment Is it really bad to reduce aggressive treatment? (Score 4, Interesting) 245

"They often penalized surgeons, like the senior surgeon at my hospital, who were aggressive about treating very sick patients and thus incurred higher mortality rates," says Jauhar.

It is true, some surgeons who are willing to treat very difficult cases would be adversely graded. But shouldn't there be some mechanism to apply brakes to the aggressive treatment? Some patients, and some of the relatives will be seeking treatment even when the situation is utterly hopeless. There are incentives for the doctors and the hospitals to pursue aggressive treatment. So, under these circs, is it really bad these grades are making them reevaluate the cases and be more realistic about the prognosis?

Comment I propose grades to the lawyers. (Score 1) 245

If start giving grades to personal injury lawyers, it should have a salutary effect. All those risk averse simple lawyers who go for really egregious violations of doctors and companies would get good grade. Those irritating aggressive ambulance chasers would get lower grades.

The doctors are chumps to operate under these rules rigged by the lawyers.

Comment As many attempts withing 2 minutes (Score 2) 157

However, OpenSSH servers with keyboard-interactive authentication enabled, which is the default setting on many systems, including FreeBSD ones, can be tricked to allow many authentication retries over a single connection, according to the researcher. “With this vulnerability an attacker is able to request as many password prompts limited by the ‘login grace time’ setting, that is set to two minutes by default,” Kincope said.

It is bad, but not so bad. At least the connection resets after 2 minutes by default.

Slashdot Top Deals

I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

Working...