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Comment Re: cooked the technology into the cake (Score 4, Insightful) 406

So I'm a bit confused all this. How close is the following chain of events?

1. Netflix/___ others start trying to wrap their "tasty content" into wrappers that (try to) require baked in DRM.
2. Uneducated Firefox users suddenly discover that their browser won't play that tasty content anymore "because Mozilla didn't add that Dr. Thingy stuff" to make it work.
3. Said uneducated Firefox users then jump ship to that dulcet siren's call such as Chrome because yay the tasty content works again! "Everything is Awesome!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

So what about PaleMoon? Scuttle has it a bunch of people are headed over that way not least because of FF29 UI Shenanigans. So why not DRM? Their entire point was to unbake bloaty parts of reg FF. So why not if they unbake the DRM from their copy?

And what does Opera have to say about all this? How about Chromium and/or Komodo Dragon? (Non-Googly clones of Chrome.)

Comment Re:technical aspects (Score 2) 58

Nice angle Dan. I needed you to start the angle because I don't have the skills for that post but I can ride with it.

Working with that use case, my older iPhone croaks right about at the 6% mark (when it's not glitching.) So for ex if you are right at 7% battery because you spent all day doing stuff, and didn't recharge, you might be able to smash out one or two texts but don't have time for the full call. Similar thing, folks like me have "value plans" for phones and with 60 cents left on the plan there's no way I'd get a call out but I might be able to manage two texts.

Comment Re:point of texting 911 (Score 2) 58

Hallo Sir Avenger.

I'll go even further with a new avenue. Let's say that there is no attacker, that it's a "contained" emergency like a self inflicted wound or an auto hit or whatever. *Both* text *and* voice could save lives. If you have stuff like

"Geroald MacKenzei with the ei and watch the unusual spellings 1433 Maple Avenue #7F Woodside, NY next to 5th and 6th Ave hits M and R trains just past the cross junction of Broadway and Roosevelt. Remember you need to have someone get you in the building." ...all as a pre-recorded 911 text you just smash it out during your call and the operator should have the tech to power-blast it to all 17 agents. So you don't need to waste time with the Op on stupid junk repeating it because Texts Can't Be Forgotten. (done right)

Our traditional notions of 911 are somewhere stuck half in 1977 and half with modern tech that 1882 TV cop shows is possible but somehow the carriers are treating it like a big deal to get a text message and send a squad car.

Comment Topic getting buried!? (Score 1) 58

Okay, this is kinda an important topic and too many junk post are threatening to bury it so I will keep raising a couple of new avenues to discuss.

It's a weird collection of states. Pasted:
Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Montana, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Virginia

Linear:
Colorado
Georgia
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Maine
Maryland
Montana
New York
North Carolina
Ohio
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
Texas
Vermont
Virginia

Comment Re:will it work with no plan? work with blocked tx (Score 1) 58

I think you make a good point. These services tend not to flesh out as fast as they need to. But for example any of the dating apps are free (with ads) via Wifi (in your home) So if they really wanted to drill this out (see my note above, emergency codes help) you could for example text 911 on a dating site for free.

It comes down to how much they want to actually help people vs the political capital. It's not hard to monitor "911" on any of thirty dating apps if they spread the word to solve exactly the problem you mentioned.

Comment Re:zillion drunk texts (Score 1) 58

See my note above.

For example let's forget tinfoil hats and assume that for once the cops are on your side. You go visit them on a nice safe day and get a series of codes.

Then you folks work together to make a few pre-recorded 911 texts with those codes and stuff they will need as mentioned in the article. Responders are at work, it's not like chatting, they don't mind a Wall of Text. So with some sort of few keystroke system if you can send any of nine 911 text messages in 12 seconds, that's gotta be plenty for them to get started with. Yes on the rare case you send that as a joke you get a fine, but the life saving side will way outweigh it;

Comment Specific use cases (Score 4, Interesting) 58

Maybe I've seen too many TV shows but if you have a pre-recorded text for 911, something like seven key strokes can send it silently whereas the standard voice call risks the attacker hearing you.

I wasn't impressed with the article. At a higher level there has to be some coding you can send that says "can't speak, puts my life in danger". I don'tr know what that would be, but it rises above the article's cheap promotion of voice calls.

Comment Re:a way to address "issues" (Score 1) 152

This is a topic highly prone to what AC was meant for in the best sense.

It's rather narrowly presented - all on the officer side. Pretty soon the members of the public will have their own running cameras if for no other reason than just in "today's social media / blogging culture". So then suddenly the defendant has a video but the cop doing something "forgot" to turn his on?!

That's gotta be good for a defense lawyer!

So the next level is both sides have theirs on, and everyone is tracking everyone else, and we become a giant game of Pac-Man. Go Atari.

Comment Re:Magic Age (Score 1) 100

Well gee, the top half of this story threads are wrecked, so I'll reply to you.

According to the (non-optimized) version I learned, you're not wrong. The Bottom Middle Non-Corners were the bear of the solution. You had both rotation and orientation to worry about. The Rotation was 18 moves long and the Orientation was 18 moves long.

So one fun prank was to take display cubes and throw them off by the 18 move orientation move, and know that "it looks so close" but no one could fix it, then they have the minor guilt of leaving a "almost solved" cube in shambles! : )

But the various modern tricks make sure you have an easier time when you get there, but like someone else said elsewhere, my horribly clunky method was enough, so I never felt the interest to super-optimize it.

Comment Re: give me an actual reason (Score 2) 137

Reversing the "what could possibly go wrong" sentiment, this particular article is noticeably short of the backing science paper for the detail hounds to pore over. The meager analysis presented is too simple - "so if this species dies, another one will just step up the food chain", like maybe that Asian Tiger Mosquito. So then just rinse and repeat a second time. "Kill all the mosquitoes and we win."

Unlike things like the Africanized Killer Bee, which as I understand it was greed gone wrong, there's a life and death upside to winning this attempt, so I'm being careful with my words. So straight up, what *could* possibly go wrong? My best guess is something like knocking a hole in the ecology chain and getting unlucky that we did three rounds, celebrated a couple years of victory, and then discovering that mosquito eating bats are in trouble and then damaging the balance of ecology with whatever eats those or something.

But the snark question is also a fast shorthand for containability risk. Unlike a problem say with a temporary dominance of destructive wolves, making a mistake with insects could be really hard to fix.

Comment Re:HughPickensDotCom is PoncaCityWeLoveYou (Score 1) 183

(Extra CamelCaps mine for emphasis)

I got tired of the caps in HughPickensDOTcom so I finally punched it in...

And there isn't a site! Instead, it's a rewrite to PoncaCityWeLoveYou.com of PoncaCityWeLoveYou fame previously here on Slashdot.

Anyone know why he rebranded into a shell redirect name away from the old one?

As for not mentioning things, it's typical lax editorial policy allowing their favorite submitters to slam stuff through.

Comment Re:Sunk Costs (Score 1) 288

"And you are all missing (surprinsingly) the ability to add things such as 3d printed guns, knives, hooks, crossbows, dildos to your hand.
Why settle for just a boring old hand when you can become inspector gadget?!"

Yours is the most general comment I've seen, so I'll reply to you.

Slashdot comment chains run in themes, so once about five themes get going plus some flamebait, that's about where the discussion centers.

But for you, I'll remark that a couple of science fiction writers did stories on 3d printing. For a while that stayed science fiction rather longer than some of the other candidates such as cell phones. But now here we are - a few stories down again today, the 3d gun topic came up. So it's really going to be thrashed out heavily now for the next six years.

Comment Re:BH's Process (Score 1) 235

"Now here's an easy question to give me a straight answer to: What's the process you follow for submitting these? Are you just filling out the submission form like anyone else and for some mysterious reason the editors post it?"

Just sayin', I noticed you're trying to pin down the question we've all been wondering for years, but he'll keep wriggling around it. Clearly yes he is "affiliated" because there's whatever "infinitely" (to use his favorite synonym of Very Large) close to zero statistical random chance that the only blog posts are his. We just don't know the exact nature of the transactions involved.

Meanwhile in the context of this particular piece, he does seem to be making lots of mistakes. So maybe he thinks "what's the value to me to shake out my reasoning if the commenters will do it for me?" There's no downside for him because we all say our bit, he adds some unclear replies, then he gets to start all over the next week.

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