L505 - Slashdot User

Comment: Re:Falling in love in 50 years? (Score 1) 510

by L505 on Friday December 14 2007, @12:19PM (#21699120) Attached to: The Future of Love and Sex - Robots

Now, if robots can be more emotionally responsive than men, will men do something drastic to compete with robots?

Robots don't make money. Women need money. Men don't. 'Nuff said. (I realize men need money too.. but take for example all the free software founders... most are men).

Does Constant Access Shatter the Home/Work Boundary? 321

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 14 2007, @10:22AM
from the and-is-that-a-bad-thing dept.

StonyandCher has passed us a link to PCWorld.au, once again raising the tough topic of work/life separation. A department of the Australian government went ahead with a purchase of dozens of Blackberry communication devices, but is now delaying their deployment. The reason: "Staff expressed fears about BlackBerries contributing to a longer working day and felt it was going a step too far because mobile phones are adequate for out-of-office contact. Not everyone agreed, however, with some senior executives claiming a BlackBerry can contribute to work/life balance by facilitating telecommuting and more flexible schedules. " For the time being this issue is on hold for those staffers, but how does this issue fall for you? Is constant accessibility freeing or just another chain around your neck?

Stallman vs OpenBSD Purism and Freedom Flamewar -> 0

Submitted by

L505

on Friday December 14 2007, @09:48AM

L505 writes ""GNU and FSF (Free Software Foundation) founder Richard Stallman posted a message entitled "real men don't attack straw men", and goes on to tell why he does not advocate OpenBSD currently. He says that he knew of no non-free software included in the base OpenBSD system, but claimed there was non-free software in the ports collection. Stallman recommends only systems such as gNewSense that are supposedly pure and free according to the FSF.

OpenBSD developers think RMS is making a big deal out of nothing, and is abusing his power. OpenBSD developers confirm the ports tree only contains links to non-free software, and does not actually recommend installation of it anywhere. Furthermore the OpenBSD developers argue that anyone can install non-free software on any Linux system, whether or not it is gNewSense."
Link to Original Source

Windows in a nutshell-> 0

Submitted by

The Open Sourcerer

on Friday December 14 2007, @08:52AM

The Open Sourcerer writes "I read this on a posting on the asterisk mailing list this morning courtesy of Doug at NaTel. It is probably not new but I found it funny. Windows is a half-baked, dying OS that in essence is a 32 bit extension and graphical shell, for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system, originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition. lol"
Link to Original Source

That Which We Call Free-> 0

Submitted by

L505

on Friday December 14 2007, @08:07AM

L505 writes "GNU and FSF (Free Software Foundation) founder Richard Stallman posted a message on OpenBSD mailing lists. The subject was "real men don't attack straw men", and the email suggested that some of his comments were being misrepresented. He says, "one question particularly relevant for this list is why I don't recommend OpenBSD. It is not about what the system allows. (Any general purpose system allows doing anything at all.) It is about what the system suggests to the user." He also said that he knew of no non-free software included in the base OpenBSD system, but claimed there was non-free software in the ports collection, "if a collection of software contains (or suggests installation of) some non-free program, I do not recommend it." http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/That_Which_We_Call_Free"
Link to Original Source

Robots that bounce in bed-> 0

Submitted by

nem75

on Friday December 14 2007, @07:41AM

nem75 writes "The NY Times has a review of British AI researcher David Levy's book "Love and Sex with Robots". He claims that within a span of about 50 years the day will come, when people could actually fall in love with life-like robots and want to live with them instead of a human mate. While this may seem far fetched at first, he has some pretty interesting views on this. Like the sexual part being the easyest thing, what with brothels exclusively offering life-like sex dolls already existing in Japan and South Korea. The case he builds goes much further though, and certainly provides food for thought."
Link to Original Source

Google Apps Buggy Lately? 0

Submitted by on Tuesday July 24 2007, @10:27PM

An anonymous reader writes "I administer two unrelated domains that use Google Apps for e-mail (thats where you basically use G-mail but with your own domain name) and over the last week I've received an alarming number of reports from users that the service appears to be broken. Upon going to their Start page, the users get the message "Information is temporarily unavailable" under E-mail and when they try click on the E-mail link they get taken to a vanilla G-mail login page (which doesn't support logging in with a Google Apps accounts). Did Google upgrade the Apps with broken software or something? Either way, I've seen the problem myself and it doesn't appear to be going away."

MySpace finds 29,000 sex offenders among users 0

Submitted by StonyandCher on Tuesday July 24 2007, @05:23PM

StonyandCher writes "MySpace has identified more than 29,000 registered sex offenders among those registered to use its site — more than four times what the company said in May it had found from an investigation, according to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper.

"[The 29,000] includes just the predators who signed up using their real names and not the ones who failed to register or used fake names," Cooper said in the statement. Cooper is one of eight state attorneys general who asked MySpace in May to turn over the names of users who are registered sex offenders.

In May, MySpace reluctantly revealed it had uncovered 7000 sex offenders."

Doom ported to freepascal 2.1.4-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2007, @01:53AM

An anonymous reader writes "The famous DOOM game has been ported to to freepascal 2.1.4. It previously was converted to Delphi but now the developer has made it run smoothly on FPC."
Link to Original Source

Oil (or Not) in Your Future-> 1

Submitted by

mdsolar

on Saturday July 21 2007, @09:52AM

mdsolar writes "Over at The Oil Drum there is an interesting discussion going on about a report released (in draft form) by the National Petroleum Council. The report is a response to questions from Secretary of Energy Bodman about the ability of oil companies to meet projected demand for oil (at a reasonable price). The report seems to say that this cannot be done and recommends that the government 1) force conservation through efficiency regulations, 2) shift to other energy sources, 3) reduce regulation on drilling in the US, 4) use US power to force open markets in oil, 5) pay for the education of engineers in the oil field, allow retiring workers to consult without tax penalties and raise H1-B quotas and 6) pay the oil industry to accept carbon dioxide from coal use for sequestration.

The discusion at The Oil Drum is finding that the report is fudging on the peak oil issue while at the same time predicting a greatly increased oil supply mainly from the Middle East using new technologies and discoveries. My own acerbic take on the report findings can be found here."
Link to Original Source