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Comment: Summary? (Score 4, Insightful) 53

by mpicker0 (#43421823) Attached to: Gambling-Focused Internet Cafes Now Illegal In Florida
I don't understand the expression of surprise in the first part of the summary. The "cafes" referred to are set up specifically to skirt the state gambling laws by taking advantage of the "sweepstakes" loophole. They make it appear that you're playing video poker, roulette, etc. but you're really just revealing your sweepstakes winnings, which were predetermined when you bought into the game. Bloomberg Businessweek had an interesting article on these things a few years ago.

... rather than at conventional Internet cafes.

I'm not sure what "conventional Internet cafes" refers to. The idea of the "Internet cafe" as a place where people go to buy time on the Internet died shortly after it was born in the late 90's. You can still go to Starbucks, Panera, etc. and use the Internet there; this bill isn't aimed at that. This is not a big deal.

Education

Getting a Literature Ph.D. Will Make You Into a Horrible Person 489

Posted by Soulskill
from the or-is-it-the-reverse dept.
An anonymous reader writes "An assistant professor at Ohio State University who recently earned her Ph.D. in literature writes a warning in Slate for others following the same path. She says, 'I now realize graduate school was a terrible idea because the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct. After four years of trying, I've finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job—and if you go to graduate school, neither will you. ... Don't misunderstand me. There is unquantifiable intellectual reward from the exploration of scholarly problems and the expansion of every discipline—yes, even the literary ones, and even if that means doing bat-s**t analysis like using the rule of "false elimination" to determine that Josef K. is simultaneously guilty and not guilty in The Trial. But there is one sort of reward you will never get: monetary compensation from a stable, non-penurious position at a decent university. ... By the time you finish—if you even do— your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.) ... In the place of actual jobs are adjunct positions: benefit-free, office-free academic servitude in which you will earn $18,000 a year for the rest of your life."

Comment: Re:What the book is about (Score 1) 115

by mpicker0 (#42956269) Attached to: Book Review: To Save Everything, Click Here
Indeed, judging from the introduction, it appears to be a questioning of the pre-canned "solutionism" that the author perceives to be prevalent in today's Internet environment. Apparently, the "review" presented here is based on a single chapter or section of the actual book, and even then, it appears to be more a exhaustive listing of the reviewer's opinion of various websites than any kind of review or critique of the book.
Image

Book Review: To Save Everything, Click Here 115 Screenshot-sm

Posted by samzenpus
from the read-all-about-it dept.
Bennett Haselton writes "Evgeny Morozov's forthcoming book To Save Everything, Click Here describes how an overly helpful 'kitchen of the future' might stifle the learning process and threaten culinary innovation. True, but we could certainly do better than the current state of how-to directions (in cooking and most other subjects) that you can find today on Google. I suggest that the answer lies not in intelligent kitchen technology, but in designing an algorithm that would produce the best possible how-to directions -- where the 'best' directions are judged according to the results that are achieved by genuine beginners who attempt to follow the directions without help." Read below for the rest of Bennett's review.
Editor's Note: This article was not intended as a full review, but rather a commentary on one point in the book. The author's actual review of the book will appear in March.
Businesses

What EMC Looks For When It's Hiring 223

Posted by Slashdot Staff
from the pulse-strongly-recommended dept.
Yvonne Lee, Community Manager at Dice.com, writes "Because EMC has expanded through more than 70 acquisitions in eight years — it was hiring even during the recession — and because many of the acquired companies were startups, it is trying to leverage the more dynamic cultures it's inherited and make itself more nimble and innovative. People it hired 'need to be able to move fast and run,' Thus, a key to getting the company's attention is to prove you can do what you say you can. In other words, when Murray asks if you can work fast, you can't just say yes. You'll have to use your previous achievements to prove that you can."

Comment: Re:Nothing new here.. (Score 4, Interesting) 268

On the C-64 version of Ultima IV, you could flip the floppy disc upside down and then move your character until the next portion of the map was loaded. It read data directly off the disc with no validation, because the map squares then had all kinds of random items on them, a good number of which were treasure chests. As soon as you got enough gold, you just flipped the disc back over and played normally.
Social Networks

Decentralized Social Networking — Why It Could Work 128

Posted by Soulskill
from the keeping-your-face-off-the-books dept.
Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with "a response to some of the objections raised to my last article, about a design for a distributed social networking protocol, which would allow for decentralized (and censorship-resistant) hosting of social networking accounts, while supporting all of the same features as sites like Facebook." Social networking is no longer new; whether you consider it to have started with online communities in the mid-90s or with the beginnings of sites many people still use today. As its popularity has surged, it has grown in limited ways; modern social networks have made communication between users easier, but they've also made users easier to market to advertisers as well. There's no question that the future of social networking holds more changes that can both help and harm users — perhaps something like what Bennett suggests could serve to mitigate that harm. Read on for the rest of his thoughts.

Comment: Re:Journey from Slackware to Kubunto (Score 1) 867

by mpicker0 (#41469193) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Distros Have You Used, In What Order?

Almost the same: Slackware (floppies) -> RedHat -> Gentoo -> Xubuntu

And my reasons for moving:

  • Slackware -> RedHat: RedHat worked out-of-the-box at the time I needed it; no manual Modeline configurations needed to get X running.
  • RedHat -> Gentoo: I needed the flexibility of Gentoo to run on multiple architectures (SPARC, PowerPC)
  • Gentoo -> Xubuntu: Eventually, I got tired of having to manage every detail of the software configuration, not to mention waiting for compiles to complete. I just wanted to get stuff done.
Government

Arizona H-1B Workers Advised to Carry Papers At All Times 884

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the snuck-in-through-the-indo-american-wormhole dept.
dcblogs writes "In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Monday on Arizona's immigration enforcement law, H-1B workers are being advised to keep their papers on them. About half of all H-1B visa holders are employed in tech occupations. The court struck down several parts of Arizona's law but nonetheless left in place a core provision allowing police officers to check the immigration status of people in the state at specific times. How complicated this gets may depend on the training of the police officer, his or her knowledge of work visas, and whether an H-1B worker in the state has an Arizona's driver's license. An Arizona state driver's license provides the presumption of legal residency. Nonetheless, H-1B workers could become entangled in this law and suffer delays and even detention while local police, especially those officers and departments unfamiliar with immigration documentation."
Cloud

The Risk of a Meltdown In the Cloud 154

Posted by timothy
from the precipitating-danger dept.
zrbyte writes "A growing number of complexity theorists are beginning to recognize some potential problems with cloud computing. The growing consensus is that bizarre and unpredictable behavior often emerges in systems made up of 'networks of networks,' such as a business using the computational resources of a cloud provider. Bryan Ford at Yale University in New Haven says the full risks of the migration to the cloud have yet to be properly explored. He points out that complex systems can fail in many unexpected ways, and he outlines various simple scenarios in which a cloud could come unstuck."

QOTD: "You want me to put *holes* in my ears and hang things from them? How... tribal."

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