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Comment Re:So..... (Score 1) 445

It's better than banning lasers altogether, which seems to be the only viable alternative.

Note, I'm one of those crazy bastards that has a 1W blue laser that can light things on fire, pop balloons, cut dark-colored foam, etc. But I am paranoid about the safety aspect and I don't let anyone borrow it or use it without all potentially affected persons wearing eye protection. I have no sympathy for those idiots who think it's fun to use irresponsibly and I even chewed out a few security guards at a grocery store for shining their cheap low-end green lasers all over the store front where people driving could get hit by them and get in an accident. If you don't know that pointing highly focused light beams at people operating vehicles is dangerous, you need to go away for awhile because you're obviously unsuited to the complexities of first-world modern life. It's amost the same level of stupid as dropping rocks off of freeway overpasses.

Comment Re:IMMINENT DEATH OF SLASHDOT PREDICTED (Score 1) 234

Well, we can see how even the erudite and well-spoken can fall to four-letter epithets and ad-hominems.

This genesis is not so different from how Slashdot originally began, if I've read things correctly in my time here.

My thought: sustainability is going to be the key to any fork venture. It is well that we come to consensus, because without it the core of what makes Slashdot what it is disappears, and with it the horde that makes Slashdot a verb. You submitters, and commenters that stay at +5, you are that core. You particularly, girlintraining, I looked for your voice of reason in the madness. We agree the Beta sucks, but that is not enough. We need decisive action. We don't need to go the Patriot Act screaming-hysteria route, over-extend ourselves, and hoist ourselves by our own petards for all the world to point and laugh. We need a firm vision, and leadership to see it through administratively.

Dice has written off the entire community. We could have done much of their work for them, pointing out the bugs and what needs improving. You know it, I know it, they know it. They don't care. We weren't juicy enough economic morsels for them to feed off of, and they've decided to try reinventing themselves as the ultimate mediocrity: flashy clickbaiters. So this is where my concern comes in, because the status quo wasn't sustainable.

How are we going to do it where they have failed? What can we learn from the development and hosting of Linux and other FOSS, a similar and seemingly heavily-related community? One kickstarter is not going to do it. Donations are a tough business method. Ads aren't going to work with this crowd. Bandwidth is an ongoing cost, even if this doesn't have to be a for-profit venture. Do we charge for moderator status? Do we solicit patronage somehow? Find one of the rare MBAs worth his salary and get him to buy Slashmedia up with his company's resources? Goodwill and enthusiasm are fine, but they only have value if someone's actually buying, as Dice has discovered to their chagrin.

Altslashdot.org is currently... slashdotted. I might suggest we bring that info back here for just a little bit longer.

Comment Re:Good riddance. Worst computers EVER to work on. (Score 2) 204

Not to mention the tiny, thin screws that had a tendency to break off at the head and/or strip if you so much as look at them wrong- and which, of course, required a (smaller) different screwdriver head to take out, assuming you were successful. And the special ACPI devices which are unintuitive to get drivers for when you've got to do a reload. Whoever designed those all-in-ones with no access to the internals needs a severe talking too.

Submission + - Band seeks compensation after music used in Guantanamo Bay interrogations

time_lords_almanac writes: A Canadian band has sent an invoice to the U.S. Department of Defense after learning that its music was used without permission in "interrogations" of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The members of Skinny Puppy, who specialize in electronic music, were originally going to make the invoice the cover of their next album until they discovered they could bring legal action against the department. They were also none to happy to learn the purpose their music was being employed for, let alone illegally. The amount of compensation requested? $666,000, of course.

Submission + - Once Slashdot beta has been foisted upon me, what site should I use instead? 2

somenickname writes: As a long time Slashdot reader, I'm wondering what website to transition to once the beta goes live. The new beta interface seems very well suited to tablets/phones but, it ignores the fact that the user base is, as one would expect, nerds sitting in front of very large LCD monitors and wasting their employers time. It's entirely possible that the browser ID information gathered by the site has indicated that they get far more hits on mobile devices where the new interface is reasonable but, I feel that no one has analyzed the browser ID (and screen resolution) against comments modded +5. I think you will find that most +5 comments are coming from devices (real fucking computers) that the new interface does not support well. Without an interface that invites the kind of users that post +5 comments, Slashdot is just a ho-hum news aggregation site that allows comments. So, my question is, once the beta is the default, where should Slashdot users go to?

Comment unmarked (Score 1) 457

So is it then illegal if you're flashing to warn people about a speed trap that happens to be using unmarked/low profile interceptors, because you can see a few of them with their lights on with people pulled over?

Personally, I think the line should be that speed traps should be illegal if there is not a higher-than average accident/fatality rate in a particular location. I'd rather they focused on tailgaters and other people obstructing traffic flow e.g. by driving exactly the same speed in the fast lane as the car in the slow lane so that nobody can pass.

Comment Re:Not worthless (Score 2) 593

Dead on. I think of it as the "common sense" bias, where a category of "things that people know" include the local religious beliefs which give it an "unfair" advantage vs. all the other world religions, and thus the burden is squarely on the incumbent religion to prove itself from first principles to ensure this has not happened "to me" (this is the biggest argument I have designed for discussing religion with fundies; unfortunately the only time I got to do this, it was a guy who had converted to Islam after being atheist most of his life, so I didn't get to use this particular argument).

The thought to engage with is: how do you tend to those poor bastards that were unlucky to be "born into" the wrong religion? Well, naturally you've got to insist everybody carefully examine the evidence on both sides - and this is where it wraps back to an imperative on the fundie in question. You then put two conveniently-selected ideologies on trial with each other, and for bonus points, the null hypothesis (atheism).

You may never get them to properly examine their own beliefs in context or critically examine their own evidence, but this is the closest you're going to get, and a good opportunity to plant the seeds of truth they wouldn't ordinarily come across in their self-selected comfort zone.

Comment Re:Embryonic ability (Score 1) 71

That would be awesome, but I don't think the tech is nearly ready for that. We have yet to produce a proper human clone - and until we at least get that process right, it's never gonna happen. I also wonder at how much the mitochondrial DNA matters as well - something a basic DNA sequence wouldn't tell you. The important thing, I think, is to catch the DNA at its original state, before it drifts as these things tend to do with age. Adult stem cells are never going to get around that issue, but they may be the next-best thing for awhile.

Comment Re:Morality is for people who are not dying (Score 1) 234

You clearly allow transferable organs, but where's the line? No nervous system tissue? What about quadriplegics injured in an accident, would that be so wrong?

What if that organ is the brain, and you can't guarantee perfect or even "reasonably good" memory transfer? Are they still the same person, and would you still want that if they end up acting very differently afterwards? Would you be dooming a new person to suffer the memories of the other person who used to have their body?

It's not as theoretical as it might sound. I have a friend who suffered tumor-induced amnesia. Her memory has recovered better than having to ask that question in her case, but after the onset of dementia you might run into that very thing. Another friend of mine is losing a grandmother to organ failure and dementia, and it's hard to say when she stopped being herself but it's mostly agreed that she is not, in fact, the woman her family used to know. At what point do you let go? In the grandmother's case, it seems unethical that humane euthanasia is illegal in her jurisdiction. Would I rebuild her brain if I could? I don't know.

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