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Comment Re: Permanent DST is a mistake as well. (Score 1) 220

by dafdaf (#58336388) Attached to: EU Parliament Votes To End Daylight Savings

Permanent DST sucks for Spain in the winter.

Agreed. Permanent DST makes no sense.

I always thought Spain would be in WET ? Maybe it's just is in the wrong time zone ? Why not take the opportunity and fix that too by switching from CET to WET and enjoy noon at midday ?

Btw: I just recently had the pleasure to try to fit the tzdata file into an embedded system with 1MB flash. I nearly went crazy sifting through the data. We couldn't do it anyway and had to settle for a compromise.

Every person that has to do with software has to encourage any attempt to get rid of DST switching. Look into the source files at https://www.iana.org/time-zone... and bee blown away. :-)

Comment Re:Increasing its nuclear capacity? Good. (Score 1) 176

by dafdaf (#55135395) Attached to: Finland To Introduce Law Next Year Phasing Out Coal

There is no proper way to dispose of highly radioactive nuclear waste. Only ways that are less dangerous than others, statistically speaking. What convinced you that the situation in Finland is significantly better than in, say, Germany?

Well, for one thing, they have no Germans.

Well, the Germans temporarily store the nasty stuff in abandoned salt mines while the people of finland to my knowledge are the only ones working on a long term solution: the Onkalo nuclear waste repository. There is a very beautiful documentary about this endeavor (building time >100 Years !). It's called: Towards the end of Time. Worth watching !

Submission + - Statues of Assange, Snowden And Manning Go Up in Berlin

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: RT Times reports that Alexanderplatz square in Berlin has become the stage for a provocative art piece which celebrates whistleblowers and encourages ordinary citizens to speak out. "They have lost their freedom for the truth, so they remind us how important it is to know the truth,” says sculptor Davide Dormino. The life-sized statues of the three whistleblowers stand upon three chairs, as if speaking in an impromptu public meeting. Next to them is a fourth, empty chair. "The fourth chair is open to anyone here in Berlin who wants to get up and say anything they want," says the artist. Dormino, who came up with the idea together with the US journalist Charles Glass, specifically chose a classical bronze statue for his depiction – and not an installation or abstract piece – since statues are usually made of establishment figures. According to Domino while men who order others to their deaths get immortalized, those who resist are often forgotten, so “the statue pays homage to three who said no to war, to the lies that lead to war and to the intrusion into private life that helps to perpetuate war.” Activists and members of Germany’s Green party unveiled the life-size bronze statues on May Day.

Submission + - Court overturns Dutch data retention law, privacy more important (dutchnews.nl) 1

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: DutchNews.nl writes:
Internet providers no longer have to keep their clients phone, internet and email details because privacy is more important, a Dutch court ruled on Wednesday.

Digital Rights organisation Bits of Freedom writes in a Blog:
The law’s underlying European directive was meant as a tool in the fight against serious crimes. The Dutch law, however, is much more expansive, including everything from terrorism to bike theft. During the hearing, the state’s attorneys avowed that the Public Prosecution does not take the law lightly, and would not call on the law to request data in case of a bicycle theft. The judge’s response: it doesn’t matter if you exploit the possibility or not, the fact that the possibility exists is already reason enough to conclude that the current safeguards are unsatisfactory.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What can Distrubuted Software Development Teams Learn from FLOSS?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As a long time free software proponent and team lead of a small development team (10+ ppl) in a midsized company I always try to intercorporate my experiences from both worlds. Lately I was confronted with the need to accept new team members from abroad working on the same codebase and I expect to have even more telecommuting people in my team in the future. All this while research suggests that the failure rate of virtual teams could be as high as 70%. On the other hand FLOSS does not seem to suffer from the same problems, despite being developed in a distributed manner more often than not. What can corporations and managers learn from FLOSS to make their distributed teams more successful? Consequently, what FLOSS tools, methods, rules and policies can and should be incorporated into the software development process in a company more often? I'm interested in the opinion of others especially regarding technical issues like source code ownership and revision control system, but also ways of communication, dealing with cultural differences, ...

Comment Working on a boat (Score 1) 167

by dafdaf (#45252837) Attached to: I've done my current job in X time zones ...
...while cruising around the world with my two kids and wife. We get in and out of different timezones without even noticing. Heck, we crossed the dateline a few weeks ago and were completely surprised to arrive in Tonga on a sunday with the immigration closed. But - who cares anyway ? Timezones... pfff. Some weird concept of land people. UTC rules ! ;-)

Comment Re:About damn time. (Score 1) 432

by dafdaf (#32027196) Attached to: Government Approves First US Offshore Wind Farm
Yeah, this whole 'base load' discussion is really getting annoying. There are multiple new ideas to store the power generated by wind farms of which one of better ones (I think) is to store the energy in form of air that is pumped into huge bubbles under water. When the power is needed, you open the bubble and let the air vent through a generator... Other ideas involve generating 'artificial' methane gas. But that just reaches ~60% efficiency right now... People are repeating the 'only works for base load' argument, the big energy providers have been spreading for years. Those companies are only afraid of de-centralized power generation which would mean the end to a *lot* of them ! (And that is a good thing !)
Government

Submission + - The Death of the US-Mexico Virtual Fence (npr.org)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: A couple years ago it was announced that the Boeing built virtual fence didn't work. Started in 2006, SBInet has been labeled a miserable failure and finally halted. A soon to be released GAO report is expected to tear SBInet a new one causing DHS Chief Janet Napolitano to announce yesterday that funding for the project has been frozen. Sad that $1.4 billion had to be spent on this before the discovery that this poorly conceived idea would not work.

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