Me: Kids should not have to stand in the dark each morning to wait for the school bus 3 months a year. Society: OK. We can adjust the clocks by an hour twice a year to make it better. Typical Slashdot troll who binges Squid Game or House of Cards until 3:00 AM and stays up after midnight on New Years Eve each year: BuT mY bEaUtY sLeEp!!! ScIeNcE sAyS!!!! ChAnGiNg ClOcKs is HARD!!!

Sorry youâ(TM)re butt-hurt that you donâ(TM)t have daylight 4:30-5:30 PM so that people who make the world run (and children who go to school) can have at least a little daylight as they drive to work or wait for the school bus. Talk about selfish.

I live near the border of Canada, in the far northern United States (Fargo, ND). Sunrise in my city will happen at 4:30 AM in mid-June if we keep âoeStandard timeâ all year (instead of 5:30 AM, as it currently is with the time change). Sunrise in mid-December will be after 9:00 AM if we keep Daylight Savings Time all year (instead of 8:00 AM). All these whiners who want to drop the time change must not have jobs where they wake up before 7 AM and not have kids in school waiting for bus pickup in the pitch black mornings of winter. Or they all live in southern states, sucking up terawatts of energy to run their air conditioners year round to make their desert and swampland homes habitable for the convenience of not having 4 seasons or days shorter than 10 hours or longer than 14 hours.

Appleâ(TM)s smartphone market share continues to grow, even in the face of a wonderful alternative: Android. Statista reports that Apple currently has 45-46% of the US smartphone market. Even though Appleâ(TM)s behaviors are supposedly âoebad for consumersâ and âoebad for innovationâ and âoebad for (insert random thing here)â, a large segment of the American public seems to REALLY like their products, even with a zillion Android options available at every Walgreens, Target, and gas station prepaid phone aisle. Could it be that some people actually prefer that limited, walled garden ecosystem? This isnâ(TM)t like Microsoft and the browser wars where they had 95%+ of the home PC market and torpedoed competitors like Opera and Netscape. This isnâ(TM)t AT&T dominating landline phone service. This is a phone company saying âoewant access to our ecosystem, play by our rules, thereâ(TM)s a competitor with 55% market share in the USA who you can sell your apps for, too, and the American public is welcome to make their choice.â I wonder why, if their practices are so bad for everyone, and so limiting for consumers, and their products are so expensive (more than probably 80% of Android alternatives), and even old, second hand phones hold their value better and are more expensive than Android equivalents, people KEEP BUYING IPHONES?

Keeping DST is going to be great in the winter in northern places like Bemidji, Minnesota. Without the âoefall back,â the sun wonâ(TM)t rise until after 9:00 AM in December there. I know all the people who are flocking to the south for the nice weather donâ(TM)t like the hassle of changing a clock or two twice a year (especially since most of that is automated on smartphones, computers, and smart devices), but it has real-world implications for those who donâ(TM)t live in the southern USA. In Houston, the length of daylight ranges from 10-14 hours over a year. In northern Minnesota and other northern states, it ranges from 8 hrs and 15 minutes to 16+ hours of daylight seasonally. If they kept standard time all year in Bemidji, the sun would rise around 4:20 AM on the summer solstice. Ridiculous.

"By the time Skynet became self-aware it had spread into millions of computer servers across the planet. Ordinary computers in office buildings, dorm rooms; everywhere. It was software; in cyberspace. There was no system core; it could not be shutdown. The attack began at 6:18 PM, just as he said it would" ...at an artificial intelligence conference in California. Judgment day has arrived. Now we just need to perfect time travel.

Rather than responding to the darkness of terror with the cleansing sunlight of truth and free discussion, major discussion sites like Reddit are shutting down discourse on this major event? This is a grave disservice to everyone who believes in a free and open society. Comments that offer nothing but vitriol, hate, and anger should certainly be moderated, but locking and deleting entire threads because the task facing the moderators is too hard is not the answer.

I cannot imagine what the families and friends of those killed and injured are going through. Instead of politicizing this hours after it occurred, how about everyone take a long moment to focus on supporting those whose loved ones were killed or whose loved ones are still in limbo in the hospital. There will be plenty of time for fingerpointing, anger, and hate later. Showing the best humanity has to offer is the best response to the worst humanity has to offer.

If you read the article, and the linked narrative by 4a.m. (the person who actually figured out the copy protection), it was not an elementary procedure to rip the data from the disk for the Internet Archive upload. The disk is unreadable by nearly all utilities available for the Apple II, and incompatible with modern disk drive systems, which expect very specific disk formatting and file structures. Security through obscurity and antiquity... I congratulate 4a.m. on a very impressive rip - I'm glad people still know how to do things like this with 35 year old technology and that programs like this won't be lost to the ages.

The use of the backspace button to move "Back" in a browser is a holdover from the days of Netscape Navigator and its atrocious interface. Microsoft adopted it in I.E., and then all subsequent browsers adopted it for compatibility. Firefox has a configuration setting for what Backspace does. Why shouldn't Chrime?
More than once, I've accidentally "clicked" outside a text area (particularly easy to do on a laptop trackpad) and then hit backspace, thinking I was still in a text entry box, obliterating everything I entered when the browser moved "Back."
Use Ctrl+Left Arrow or Ctrl+Right Arrow to go Back and Forward. This works in all modern browsers and across all platforms, and is unambiguous. Command left-bracket and Command right-bracket also work in Apple's Safari. I'm sorry you'll have to move your fingers a few more inches to save the rest of us hours of frustration.

The summary makes it sound like computers in the classroom are the problem. That's not what the article says at all. The teachers' union is accusing out-of-school exposure to "instant gratification" digital devices and games for ruining attention-spans before kids are old enough to go to school. The article claims youngsters are aggressive and inattentive due to past conditioning by games and always-on entertainment. It doesn't even mention computers or tablets in school. Misleading title & summary.

The hospital I work at uses Invos / Somanetics 5100C monitors which perform Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) monitoring of blood for patients under anesthesia.

This is the monitor: http://www.covidien.com/rms/pr...

These monitors run on Linux, a fact I learned when I watched one boot up the other day. It showed its Linux Kernel version and then ran through the typical 5-10 pages of gray text before loading the user interface. They basically have about a dozen hard buttons on the front (no touchscreen) and some specialized ports for the cables to the NIRS sensors. They work great and do exactly what they're supposed to.

I think the problem may simply be that teachers perceive they will lack the time to answer questions / comments they receive from parents via email if they open this pandora's box. I know a similar feeling is present in much of the health care industry and other "social service" sectors. The more available one is via "always on" technology, the more time one will have to spend on addressing communications conveyed via this additional medium. Businesses see it all the time - think how much time each day the stereotypical Dilbert-like employee must spend on emails compared with time spent addressing paper memos and phone calls alone (which still exist today) prior to the advent of email. Teachers fear their already strenuous schedule will become even busier. It takes a lot more time for a parent to pick up a phone or write a letter to contact the teacher... and I think that's how a lot of teachers like it.

Being a juror stinks - I think most everyone agrees on that. But the rationale behind restrictions like this makes sense: communication about the case outside the courtroom may result in a juror's opinion being changed by friends, family, Facebook contacts, etc.

It's hard for some people to slow down and refrain from tweeting of Facebook posting every last thing they do every day... but I'm sure we'd all appreciate a fair trial without undue influence from bystanders who don't know all of the facts if we ever find ourselves seated at the defendant's table one day...

This is one time when following the rules can have enormous consequences. Far too many people see jury duty as a joke, or otherwise don't follow the rules in other areas of their life (parking in handicapped spots to run into the store for "just a minute," taking things from work because "nobody will miss it") and this transfers to abiding by the rules set forth by the judge at trial. It's a joke for some people - and that's just disrespectful.

In answer to the question from the original post... I think there are no hearings about wired communication "monopolies" because there are a variety of wired providers nationally, even if only one or two of them service each domicile or office. There's still comparatively heavy competition in most markets for wired communications services. Wireless, on the other hand, utilizes a finite resource (EM spectrum) and the 4 remaining carriers are largely the only ones available in the US. If I move from Miami, Florida, to Miami, Ohio, I probably have the same options available to me. Virgin Mobile, Boost, Wal-Mart Mobile, etc. all lease their spectrum from one of the big 4, so they aren't true alternatives or competitors. Three providers (or really two providers since I don't count Sprint) controlling all of the cell network EM spectrum seems like a very bad idea. I think that's why Congress is more concerned about the wireless merger than the paucity of wired communications providers serving Podunk, Montana. Other thoughts on this?

The Slashdot search / feedback / submit story / login / join banner covers part of the text content on the page. When you hit page up or page down, the first line of the next page is hidden beneath that banner and you have to scroll up a few lines to see it. Very annoying. This happens on the latest Google Chrome and the latest Firefox on Windows 7, 64-bit edition. Please fix this CSS glitch! The content shouldn't appear beneath the top banner on the page!