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Comment Re:Time to shut down the WTO (Score 1) 327

So have your national sovereignty or your international companies making billions of dollars world wide. Part of having an international community is ceding national sovereignty for the greater good. The same way you cede personal sovereignty to the government in return for an organised society. If I was Antigua I would give all the content away for free so that they don't consume any of their quota and instead sell access to the site.

Comment Re:Big Oil is Dancing (Score 1) 388

diesel has a lower flashpoint then petrol. so its more likely to catch fire... but good try.

Seriously. You posted that? Please don't troll. Flash point of Petrol is -42C, Diesel is 62C. That's a very large difference. If you get a match and try and light diesel at room temperature it wont burn as there aren't enough flammable vapors. Petrol on the other hand has no problem.

Comment Re:Big Oil is Dancing (Score 3, Insightful) 388

Seriously though. I have seen a Diesel Toyota hilux catch fire after hitting a tree and diesel is very hard to start a fire with. Petrol cars catch fire all the time. I highly doubt that these battery packs are statistically more likely to catch fire than a Petrol car. Please ignore overly dramatic journalism. These cars are thoroughly tested before they get approval to be on the road. Much more so than the dodgey chinese imports that are arriving.

Comment Re:Yes, but it won't make any difference. (Score 2) 406

If the world decided to leave the US internet, I'm pretty sure that a Competitor to Google/Facebook/Amazon/Netflicks would pop up overnight and happily take in all of the visitors. What actually makes the internet useful is all of the user created content like Wikipedia. Having 2 versions of such a service would be a tremendous waste of human resources. It wont happen though because its just 5% of Senators which are .001% of the population which have been fucking up the reputation of the whole of the US for their own agenda's. If the President wasn't in the pocket of everybody who put him there I'm sure his moral compass would have objected to abusing the privacy of every internet citizen. As soon as this starts to affect the bottom line of US Companies policy will change. However its on each and every citizen to rise up and protest. Or just bitch about it on twitter. At least do something rather be a part of the rampant apathy that has taken over the western world.

Comment Re:Resolution (Score 2) 397

2560x1600 is the standard 30" monitor res.
Cramming 3200x1800 into 13" can make many things appear mighty small. Its not that it wont work. Its that windows (and 3rd party apps) has traditionally been pretty bad at handling anything other than standard 96 PPI. The Samsung screen has an actual PPI of 275. So that x on the top of a window is going to be 1/3 of the size of what windows intended unless its scaled. Same with all your menu bars and whatnot. If you are using a fixed size application such as Calculator it may end up being unusable.

Comment Re:Whoosh (Score 1) 547

I don't need/have to play MGS or Halo. I would like to, and if released on steam or ubuntu software centre I would buy it. Exclusive titles only limit publisher income streams, I wont be forced into buying hardware that I don't actually own to play a cool game. If the voiced outraged actually started turning into lost sales, then maybe microsoft would listen. I stopped buying COD games after COD4 because the mindset of the publisher changed from community serving to self serving. Thousands of people still play older games unencumbered by modern DRM because they are more mod/community friendly. ie War3x, COD4, CS, Minecraft.
So yes, I wont be playing Halo on my linux box any time soon, but I can do so much more.

Comment Re:Whoosh (Score 1) 547

Both the PS4 and Xbone seem a little pointless. I now have a linux box on my TV. I would rather get a few controllers for that and buy some linux games rather than buy another console when I wont be able to install the programs that I want, use the peripherals that I want and be overcharged for every accessory I buy due to the captive market. Unless the console makes it easier to buy DRM free movies that I can put on my SMB server and watch on whatever device I own TV/Tablet/PC I cant see myself bothering.

When the steam console comes out I'm pretty sure I will be getting one of those.

Comment Re:Wow, just wow. (Score 5, Insightful) 406

Slashdots moderator system is a form of censorship.
Its just an open, and free form of censorship. The only way to make it more open would be to say who modded you up and down and why. But this might lead to reprisal voting and politics so as far as I'm concerned peer censorship works.

Additionally the -1 comments are still there, they are just out of the way and can be read if you want to have a laugh about goatse and frosty piss.

Comment Re:Q: How many cameras is too many to watch? (Score 2) 161

As computer power increases, facial recognition improves, databases become linked, ai improves we will all be watched. Someone with the right authority could do a search for all footage, location data, internet traffic of an individual. And wham instant blackmail material. Any activist, opposition member could be charged with enough crimes to give them life in prison. Fake tagging someone in a photo, identity theft. Using your partners credit card, fraud. All of this evidence could easily be compiled and used against you. Having a game of thrones marathon with some friends from an on demand streaming service? DMCA violation? CFAA violation? Illegal broadcasting? One party with infinite power.

Comment Re:BYOD means I/T loses some control over it (Score 4, Insightful) 377

Having worked on both sides of this fence I can say that IT are often lured into the belief that they are the core of an organisation and that they are constantly making things better for everyone by making things more uniform. Such as giving everyone the same desktop icons and refusing access to the desktop to allow users to add their own icons. They are hidden away from the rest of the workforce in artificially lit computer graveyards. The users in such a network ie, the accountants/journalists/engineers who are actually making the company money get more and more disillusioned with this system that gets less and less functional, ie submit a form signed in triplicate with a cost code attached in order to get Chrome installed. They bring their own 4G devices in and use them to do their work, or bring in windows hacking tools to give themselves local admin rights and all hell breaks loose.

Thus where I have seen IT actually play their support role is where they don't get put in the dungeon in the basement of the building but integrated into the workforce and forced to do their work in plain sight. Other staff members can see the work that they do and come and ask questions, and they can see the impact that their work has on their users. Their team meetings are infiltrated with key staff members who get to vet the plans moving forward, and key to all this, is an articulate manager who actually understands what his subordinates are doing and not just playing with dollars and cents.

Comment Re:So It's An Indirect Intangible Gamble? (Score 4, Interesting) 232

What if this came along with an airtight guarantee? Like: no tracking, snooping, all Facebook/Twitter/G+ buttons turned OFF until you click to activate them, never selling your info, forever, amen. Just mine us Bitcoins... and only while you're on the site.

I'll be honest, I would take that deal over the implicit "pay via getting spied on" internet we have today.

+5.

As the family IT guy, most of what I do is fix the damage done by free games. My cousins teenage kids seem to ruin their laptops by installing hundreds of adware programs on their computers which eventually destroy it. Perhaps this would end this trend of destruction.

However this would create another problem in turn. How would bitware apps fight for your idle processor? If left to their own devices they would get greedy and attach higher and higher priorities to their threads in order to muscle out the competitors app. I guess that you would need like a steam deployment platform running that shared your bitcoins based on the amount of time you spent playing each game?

Comment Re:Equal rights (Score 1) 832

No the woman gave birth 8 weeks ago. This is about bonding time not physical recovery. Men deserve the same amount of bonding time with their children as women. Then they can be forced to cash in their leave and work through anyway because as society we see fathers as less important parents than mothers. This decision by yahoo proves the point.

Comment Re:SPEAK in their own language (Score 2) 238

Pretty sure this is the most likely. When a private practice moves into a hospital they have to sign many cohabitation agreements. One of them will cover I.T. governance and likely will be written in such a way that you have no recourse, "our network our rules". As such if you want these official probes to stop then talking to them face to face may be your only option. Then they may just tell you that its a legal requirement that they take every action available to ensure patient data is safe and penetration testing all machines on the network is standard practice.

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