Comment Re: CowboyNeal (Score 1) 280
"I am the Dread Pirate CowboyNeal."
Comment Re:So much history-- (Score 1) 95
I had a Lisa! It was the successor to my Apple ][+. It had a 5 MB hard drive you had to turn on a few minutes before the main computer so that the drive would spin up and stabilize before the Lisa tried to access it. The drive was as big as a 24" monitor laying horizontally and sat on top of the computer. I used Modula-2 to program it.
A couple of years later I worked at a printing company and their prepress department had dozens of Lisa's all happily composing away. Great money saver for the company.
Comment Cowboy Neal (Score 1) 239
Clear winner on this issue.
Comment Re:sales figures? (Score 1) 578
Nice troll. Do you have that figure?
The vast majority of people buy a PC at Best Buy, and use what's on it, crapware and all. Only a tiny percentage of consumers can delete partitions and install OS's.
Fukushima Nuclear Plant Cleanup May Take More Than 40 Years 218
mdsolar writes "'A U.N. nuclear watchdog team said Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to decommission the Fukushima power plant and urged Tepco to improve stability at the facility. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said Monday that damage at the nuclear plant is so complex that it is impossible to predict how long the cleanup may last.' Meanwhile, Gregory B. Jaczko, former Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said that all 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology."
Comment Re:Flawed assumptions. (Score 1) 686
Can any excess heat be concentrated and sent back into the central star, rendering it indistinguishable from natural fusion energy release? Apologies in advance if that's a hopelessly noob question.
Comment Re:When's the dupe? (Score 1) 178
With a link to goatse in the body text.
Ask Slashdot: Hacking Urban Noise? 474
b1tbkt writes "I live at the corner of one of the busiest intersections in my city (pop. 350k). Although I've replaced all windows, insulated, and caulked every square inch of the place, the fire trucks and cars with obnoxious stereos still regularly intrude on my home office. Most of the noise comes in through the windows. I'm considering mounting an oblong parabolic reflector in the ceiling above the windows with a steady feed of white or brownian noise directed into it (e.g., via a small speaker placed within the reflector) to create a 'wall' of sound that would act as a buffer to the outside world. Active noise cancellation would be nice, too, but that's probably more than I want to take on. I don't see any products on the market for this sort of thing. Does anyone have any experiences to share with similar homebrew noise remediation efforts?"
Comment Re:The budget isn't $82,000 (Score 1) 67
I'll add in Born in Hope, a LOTR masterpiece about the birth of Aragorn and the life & death of his father. If PJ claimed he filmed this, no one would blink, it's that good.
http://www.bornofhope.com/
No, I wasn't connected in any way other than being a fan....
Study Finds New Pop Music Does All Sound the Same 576
whoever57 writes "A study of music from the '50 to the present using the Million Song Dataset has concluded that modern music has less variation than older music and songs today are, on average, 9dB louder than 50 years ago. Almost all music uses just 10 chords, but the way these are used together has changed, leading to fewer types of transitions being used. Variation in timbre has also reduced over the past decades."
An HTTP Status Code For Censorship? 369
New submitter Tryfen writes "UK ISPs are being forced to block The Pirate Bay. One is using 'HTTP 403 Forbidden' to tell users that they cannot access the site. From the article: 'However, chief among my concerns is the technical way this censorship is implemented. At the moment, my ISP serves up an HTTP 403 error.' ... As far as I am concerned, this response is factually incorrect. According to the W3C Specifications: "The 4xx class of status code is intended for cases in which the client seems to have erred."' So, should there be a specific HTTP status code to tell a user they are being censored?"
Comment Re:Hear, hear! Guest access! (Score 1) 277
I also have been a past user of the ever-popular Linksys. Back in those days I went the extra mile to be nice and set a password on the way out of the connection, since they would also leave "admin" open. Just doing my part for security...
Autralian Mining Companies Increasing Use of UAVs 67
aesoteric writes "Australia's top miners have opened a new front in their march to automation, flying unmanned aerial vehicles in increasing numbers at remote sites across the country. They've been used to inspect a fire-damaged oil rig, perform aerial photography and stockpile surveys. There is also a trend towards non U.S.-built UAVs, due to the lag in receiving export approvals for the aircraft and spare parts."
Comment Re:A Different Interpretation of the Tiers (Score 1) 176
The Billy Goat (great place, highly recommended) is only a couple of blocks from this school.
I'll assume, in the absence of any actual facts, the OP goes to that high school and had an unpleasant encounter with the normal clientele of that fine establishment.
If you try to play Drake in the Billy Goat:
You're gonna have a bad time.
Submission + - Most advanced auto user electronics?
TrailerTrash writes: "I want next car (USA based) to be determined largely on the sophistication of the user electronics. Who has the best system, or at least the system with the most features? GPS, Bluetooth, in-car hotspot, cameras, etc.? Cars over USD$50K need not apply..."
