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Comment Re:He's not quite so level-headed (Score 1) 19

He should have seen a shrink about this I think.

That is (at least) half the problem as I see it. While mental health problems don't tend to just show up instantaneously, his issues likely became worse at the time when he had the least access to help - after losing his job.

Whie I generally agree with the NRA on almost nothing, I do agree with them that we need to deal with mental health problems in our country. Of course, they are too cowardly to actually propose a way to do anything as they are in bed with the GOP and hence cannot suggest anything that is counter-conservative. I will state - as I have in the past - that we need to reform our health care system in a meaningful way. We passed a massive bailout a few years ago for the health insurance industry when we needed to do something about accessibility of care.

People who lose their jobs or cannot find full-time work still fall through the cracks. Even worse as a nation we still degrade people who seek help for mental health issues. We cannot continue to oppress the working class indefinitely without expecting to see a response.

Comment Google is only a company (Score 1) 450

You could host the video somewhere else, you know. Google deciding not to host it on their services does not in any way prevent you from hosting it somehwere else - or hosting it yourself. If it is not your video, you don't have to work too hrad to find out who posted it and contact them directly for it so you can host it somewhere for them.
Communications

No Wi-Fi Around Huge Radio Telescope 224

JG0LD writes "Students at a tiny Appalachian public school can't use Wi-Fi because any such network can throw the radio equivalent of a monkey wrench into a gigantic super-sensitive radio telescope just up the road. GBT's extraordinary sensitivity means that it's very susceptible to human-generated radio interference, according to site interference protection engineer Carla Beaudet. 'If there was no dirt between us and the transmitter, a typical access point ... would have to be on the order of 1,000,000 km [more than 620,000 miles, or about two and a half times the distance from the Earth to the Moon] distant to not interfere. Fortunately, we have mountains around us which provide lots of attenuation, so we're not seeing everything from everywhere,' she said. A standard Wi-Fi access point would wipe out a significant range of usable frequencies for the observatory. 'It simply ruins the spectrum for observations from 2400-2483.5MHz and from 5725-5875MHz for observational purposes,' wrote Beaudet."

Comment Re:It's like third grade, all over again (Score 1) 144

In elementary school they'd often send me to the library to get rid of me. We had "library passes" that teachers could issue to students, and they were issued to me quite often. I spent most of my time reading whatever scientific books I could find in our library (often not realizing how out of date they were - I remember in particular reading a book on how great skylab was going to be).

However one time I looked up a profane word in the giant unabridged dictionary - and then showed it to my friends. The librarian was not amused.

Comment It's like third grade, all over again (Score 1) 144

If the pen will punish me for bad penmanship it will just bring back bad memories of being taught (much against my will) how to write in cursive back in 3rd grade. Hell, I enjoyed memorizing multiplication tables but dreaded cursive writing tests. I still remember my teacher giving me extra pages of just the dreaded lower-cased letter "r".

If this pen takes a similar approach I would just take the batteries out and go back to typing messages.

Comment Re:TeamViewer (Score 1) 4

Thank you for the recommendation. This seems like a much better option than logmein, which (from what I know of it) makes me nervous from a security standpoint.

However I just noticed in a discussion where people were discussing TV vs LMI that the enterprise version of RealVNC adds some useful additional features, as well. For the setup I'm looking at, this might be worth looking into as well as it ends up costing less than TV.

Comment Re:Strangely enough, I though of you, seeing that (Score 1) 17

Troll? No, I'm helping you out. Your whole Benghazi bit is about to fizzle out - even the other conservative news sources are mostly ignoring it now - so you need something else to get excited about and scream "impeachment" over. I have now handed it to you, so go ahead and run with it. You don't even need to thank me.

I just didn't want you to have to go a full week without a story that you can try to blow many orders of magnitude out of proportion in expression of your hatred of all things not preceeding an (R).

Comment Re:Thinkpad (Score 3, Informative) 570

I'm not the OP here but I am a thinkpad guy so I thought I'd offer my $.02. I recently upgraded from a very much battle-worn R32 to a new T510. The former was a value series but indisputably an IBM thinkpad. The latter is a Lenovo from the regular line-up. I've owned both since new, the latter of which I ordered custom-built.

What's your opinion of the new keyboards

I think the new keyboard is still great, easily better than any other on the market for a laptop. Response is great, a nice tactile feel. Keys are 95% size IIRC and no problem to type on. I type quite a bit - just finished my PhD thesis - so I probably know my keyboards better than most. I do have a couple IBM M series full-size keyboards (with trackpoint, of course) that I use for heavy-duty typing but there are times when a silent keyboard is called for and the T510 is great for that time.

My only complaint on the keyboard is that the finish leaves something to be desired. I have naturally oily skin which seems to eat the finish off fairly quick. My left mouse button, for example, looks quite a bit older than it actually is. I do keep a silicone skin on my keyboard most of the time, FWIW.

If so, any opinions as to changes in quality, keyboard or otherwise?

All in all, I would say my T510 is still a great unit. Hardware wise my only gripe is that this particular model (or any T510) doesn't have the ultrabay, and hence is limited to the system battery (though I do have the 9 cell). I can also tell you I have dropped my thinkpad from table height - while running - more than once already and that has caused absolutely no noticeable damage whatsoever to any part of the system.

The Internet

Journal Journal: Recommendation for remote access software? 4

I need to set up remote desktop access for someone to access their small business desktop PC from their home. If this was my own setup I would tunnel VNC through ssh and be happy. However that is not a reasonable solution in this case as they can't handle the unix side of ssh tunneling and any kind of wrapper for it (ie, cygwin) would be too much to ask of them. The setup needs to be simple, but secure. They were using windows remote desktop, which is not a program I am particularly familiar

Comment "New" Mobile Site? (Score 1) 384

Doesn't that imply that there was a mobile site before? To the best of my understanding there was never a mobile slashdot site before now - or at least, not one that worked. I also like how the "new" mobile site launches now thta BlackBerry is considered to be a marginalized niche player - I had pointed out before that slashdot would crash most Blackberries and they always made excuses for not doing anything about it. Now that BlackBerry is no longer viewed as particularly relevant they can more easily get away with continuing to ignore it.

(and I say this as a blackberry user)

Comment Kubuntu 12.10 sans unity-lens-shopping (Score 1) 9

I just thought I'd share that I just installed Kubuntu 12.10 on my laptop this morning (amd64 release) and it did not install unity-lens-shopping by default; I even did 'sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping' to make sure. Looks mostly like the Kubuntu 10.10 that I was running before, even though I formatted my HD along the way. I don't know if maybe some releases don't do the shopping bit out-of-the-box or not?

So far, I'm pretty happy with it, thoughI'm just getting through restoring files from across the network. Once I have my mailboxes and everything else set up to get back to work I'll know for sure if I like it or not. Also in the process of installing the NVidia drivers; we'll see how that goes - I'm trying it through Muon first and then I'll try the downloaded drivers after that.

Comment I'm less concerned than I thought I would be (Score 1) 203

10-15 years ago I thought I would never be able to get a "fast enough" internet connection (of course that was after 10+ years on 28.8 dial-up). But now, I am using just a basic cable modem and I can't find a good reason to upgrade my speed. Cable company calls or mails me every week or two with offers and I always turn then down. My wife and I each have a laptop and a smart phone, we also have a blu-ray player doing netflix and an ipad. Yet we never really seem to find ourselves starved for bandwidth.

I get the argument for decreasing the cost of high-speed internet access in general, but if the cause is just for more speed, I'm not sympathetic.

Comment Re:The Best Things in Ubuntu (Score 1) 9

I'll offer up my current $.02 by saying I've been running Kubuntu 10.10 since it was new. It is, of course, 2+ years old and now the packages are no longer available for it. I had to freeze my updates while I was working on a large project that is almost wrapped up now which I could not afford to have interrupted by software failures. I have the Kubuntu 12.10 DVD ready to go once I'm officially done with this project so I will probably try that with the shopping bit removed as you suggested.

FWIW I'm an old FBSD guy, too. My webserver at home runs FBSD 8.1 currently and with the exception of some ZFS panics it does great (but that's my fault as it has only 1gb of ram and 3tb ZFS). I've ran FBSD on my laptops before but the lack of forward progress on applications I need (specifically openoffice, wine, and even at times KDE) made it too much of a hassle for that use so I went to Linux for my laptops and kept my server on FBSD.

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