Comment Re:v'ger (Score 1) 260
Just scrape off some dirt & carbon over the label - it's still there, it's just smudged a bit.
Comment v'ger (Score 5, Insightful) 260
I thought it was Voyager VI that was supposed to come back and we couldn't understand what it was saying...
Comment Phone? No. Laptop? ABSOLUTELY. (Score 5, Insightful) 146
No, I wouldn't use one in my phone - but I would ABSOLUTELY use one in my laptop.
It'd be great to be able to project onto a wall for a spur-of-the-moment code discussion, etc. It seems like every time I'm in a meeting & want to share an idea or code snippet, etc. with the group, it happens to be in an area without a projector. If we could have a picoprojector on the backside of my laptop's LCD, you could project from there whenever you need...
It'd be great to be able to project onto a wall for a spur-of-the-moment code discussion, etc. It seems like every time I'm in a meeting & want to share an idea or code snippet, etc. with the group, it happens to be in an area without a projector. If we could have a picoprojector on the backside of my laptop's LCD, you could project from there whenever you need...
Comment Re:Facebook Will Not Acknowledge the New Guy (Score 1) 135
it's due to all the farmville spam he's been getting...
Pluto — a Complex and Changing World 191
astroengine writes "After 4 years of processing the highest resolution photographs the Hubble Space Telescope could muster, we now have the highest resolution view of Pluto's surface ever produced. Most excitingly, these new observations show an active world with seasonal changes altering the dwarf planet's surface. It turns out that this far-flung world has more in common with Earth than we would have ever imagined."
Submission + - Jammie Thomas verdict reduced from $1.92M to $54k (blogspot.com)
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: The $1.92 million dollar RIAA verdict in Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset has been reduced from $1,920,000 to $54,000. The judge indicated that he found even the reduced amount to be 'harsh' and that, were he — rather than the jury — determining the proper damages, he might well have awarded even less. In his 38-page decision (PDF), Judge Michael J. Davis concluded that $2250 per infringed work was the maximum amount a jury could reasonably award without the result being a 'shock to the conscience', and indicated that he was relying solely on standard principles of 'remittitur', without reaching the constitutional due process arguments advanced by Ms. Thomas-Rasset's counsel. Judge Davis also indicated that he was relying in part upon the defendant's having lied under oath during the trial. The judge stated that 'statutory damages must still bear some relation to actual damages'.
Comment Weirding module (Score 1) 314
It's a Weirding Module!! So do you have to chant "muuuuad-DIB!" to make it fire??
Tower Switch-Off Embarrasses Electrosensitives 292
Sockatume writes "Residents in Craigavon, South Africa complained of '[h]eadaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns' after an iBurst communications tower was put up in a local park. Symptoms subsided when the residents left the area, often to stay with family and thus evade their suffering. At a public meeting with the afflicted locals, the tower's owners pledged to switch off the mast immediately to assess whether it was responsible for their ailments. One problem: the mast had already been switched off for six weeks. Lawyers representing the locals say their case against iBurst will continue on other grounds."
Comment Re:Perfectly secure airport (Score 1) 361
That's all well and good, until they run out of lemon-scented napkins.
Comment Re:depends (Score 2, Insightful) 426
Not to defend inept management... but there ARE scenarios that necessitate late nights (or early mornings -- I've gotten several 3AM wakeup calls!) without having a schedule slide or a developer not pulling his weight.
The most common example at my work is a sudden critical-situation customer issue. Hardware fails or your product crashes (or is misconfigured, or a user error causes something vital to get deleted, or... there are a million ways things can go bad quickly). The customer is losing money every minute the system is down. In critsit cases like this, we stay until they're fixed - whether that takes 20 minutes or 20 hours. In cases like that, there's NOTHING the manager did wrong. There may be nothing ANY of us (including the customer) did wrong - but that doesn't matter to the customer. He's losing money & desperate to get it fixed. Therefore, it doesn't matter to us either. We're desperate to get it fixed to and do everything possible to make that happen.
It still may make sense for a manager to stay, especially in cases like this where it's vital that we get the proper expertise on the job in the quickest time possible. Sometimes the proper person is in a totally different department - we as developers may not even know who the right person is! In those cases, the manager can very quickly contact that department's manager and determine who the expert is.
The most common example at my work is a sudden critical-situation customer issue. Hardware fails or your product crashes (or is misconfigured, or a user error causes something vital to get deleted, or... there are a million ways things can go bad quickly). The customer is losing money every minute the system is down. In critsit cases like this, we stay until they're fixed - whether that takes 20 minutes or 20 hours. In cases like that, there's NOTHING the manager did wrong. There may be nothing ANY of us (including the customer) did wrong - but that doesn't matter to the customer. He's losing money & desperate to get it fixed. Therefore, it doesn't matter to us either. We're desperate to get it fixed to and do everything possible to make that happen.
It still may make sense for a manager to stay, especially in cases like this where it's vital that we get the proper expertise on the job in the quickest time possible. Sometimes the proper person is in a totally different department - we as developers may not even know who the right person is! In those cases, the manager can very quickly contact that department's manager and determine who the expert is.
Comment Re:Hooray for lawyers and lobbiests! (Score 1) 371
I would go further than that. It's not a case of "smart people avoid it" so much as "the people who run for office (especially at the national level) are running due to a desire for power -- and most likely will do anything to get it." Running for national-level office is HARD and PAINFUL. Skeletons are exposed, people lie about each other in order to win, any slight misstep or poorly-pronounced word will be magnified and repeated over and over. NOBODY goes through that without some underlying motivating factor: the power you get if you win the position. Power corrupts (and absolute power corrupts absolutely).
Anybody who wants to go through that kind pain is so power-hungry that they should be the LAST person to actually hold that office.
Anybody who wants to go through that kind pain is so power-hungry that they should be the LAST person to actually hold that office.
Comment Re:Good and bad, computer chair version and some b (Score 1) 247
Why do I keep thinking of the "hoverchairs" from Wall-E ... and the resulting balloons of blubber everybody turned into whenever I see articles like this???
Comment Compare it to your car (Score 1) 554
Let's compare the ISS to a car, for a moment.
Think about your 20 year old vehicle and the shape it's in. It's got, what? 150,000 miles on it? It's starting to rust out, the trunk leaks when it rains, the radio only works out of 2 speakers, the air conditioner works great in the winter time, the right-front door won't lock and the left-rear window won't roll down any more. Not to mention the big ole dent in the front fender where you misjudged a turn coming out of that parking ramp...
Now, compare it to the ISS. by 2016 it'll be 18 years old, and have traveled approximately 2.7 BILLION MILES! What would your old beater look like after 2,700,000,000 miles?????
Think about your 20 year old vehicle and the shape it's in. It's got, what? 150,000 miles on it? It's starting to rust out, the trunk leaks when it rains, the radio only works out of 2 speakers, the air conditioner works great in the winter time, the right-front door won't lock and the left-rear window won't roll down any more. Not to mention the big ole dent in the front fender where you misjudged a turn coming out of that parking ramp...
Now, compare it to the ISS. by 2016 it'll be 18 years old, and have traveled approximately 2.7 BILLION MILES! What would your old beater look like after 2,700,000,000 miles?????
Comment Re:Had to laugh at ... (Score 5, Funny) 138
Yeah, but Australia got their criminals and the US got their religious nuts. Australia got the better deal!
Submission + - Has Android Already Failed (pcmag.com)
adeelarshad82 writes: Android hasn't delivered as expected. Android was supposed to appear on dozens of different devices from a bunch of different manufacturers. It was supposed to be more flexible than RIM's BlackBerry OS, more widely available than Apple's OS X, and less expensive than Microsoft's Windows Mobile. However six months into it's release there's a grand total of one more Android phone available, the HTC Magic, which looks like a G1 with the keyboard snapped off.
