sfcat - Slashdot User

Obama Staffers Followed Palin's Email Lead On Inauguration Day 407

Posted by timothy on Friday January 23, 2009 @09:08AM from the why-mess-with-success dept.

theodp writes "Using Yahoo's free e-mail service to conduct government business was good enough for Sarah Palin. And now the Washington Times reports that Obama staffers turned to Gmail on Inauguration Day to conduct their business. Those wishing to contact members of the incoming Obama administration were instructed to contact staffers at wh.LASTNAME@gmail.com until official White House e-mail addresses became available."

Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 1) 1475

by sfcat on Friday January 16, 2009 @07:11PM (#26490539) Attached to: Google Challenging Proposition 8

That's very clever, maybe you should tell the anti-prop 8 people about that argument.

Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 1) 1475

by sfcat on Friday January 16, 2009 @05:30PM (#26488495) Attached to: Google Challenging Proposition 8

But they are the 3rd largest minority. There are about 2 1/2 times as many gays in the US as Asians. And about the same number of gays as African-Americans. How would it look if someone tried to pass a law that said Asians or African-Americans couldn't get married? City hall would be in flames in minutes if anyone tried that. Like it or not, gays are not a small minority.

Comment Re:Seen it coming (Score 1) 252

by sfcat on Wednesday November 26, 2008 @06:49PM (#25904307) Attached to: Gaming In Sweden Bigger Than Football and Hockey

There was once a famous Australian rules football player that came to the NFL to be a punter. He was a great punter. But he would try to cover his own punts despite the advice of everyone around him. In his third game, he was knocked unconscious and quit the team about 5 seconds after being woken up with smelling salts. But whatever you want to believe is fine. Guess pads don't protect you as much as you think.

Comment Re:the consumers just need to do their part (Score 1) 388

by sfcat on Tuesday November 25, 2008 @10:11PM (#25894839) Attached to: Bay Area To Install Electric Vehicle Grid

I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius. The Insight and Prius are hybrid cars. That is, they have a gasoline engine and a small set of batteries to augment it, as an efficiency measure. The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.

Maybe because the GGP said that customers were to blame for the death of the electric car and I (and reality) was disagreeing with him. Good information, but I think all the reasons you listed are ancillary to the issue of after market parts which is the real reason we don't have EVs. GM is a very large company and while losing a billion USD is a lot, if they wanted to dominate the market, they would have pushed on. Instead they wanted to preserve the current business model. Understandable, but like I said above, against the public good.

Hands-On With the PSP-3000 41

Posted by Soulskill on Monday October 06, 2008 @07:57PM from the upgrades dept.

Eurogamer got a chance to take a look at Sony's latest hardware revision for the PSP. Their overall impression of the new model is positive, finding that a redesigned screen offers noticeably better graphics and higher brightness without affecting battery life. They also say the button pads may be slightly different, and the unit comes with useful firmware upgrades. "Elsewhere, our side-by-side comparison of the current PSP/PSP-2000 firmware, 4.05, and the new 4.20 firmware on the PSP-3000 reveals a 'USB Auto-Connect' option, which promises to automatically switch the handheld to USB mode when a cable is connected. It will do this from anywhere on the XMB, but it won't interrupt gameplay. ... The new-model PSP also allows you to play games on a TV by hooking it up with a special adapter (sold separately) and a composite cable, whereas the old one would only allow composite cables to display video, with gaming reserved for component output."

How To Kill an Open Source Project With New Funding 187

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday October 03, 2008 @02:25PM from the money-still-the-root-of-all-evil dept.

mir42 writes "The OpenSource multimedia authorware project Sophie, formerly hosted by USC Los Angeles, may just have been killed by new funding. The original funding organization, Mellon Foundation, approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company based on their proposal, which is simply an exact description, including the UI and the artwork, of the current Sophie. Being an OpenSource project, this isn't strictly illegal, but let's say, not nice and definitely not innovative, coming from a former sub-sub-contractor on the project. Some of the original, now laid-off developers started OpenSophie.org trying to salvage the project. As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow, it might just be enough to alienate all potential users of Sophie to the point that nobody will even try to use the next version. Have others faced similar situations? How would you deal with a situation like this?"

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