castle - Slashdot User

Comment Re:what about slashdot? (Score 1) 595

by castle on Monday April 30, 2012 @01:20PM (#39847101) Attached to: Not Just Apple, How Microsoft Sidestepped Billions In State Taxes

Left wing crazy? I thought that was you!?!

In short, Right Wingers that think government should be an activist one doing a whole bunch of shit on the dime of their taxpayers aren't really Right Wing, those that think they should be in some cases (War and Drugs and War on Drugs is Different, see, honest, but paying for them Educations is a violation of my rights) are actually what most American political types are... Stark Raving Mad Busybody Hypocrites who operate under a delusion of pragmatism in a haze of Prozac tainted water.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 569

by castle on Wednesday October 26, 2011 @01:48PM (#37846506) Attached to: HPV Vaccine Recommended For Boys

It's good that you reveal that your vested interest is in saving your place saving the world for your pharmaceutical corporate employer, keep up the rent seeking. It's good that you're honest about it.

You probably are doing some good, but you are a part of a machine that isn't all good. Just look at your lobbyists, and your public relations expenditures.

Comment Re:All this shows (Score 2) 334

by castle on Monday October 10, 2011 @01:02PM (#37665574) Attached to: The Data Crunching Prowess of Barack Obama

Welcome the New boss, same as the Old boss, only, more "hip".

Comment Re:Blame it on Liberals and Communists (Score 1) 566

by castle on Monday October 03, 2011 @12:40PM (#37590758) Attached to: Theater Professor's <em>Firefly</em> Poster Declared Threatening

Pretty good summary, I have to say, of mainstream 'liberals' and 'conservatives'.

I consider myself a Classical Liberal.

Comment Re:Do like the Romans (Score 1) 135

by castle on Wednesday August 03, 2011 @03:44PM (#36976122) Attached to: Get Cyber-Mercenaries Suggests Ex NSA, CIA Director

Distinction without difference, or at least too little difference to matter.

We all have the British Foreign Office to thank for most of this anyway.

Scottish Scientists Develop Whisky Biofuel 172

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday August 17, 2010 @07:05PM from the you-mad-geniuses dept.

RabbitWho writes "It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'one for the road.' Whisky, the spirit that powers the Scottish economy, is being used to develop a new biofuel which could be available at petrol pumps in a few years. This biofuel can be produced from two main by-products of the whisky distilling process – 'pot ale,' the liquid from the copper stills, and 'draff,' the spent grains. Copious quantities of both waste products are produced by the £4bn whisky industry each year, and the scientists say there is real potential for the biofuel, to be available at local garage forecourts alongside traditional fuels. It can be used in conventional cars without adapting their engines. The team also said it could be used to fuel planes and as the basis for chemicals such as acetone, an important solvent."

Comment Re:Cutting corners is the name of the game (Score 1) 383

by castle on Friday July 23, 2010 @02:52PM (#33006018) Attached to: BSOD Issues On Deepwater Horizon

Part of the problem *is* that it's not real money.

Overall it's just chits of debt to the federal reserve, if it were real money, you could run out, thus providing a sustainable feedback mechanism which would probably lessen the bad things that "capitalism" is being blamed for in this case, and others.

Corporations themselves rely on the states that define them. Liability shields and incestuous dealings with regulators (revolving doors and their attendant failures of regulatory oversight) abound in many industries.

In this instance you'd think the ridiculously low quality computers would be detected by the frequent audits of the private backers of the endeavor, if those backers had any sense. BP being a multinational plays by all the rules on paper, shit happens, since they just rent the land from the government, the landlord gets to pay the bills / suffer the consequences with little to no recompense when it all goes to hell.

Modern Day Equivalent of Byte/Compute! Magazine? 327

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 15, 2010 @03:34PM from the must-have-tape-drive dept.

MochaMan writes "I grew up in the '80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line by line, and figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way. Since then, the personal computer market has obviously moved away from hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware, but I imagine there must still be a market for similar do-it-yourself articles. Perhaps the collective minds of Slashdot can divine some online sources of fun and educational mini-projects like 'write your own assembler' or 'roll your own bootloader.'"

Newsweek Easter Egg Reports Zombie Invasion 93

Posted by kdawson on Monday June 14, 2010 @10:56PM from the it-takes-braaains dept.

danielkennedy74 writes "Newsweek.com becomes the latest in a long list of sites that will reveal an Easter egg if you enter the Konami code correctly (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter). This is a cheat code that appeared in many of Konami's video games, starting around 1986 — my favorite places to use it were Contra and Life Force, 30 lives FTW. The Easter egg was probably included by a developer unbeknownst to the Newsweek powers that be. It's reminiscent of an incident that happened at ESPN last year, involving unicorns."

Intel Abandons Discrete Graphics 165

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @02:21PM from the out-of-the-lifeboat dept.

Stoobalou writes with this excerpt from Thinq: "Paul Otellini may think there's still life in Intel's Larrabee discrete graphics project, but the other guys at Intel don't appear to share his optimism. Intel's director of product and technology media relations, Bill Kircos, has just written a blog about Intel's graphics strategy, revealing that any plans for a discrete graphics card have been shelved for at least the foreseeable future. 'We will not bring a discrete graphics product to market,' stated Kircos, 'at least in the short-term.' He added that Intel had 'missed some key product milestones' in the development of the discrete Larrabee product, and said that the company's graphics division is now 'focused on processor graphics.'"

Doctors Seeing a Rise In "Google-itis" 368

Posted by samzenpus on Monday May 17, 2010 @02:29PM from the sounds-like-rickets-to-me dept.

It's one of the fastest-growing health issues that doctors now face: "Google-itis." Everyone from concerned mothers to businessmen on their lunch break are typing in symptoms and coming up with rare diseases or just plain wrong information. Many doctors are bringing computers into examination rooms now so they can search along with patients to alleviate their fears. "I'm not looking for a relationship where the patient accepts my word as the gospel truth," says Dr. James Valek. "I just feel the Internet brings so much misinformation to the (exam) room that we have to fight through all that before we can get to the problem at hand."

Programming Clojure 109

Posted by samzenpus on Monday May 17, 2010 @02:00PM from the read-all-about-it dept.

eldavojohn writes "Programming Clojure by Stuart Halloway was very near to the perfect book for me. It covers many things common to many Lisp languages while highlighting in moderate detail the things that make Clojure unique and worthy of some attention. The book spends a large amount of time dealing with the intricacies of interfacing fluidly with Java (down to a package rewrite inside a large project). This fits me perfectly as a Java programmer, and I now feel ready to experiment with peppering functional language capabilities into an object oriented language. The book also strives to show how to simplify multithreading through functional programming, which is good because I find multithreading in Java a serious headache that few are good at. Programming Clojure, released in May 2009, is currently the only book out there devoted to Clojure, and the introduction is written by the language's creator, Rich Hickey, who says, 'What is so thrilling about Stuart's book is the extent to which he "gets" Clojure.' The book earns its place on the Pragmatic Bookshelf by guiding the user through rewriting a part of Ant into a new build tool called Lancet — adding to the project what you just learned about Clojure at the end of each chapter." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

Submission + - Parts of Iron Man 2 costumes made on a 3D printer (bnet.com)

Submitted by bizwriter on Friday May 07, 2010 @04:02PM

bizwriter writes: The production company for Iron Man 2 the gloves that Robert Downey Jr. wore in the movie on a 3D printer. The technology let them control the fit of the piece down to 10 microns. Apparently in the first movie, the gloves fit badly, hampered the actor's movements, and kept falling apart, so someone had to keep putting them back together during shooting.

Submission + - Facebook exec defends site's privacy policies (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike on Friday May 07, 2010 @01:53PM

CWmike writes: Social networking giant Facebook has been taking it hard on the chin lately as critics contend that recent upgrades to the site and a bug that lets users view their friends' chat sessions raise a bevy of privacy issues. However, in an interview with Computerworld on Thursday, one Facebook executive insisted that users are happy with recent changes to the site despite the hornet's nest of controversy stirred up by online pundits and commentators. Ethan Beard, director of Facebook's developer network, noted that the millions of users that have joined Facebook's social network did so specifically to share information. Beard also talked about the social network's controversial privacy settings, why users' information isn't private by default, and reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that people shouldn't expect online privacy. Is it just the media to blame for hyping Facebook's privacy woes?

Games Workshop Goes After Fan Site 174

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @05:03AM from the don't-anger-your-base dept.

mark.leaman writes "BoingBoing has a recent post regarding Games Workshop's aggressive posturing against fan sites featuring derivative work of their game products. 'Game publisher and miniature manufacturer Games Workshop just sent a cease and desist letter to boardgamegeek.com, telling them to remove all fan-made players' aids. This includes scenarios, rules summaries, inventory manifests, scans to help replace worn pieces — many of these created for long out of print, well-loved games...' As a lifelong hobby gamer of table, board, card and miniature games, I view this as pure heresy. It made me reject the idea of buying any Games Workshop (read Warhammer) products for my son this Christmas. Their fate was sealed, in terms of my wallet, after I Googled their shenanigans. In 2007 they forbid Warhammer fan films, this year they shut down Vassal Modules, and a while back they went after retailers as well. What ever happened to fair use?"

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