OiBoy - Slashdot User

Internet Sales Tax Vote This Week In US Senate 434

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 21, 2013 @02:45PM from the what-the-market-will-bear dept.

SonicSpike excerpts from CNet's coverage of the latest in the seemingly inevitable path toward consistently applied Internet sales taxes for U.S citizens: "Internet tax supporters are hoping that a vote in the U.S. Senate as early as today will finally give them enough political leverage to require Americans to pay sales taxes when shopping online. Sens. Mike Enzi (R-Wy.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) are expected to offer an amendment to a Democratic budget resolution this week that, by allowing states to 'collect taxes on remote sales,' is intended to usher in the first national Internet sales tax." There goes one of the best ways to vote with your dollars.

Comment Backblaze (Score 1) 326

by OiBoy on Friday August 10, 2012 @05:08PM (#40951471) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best On-Site Backup Plan?

I use backblaze http://www.backblaze.com/ for off-site backups. $50/year for unlimited storage is more than reasonable. I currently have about 2.5TB backed up there.

Comment Re:new weight new meters (Score 1) 825

by OiBoy on Friday February 17, 2012 @10:03AM (#39073495) Attached to: Obama Pushes For Cheaper Pennies

This was true when the dollar coin was replaced. The replacement had to have the same dimensions and weight. But, show me a vending machine that accepts pennies...

Submission + - ISPs Warn Europe - Website Blocks Don't Work (ispreview.co.uk)

Submitted by Mark.JUK on Tuesday January 11, 2011 @10:51AM

Mark.JUK writes: The European Internet Services Providers Association (EuroISPA) has today warned the European Union (EU) that plans aimed at tackling online child sexual abuse content, which propose to force ISPs into adopting mandatory website blocking (censorship) technology, will not work because such methods are easy to circumvent; an ISP might cover your eyes but anybody can still take the blindfold off. Instead the EuroISPA has called for MEP's to consider permanently removing internet based child sexual abuse content at source, although this also runs into problems when the servers are based outside of your jurisdiction.

Comment Poor detection (Score 4, Interesting) 263

by OiBoy on Thursday December 30, 2010 @10:49AM (#34710508) Attached to: The Significant Decline of Spam

I've been getting significantly MORE spam in the last month. I would assume that they base their metrics on how much spam was caught and identified. Since apparently more is getting through to me now, the article should really be titled "Significant Decline of Spam DETECTION".

Comment This just confirms my feeling... (Score 0, Redundant) 472

by OiBoy on Wednesday April 21, 2010 @02:06PM (#31927410) Attached to: McAfee Kills SVCHost.exe, Sets Off Reboot Loops For Win XP, Win 2000

I've always said that Windows was a virus.

Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released 195

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday December 03, 2009 @11:04AM from the download-compile-reboot-repeat dept.

diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."

AMD's Six-Core Istanbul Opterons 123

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 02, 2009 @08:16AM from the nothing-outruns-my-v8-ford dept.

EconolineCrush writes "AMD's latest 'Istanbul' Opterons add two cores per socket, for a grand total of six. Despite the extra cores, these new chips reside within the same power envelope as existing quad-core Opterons, and they're drop-in compatible with current systems. The Tech Report has an in-depth review of the new chips, comparing their performance and power efficiency with that of Intel's Nehalem-based Xeons. Istanbul fares surprisingly well, particularly when one considers its performance-power ratio with highly parallelized workloads."

Comment Anyone actually TRY this? (Score 4, Interesting) 301

by OiBoy on Tuesday May 27, 2008 @03:17PM (#23560455) Attached to: Consumer Reports Gets Its Game On

I see a lot of people complaining that it's not a REAL workout, or it's just a gimmick. Knowing that the Wii Fit is sold out almost everywhere, how many of you have actually tried it?
I own a Wii Fit. I've been using it for 5 days now. Not a workout, my ass! Maybe if you only do the balance games, or maybe if you only consider a workout to be doing weightlifting. I've been doing the cardio games (Hula Hoop, Stepping, Running), and I end each session out of breath and sweating. No, a single 2 minute stepping series on the starter level doesn't wear me out. 30 minutes of rotating between the 3 exercises in the more advanced mode (which you only get after having done them for 30 minutes...I think. Regardless, they are an unlockable you wouldn't see the first time you tried) will have your heart rate up just as effectively as the same amount of time on your average exercise bike or elliptical trainer.
Would I lose any more weight if I drove 30 minutes to the nearest gym, paid the equivelent of a used car payment in membership fees every month, and used machines covered in somebody else's sweat? I doubt it. More importantly, I wouldn't bother, so I wouldn'get get ANY exercise. Walking into my living room and turning on the TV seems to have a much lower barrier to entry, so I can't easily make excuses for why I can't work out today.

Important Court Decisions Chip Away At ISP Liability Shield 103

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday April 08, 2008 @11:56AM from the i-kind-of-like-the-open-internet-personally dept.

An anonymous reader writes "News.com is reporting on a pair of court cases that could prove very important to ISPs in coming years. They both subtly chip away at the legal shield service providers have enjoyed against liability for hosted content. Further court cases could result in a 'chilling effect' on social networks and hosting services, as small businesses steer clear of potentially contentious content. '[The judge's ruling] differed from previous opinions in one important area. He refused to dismiss Jane Doe's argument that FriendFinder's republication of her profile invaded her 'intellectual property rights' under New Hampshire law. She claimed to be concerned about violations to her 'right of publicity,' which says an individual generally has the right to control how his name, image, and likeness is used commercially--and the court ruled that Doe's argument fell into the category of intellectual property law.'"

Your Cat Wants Armor 3

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday February 12, 2008 @02:15PM

What would you get if you crossed The Society for Creative Anachronism with an old cat lady? Cat armor of course. Now the age old question of whether or not a cat thrown into battle lands on its feet can be answered. To keep the playing field level, they've also made mouse armor.

Oracle Is Latest To Take On VMware 109

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 13, 2007 @04:26AM from the virtual-virtual-everywhere dept.

BobB writes "Oracle is going after its piece of the hot virtualization market by introducing an open source Xen-based hypervisor to compete against those from Novell, Red Hat, and VMware. Oracle VM, unveiled Monday at the Oracle OpenWorld convention in San Francisco, enables virtualization on Oracle and non-Oracle software applications and on the Linux and Windows OSs. It also operates on industry-standard x86- and x86-64-based servers. Oracle claims it offers virtualization at a lower cost than competitors can." VMware stock dropped over 10% on the news; Oracle's stock rose. The market was not punishing Oracle for the unpatched zero-day vulnerability (public exploit available) that the company won't patch until Jan. 15.

China Reinstates Wikipedia Ban 172

Posted by Zonk on Friday November 17, 2006 @03:36PM from the that-was-depressingly-quick dept.

Rob T Firefly writes "The International Herald Tribute reports that the lifting of China's Wikipedia ban earlier this week was short-lived. Wikipedia is once again inaccessible from behind the Great Firewall, along with all other Wikimedia projects. Additionally, the URL of Chinese Wikipedia is once again a banned search term. No reason has yet been given for any of it." From the article: "It wasn't immediately clear if Wikipedia was inaccessible due to technical glitches or because government censors had blocked the site again. The Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Information Industry did not immediately respond when contacted for comment Friday. Beijing blocked access to the English and Chinese versions of Wikipedia in October last year, apparently out of concern about entries touching on the country's sensitive spots -- Tibet, Taiwan and other topics."

The Corporate Invasion of Second Life 62

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday November 14, 2006 @01:22PM from the big-business-other-world dept.

Tyburn Franklie writes "Second Life is entering its 'second phase'. With big-name brands colonizing its virtual earth and the media getting worked up into a frenzy of hype, the alternative world is looking more and more like the old one. There are even worries about virtual office etiquette (sorry guys: no guns in the office). And now Linden Labs has words of warning for would-be corporate warriors seeking a Second Life: 'If you are not authentic and do not offer anything to the community, you are likely to be ignored, at best.' Sage advice — whatever world you're in." A lot of overhype here, I think.

Automatic Image Tagging 123

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday November 02, 2006 @09:07PM from the on-the-horizon dept.

bignickel writes "Researchers at Penn State have applied for a patent on software that automatically recognizes objects in photos and tags them accordingly. The 'Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures Real-Time' software (catchy name) trained a database using tens of thousands of images, and new images have 15 tags suggested based on comparisons with objects or concepts in the database. Not sure how you identify a 'concept,' and they're only talking about having one correct tag in the top 15, but still cool."

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