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Comment You must be young (Score 1) 547

40 ain't hard at all. I used to work 11hr days 6.5 days a week writing games. Of course I burnt out after a few months doing it, but coming back to 40 is an absolute breeze and have been doing that for years now.

You should toughen up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unkIVvjZc9Y

Perhaps purchasing this (therapeutic?) wristband can help: http://store.ronniejohns.com/?show_product=HTFU

Idle

Submission + - Man Uses Drake Equation to Explain Girlfriend Woes (foxcharlotte.com) 2

artemis67 writes: A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus , a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, " Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK ," used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote "the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy."

Comment Re:Always more to the legends and stories... (Score 1) 233

I think you misunderstood quite a deal when you visited us. As a whole we are a multicultural country, however, the Aborigines have a history markedly different from our 'modern' cultures. In short, they were semi-nomadic, very tribal and had absolutely no concept of ownership.

Enter the white man. We see these people living without clothes. So we give them clothes. We see them without shelter. We give them shelter. Unfortunately, we failed to understand that these concepts don't mean much to a people who live, literally, for the land itself.
From an Aboriginal's point of view, we white people live off the land by harvesting and digging and, basically pillaging the earth, but are completely disconnected from it. They simply don't want to live like us, and yet we force them to (mainly because we don't understand).
Tragically, we have forced them to live in sheltered areas, wearing western clothes and even worse, they (somewhat like the american indians, from what I understand) also have alcohol issues as a result.

There is no easy answer for the Aboriginal issue, since there doesn't seem to be a culture anywhere else in the world similar to them. Unfortunately, we seemed doomed to make mistake after mistake trying to interact with their long lived heritage and culture. It has nothing to do with Immigration policies.

Note further, that there are Aboriginals who (while still acknowledging their heritage) now live in a 'western' manner: clothes, house and job. Many many are very highly educated too. We white people see them as a success, whilst many Aboriginals see them as brothers who have lost the way.

I hope this helps.

Submission + - Save The Planet: Eat Your Dog (stuff.co.nz)

R3d M3rcury writes: New Zealand's Dominion Post reports on a new book just released, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living. In this book, they compare the environmental footprint of our housepets to other things that we own. Like that German Shepherd? It consumes more resources than two Toyota SUVs. Cats are a little less than a Volkswagen Golf. 2 Hamsters are about the same as a plasma TV.

Their suggestions? Chickens, Rabbits, and Pigs. But only if you eat them.

Privacy

Submission + - Dutch govt has no idea how to delete tapped calls

McDutchie writes: The law in the Netherlands says that intercepted phone calls between attorneys and their clients must be destroyed. But the Dutch government has been keeping under wraps for years that no one has the foggiest clue how to delete them (Google translation). Now, an email from the National Police Services Agency (KLPD) has surfaced, revealing that the working of the technology in question is a NetApp trade secret. The Dutch police are now trying to get their Israeli supplier Verint to tell them how to delete tapped calls and comply with the law. Meanwhile, attorneys in the Netherlands remain afraid to use their phones.
IT

How Do You Manage Dev/Test/Production Environments? 244

An anonymous reader writes "I am a n00b system administrator for a small web development company that builds and hosts OSS CMSes on a few LAMP servers (mostly Drupal). I've written a few scripts that check out dev/test/production environments from our repository, so web developers can access the site they're working on from a URL (ex: site1.developer.example.com). Developers also get FTP access and MySQL access (through phpMyAdmin). Additional scripts check in files to the repository and move files/DBs through the different environments. I'm finding as our company grows (we currently host 50+ sites) it is cumbersome to manage all sites by hacking away at the command prompt. I would like to find a solution with a relatively easy-to-use user interface that provisions dev/test/live environments. The Aegir project is a close fit, but is only for Drupal sites and still under heavy development. Another option is to completely rewrite the scripts (or hire someone to do it for me), but I would much rather use something OSS so I can give back to the community. How have fellow slashdotters managed this process, what systems/scripts have you used, and what advice do you have?"
Medicine

A New Robotic Hand That Can "Feel" 112

Dyne09 writes "The BBC is running a video report about a group of Swiss and Italian scientists who have created the 'Smart Hand,' a robotic hand with forty sensors that 'connect directly to the brain.' Though fuzzy on the details, the report says the hand provides sensor feedback to a willing test subject, a 22-year-old man who lost his hand to cancer three years ago. How long until we have access to Star Wars-esque robotic limbs?"

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