mets501 - Slashdot User

Slovak Police Planted Explosives On Air Travelers 926

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @07:40PM from the carrying-reality-tv-too-far dept.

Entropy98 writes "Slovakian Police have planted explosives on 8 unsuspecting air travelers. Seven were stopped by airport security, including one man arrested and held upon arriving at a Dublin airport. Unbelievably, one innocent traveler made it home with 90 grams of explosives, and had his flat surrounded by the police and bomb squad."

Poor Design Choices In the Star Wars Universe 832

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday August 20, 2009 @11:31AM from the there-are-so-many dept.

Ant writes "John Scalzi's AMC blog shows a short guide to the most epic FAILs in Star Wars design — 'I'll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here's ten ...'"

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 207

by mets501 on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @12:01PM (#29024617) Attached to: Schneier On Self-Enforcing Protocols

I don't agree that voter registration is unrelated to political parties. There are two points to campaigning: convince people to vote for your candidate, and then get the people who support you registered and to the polls. Voter registration is very important to our democracy (clearly), and I believe it only serves us better in the long run that we have political parties pushing so hard for it. Without the Democrats and Republicans, I'm fairly confident we'd have much lower voter registration and turnout.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 2, Informative) 207

by mets501 on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @11:55AM (#29024539) Attached to: Schneier On Self-Enforcing Protocols

Furthermore, your signature is asinine for several reasons, not the least of which is because you put the inequality going in the wrong direction.

Check out p-values. "p" in this case is not a regular probability. The equality is in the correct direction.

Comment Why? (Score 3, Insightful) 207

by mets501 on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @10:50AM (#29023601) Attached to: Schneier On Self-Enforcing Protocols

After reading that, I was left with the feeling that I had no idea what I had read it for. Was it a call to arms? Was it a rant about our whole world? It seemed to offer more problems than solutions...

A Standardized OS For Robots 184

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @08:56AM from the kill-all-humans-until-done dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "The New Scientist reports that at present, all robot software is designed uniquely, even for parts common to all robots but that could be about to change as roboticists have begun to think about what robots have in common and what aspects of their construction can be standardized, resulting in a basic operating system everyone can use. 'It's easier to build everything from the ground up right now because each team's requirements are so different,' says Anne-Marie Bourcier of Aldebaran Robotics but Bourcier sees this changing if robotics advances in a manner similar to personal computing where a common operating system allowed programmers without detailed knowledge of the underlying hardware and file systems to build new applications and build on the work of others. 'Robotics is at the stage where personal computing was about 30 years ago,' says Chad Jenkins of Brown University. 'But at some point we have to come together to use the same resources.' This desire has its roots in frustration, says Brian Gerkey of the robotics research firm Willow Garage. If someone is studying object recognition, they want to design better object-recognition algorithms, not write code to control the robot's wheels. "You know that those things have been done before, probably better," says Gerkey, who hopes to one day see a robot "app store" where a person could download a program for their robot and have it work as easily as an iPhone app."

The Mice That Didn't Make It 202

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 06, 2009 @04:09PM from the does-anything-beat-a-logitech-marble-mouse? dept.

Harry writes "For every blockbuster of the mouse world (such as Microsoft and Logitech's big sellers) there have been countless mice that flopped, or never made it to market. Mice shaped like pyramids; mice shaped like Mickey; mice that doubled as numeric keypads or phones. Even one that sat on your steering wheel. I've rounded up some evocative patent drawings on twenty notable examples."

Next Generation T9 Keyboard Technology 150

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @11:10PM from the type-in-a-new-way dept.

Iddo Genuth writes "Cliff Kushler, the inventor of the T9 keyboard technology for numeric keypads, has developed a new alphanumeric entry technology for touch-screen laptops and Smartphone devices. This latest technology, named Swype, works with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard similar to ones found on Windows Mobile and the iPhone. The difference from the usual method of typing in the letters is that a finger or stylus is used to slide in the first letter, then without lifting the finger, the user continues writing the entire word. Only once the word is completed can the finger be lifted off. According to the developers, this leads to a much faster way of 'typing,' or as we might call it soon, 'swiping.'"

Sex Offenders Must Hand Over Online Passwords 630

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @09:28PM from the give-it-up dept.

mytrip writes "Privacy advocates are questioning an aggressive Georgia law set to take effect Thursday that would require sex offenders to hand over Internet passwords, screen names and e-mail addresses. Georgia joins a small band of states complying with guidelines in a 2006 federal law requiring authorities to track Internet addresses of sex offenders, but it is among the first to take the extra step of forcing its 16,000 offenders to turn in their passwords as well."

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