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Comment Precedent? (Score 1) 539

Is this a precedent? Does it mean that now anyone who does not want to be on a jury can pay $250, write an essay, and go home early? Many people lose more than $250 in pay while serving, so this may be a cheaper alternative. When I had to serve, I wasn't even picked, but I lost five days of work and had to pay for parking - $250 would have been a cheaper alternative.

Comment Death Of PC Greatly Exaggerated (Score 4, Insightful) 549

A couple of points:

  1. These next-generation devices lack storage, and it is far cheaper to put a drive on your local network than it is to rent space online, in which case you pay monthly fees not only for the storage but for the bandwidth to access it. A desktop in the basement is a good solution for this requirement.
  2. The cost of a terminal which can be used to access virtual OSes over a network usually costs about the same as a desktop. If you can have the desktop for the same price, why not keep it?
  3. When a product becomes a commodity, people don't stop buying it - in fact, quite the opposite. Just because Apple can't charge $2000 for a computer anymore doesn't mean low-margin suppliers won't continue to sell them.

Comment Re:Or you could say... (Score 1) 205

Exactly right - meetings never end, interruptions never stop, and drive-by management becomes an even easier habit to fall into. It may be tiresome, but there are real benefits to getting the right people into a room, and focusing on the problem at hand. Where chat rooms and follow-on technologies really shine is enabling these meetings over great distances.

Comment Re:What a Tragedy and No Charges? (Score 5, Interesting) 1343

But the fact that there are no charges being pressed enrages me.

Are you a parent? There's absolutely NOTHING they could do to the guy that would be worse than losing a child. I wouldn't be surprised if he winds up comitting suicide intentionally, with the same gun. I can't imagine how much this guy's hurting right now.

I'd also betting his marriage is over. Yes, charges of child endangerment could be filed, but no punishment is going to change anything; no punishment that state can inflict will come close to what he's done to himself.

I am a parent, and my eyes tear up thinking about a child dying, mine or one I've never met - they are all tragedies. However, in this case the *stepfather* left a gun around that killed a child that wasn't his. He may or may not be suffering, and it should be investigated.

Comment DRM-Free Digital Downloads? (Score 3, Interesting) 121

Lately, I have become enamoured with legal, DRM-free digital download content providers such as gog.com (for games) and filmbaby.com (for indie movies). There are many similar sites, but they come burdened with DRM, which I am not interested in supporting or being bogged down by. Given the slashdot community's general dislike for DRM, and hopefully support for indie developers of content, I am hoping you folks can suggest other such sites. So - care to share any favourites?
Google

New Search Engine Cuil Takes Aim At Google 649

theodp writes "CNET reports that Cuil (pronounced 'Cool'), a startup founded by the husband-and-wife team of Xift creator Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, is launching a new search engine today that claims to index three times as many Web pages as Google." Running a few searches left me underwhelmed with the content of the results (hitting the next-page button on a search with a listed 62,200,000 results — for "seattle" — got me the unexpected error message "We didn't find any results for 'seattle.'"), but pleased with the actual layout of the results when it worked, so I hope the kinks are worked out. Update 7/28 18:30 GMT by SM: corrected Tom Costello's accreditation, he wasn't a professor at Stanford as the linked story suggests, just did some research there as a grad student. Thanks to the Stanford CS department for pointing this out.
The Internet

ISP Block on Pirate Bay Not Having Desired Effect 177

TechDirt is reporting that the recent block placed on The Pirate Bay torrent site is not only relatively ineffective, but actually driving more traffic to the site because of the attention. "The news from The Pirate Bay appears to confirm this suspicion. According to The Pirate Bay's new Court Blog, Danish traffic has not dropped since the implementation of the block. '...the number of visits from Denmark has increased by 12% thanks to IFPI,' the blog post reads. 'Our site http://thejesperbay.org is growing more because of the media attention than people actually coming to learn how to bypass the filter - our guess is that alot of the users on the site now run OpenDNS instead of the censoring DNS at Tele2.dk.' 'We also started tracking some stats before and after the block. There's no noticeable difference between the number of users from Tele2.dk before and after.'"
Idle

Nigerian Spammers Up the Ante 7

It seems the Nigerian spammers have learned you can't always kill them with kindness. Now they just threaten to kill you. A woman in St. Louis received a mail that said, in part, "Am very sorry for you my friend, is a pity that this is how your life is going to end as soon as you don't comply. ... I don't have any business with you, my duty as I am mailing you now is just to KILL/ASSASINATE you and I have to do it as I have already been paid for that. Get back to me now if you are ready to pay some fees to spare your life, If you are not ready for my help, then I will carry on with my job straight-up."

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