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Comment Re: This subject is work. (Score 1) 241

It's also about people like nurses that travel to visit patients in their homes, who are being paid a salary for the hours they work, but in some cases not for the hours spent travelling to the first patient and from the last patient. If the company is not paying for the time spent travelling to the first job and from the last, there's no incentive to optimise the routes so they start/finish close to home.

Submission + - Creationists Stuffing Google Ballot Box With Bogus Propaganda

reallocate writes: Looks like some Creationists are stuffing the Google ballot box (http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/05/26/what-happened-to-the-dinosaurs/). Ask it "What happened to the dinosaurs?" and you'll see links to Creationist sites pushed to the top. (And, right now, several hits to sites taking note of it.)

Google has a feedback link waiting for you to use it.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to handle unfixed Linux accessibility bugs?

dotancohen writes: It is commonly said that open source software is preferable because if you need something changed, you can change it yourself. Well, I am not an Xorg developer and I cannot maintain a separate Xorg fork. Xorg version 1.13.1 introduced a bug which breaks the "Sticky Keys" accessibility option. Thus, handicapped users who rely on the feature cannot use Xorg-based systems with the affected versions and are stuck on older software versions. Though all pre-bug Linux distros are soon scheduled for retirement, there seems to be no fix in sight. Should disabled users stick with outdated, vulnerable, and unsupported Linux distros or should we move to OS-X / Windows? The prospect of changing my OS, applications, and practices due to such an ostensibly small issue is frightening.

Note that we are not discussing "I don't like change" but rather "this unintentional change is incompatible with my physical disability". Thus this is not a case of every change breaks someone's workflow.

Submission + - Mozilla Scraps Firefox For Windows 8 Citing Low Adoption of Metro

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today announced it is abandoning the Metro version of its Firefox browser, before the first release for Windows 8 even sees the light of day. Firefox Vice President Johnathan Nightingale ordered the company’s engineering leads and release managers to halt development earlier this week, saying that shipping a 1.0 version "would be a mistake." Mozilla says it simply does not have the resources nor the scale of its competitors, and it has to pick its battles. The Metro platform (which has since been renamed to Modern UI, but many prefer the older name) simply doesn’t help the organization achieve its mission as well as other platforms Firefox is available for: Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

Comment Don't Care; Won't Watch Any of It on Anything (Score 1) 578

I zapped my cable three years ago. I watched the opening ceremony (and only that) of the London Olympics via a VPN. I don't care enough about Sochi or winter Olympics to be interested in watching any of it.

I don't think it's important if the FCC forces NBC to run a live stream. If NBC thinks the cost of running a stream of the broadcast they're already doing exceeds the revenue they could generate from stream viewers watching the same commercials the network is already doing, that's their problem.

Comment Market Can't Do What's Not Profitable (Score 1) 580

If it isn't profitable, the market can't do it. Not won't, can't.

Fifty-six years after Sputnik, there's profit to be found in building, launching and operating satellites. As a result, the market has built and sustains businesses that do that. Aside from the Russians pay-to-be-a-space-tourist gimmickry (which exists thanks to state-funded infrastructure) no one has built a business putting people into space.

If the market is going to send people out to explore the Solar System, someone will need to tell it how to turn a profit doing that.

Comment There's No Privacy When You Publish on the Net (Score 1) 410

Sure, you may run a mail server next to the dryer, but who knows where your mail is, or how it got there.

The internet is not about point-to-point communication. It's a *publishing* technology. The reason I can see this Slashdot page is because it was published on some servers, not sent over some secure wire to me. I click on a URL and somewhere a server sends the data comprising that page out into the net, broken up in itty-bit packets with my IP address embedded in them, and eventually they all get to me, where they are reconstructed and displayed in my browser.

Email is no different. Sure, you can use encryption. But, that's self-limiting unless the entire world knows everyone else's key, and then what good would encryption be?

Just as criminals rely on "social engineering" to get access to data, it's been used for centuries by governments and others to get access to data other people do not want them to see. No matter how anyone uses technology to secure their internet "privacy" (quotes because it's an oxymoron), you are really just depending that the folks who create the technology have not been "socially engineered".

So... if you don't want someone to find out something, don't publish it, on the net or elsewhere.

Comment It's About Power & Developers Will Lose It (Score 1) 467

It's all about power.

Our notions of right and wrong tend to adapt to fit our notions of what we want.

Someday, users will use software to create the software they want. When that happens, 95 percent of software developers will be redundant and they will belatedly learn that unions multiply their individual power.

Comment Re:Pointless fork (Score 1) 86

People like me, singleton users, don't really care about things that make your professional life a tad more complicated. That's what you're paid for. Sorry.

At heart, you are reflecting the same corporate make-things-easy notions that underpin the adoption of Windows.

The more alternatives in Linux, the better. Fork away, people!

Comment Is Python Gonna Bother Registering in Europe Now? (Score 0) 261

Python-the-language was never registered as a mark in Europe. If the guy backs off, Python geeks out to consider themselves lucky. Be a change from considering themselves exempt from the house rules.

I don't suppose the hate mail and venomous phone calls he got from idiots helped either. Class act, that.

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