[SLASHDOT] Open Ports. NOT EVEN ONCE!

Ross Ulbricht Found Guilty On All 7 Counts In Silk Road Trial

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6904213&cid=48984229

Re:If he actually did all that... (Score:2, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @06:25PM (#48984229) 

Probably. All he was doing was running bit torrent. He had an open port on his laptop! The feds used that to hack the computer and plant the private keys to the silk road's bitcoin wallet, as well as the mastermind's criminal diary and accounting records. And then made the silk road page come up and log in.

Then they pounced.

Open ports. Not even once.

[SLASHDOT] Airplanes in a Gist

US Air Force Selects Boeing 747-8 To Replace Air Force One

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6862945&cid=48935743

Re:Not going to disappear quickly.... (Score:4, Interesting)

by Solandri (704621) on Thursday January 29, 2015 @07:22PM (#48935743) 

Even if Boeing stopped building 747 variants tomorrow, they'd be around for ages. They're the mainstay for long-haul travel, and dwindling sales probably are more related to market saturation - as in, there are enough in the air now to meet current demand - than any inherent shortcoming in the design.

An individual airframe is typically retired before 100,000 pressurization cycles. This is a limitation of the aluminum used to make the skin, which unlike other ferrous metals does not have a fatigue limit [wikipedia.org]. In other words, aluminum always grows weaker with use. As you get closer to 100,000 cycles, you increase the odds of a catastrophic fatigue failure [wikipedia.org] where the aluminum literally unzips like plastic shrinkwrap after you've cut a notch in it. (Aloha 243 had nearly 90,000 cycles due to its short-duration island-hopping history.) 

The 747 is typically used on long-haul overseas flights lasting 10+ hours. This drastically reduces the rate at which airlines can rack up pressurization cycles. Even if one were flown 2x a day every day, it would take over 130 years to reach 100,000 cycles. By comparison, a 737 used for the 40-minute LAX to Las Vegas route may fly 10x a day and reach 100,000 cycles in a little over 25 years. This is why 747s are hanging around - their skins simply have less wear and tear on them despite being in service for more years and logging more flight hours than other planes. 

The 747-8 was always a bit dodgy. When Boeing made the original 747, they weren't planning to make it with a partial second deck. It was supposed to be a stepping stone to future models with a full second deck (designing the 747 nearly bankrupted the company). Boeing pitched the full two-decker model to the airlines for decades but could never get enough interest to justify actually building it. Then Airbus came with its "who cares if we'll sell enough to make money, our governments will pay for it if it doesn't so let's build it" A380, and Boeing threw together the 747-8 as a possible alternative. 

The slow rate of A380 sales (nearly 10 years old, 318 orders, 147 deliveries) seems to substantiate Boeing's marketing research that there just wasn't sufficient demand (yet) for such a large plane. By comparison, the 747-400 had 465 deliveries in its first 10 years. The 747-8 has 119 orders, 83 deliveries in the same timeframe as the A380. As you state, in the 400-525 passenger category, the market is pretty well-saturated by older 747s which are still airworthy.

I suspect that there are more refinements to come - it's just too useful an airframe to discard. It may take Boeing a bit to roll in some of the working dreamliner tech but it seems reasonable that they'd try to do that when time and demand permit.

In terms of airline operating economics, the number of passenger per flight nearly always has a larger magnitude of effect than efficiency gains for new technology. For an airline you are almost always nearly best-off flying a plane with slightly more capacity than the number of passengers. Airbus tried to claim the A380 would be so efficient this wouldn't matter, and you could fly a 747-sized number of passengers on a A380 for cheaper than a 747. I was very skeptical, and the fact that airlines aren't tripping over themselves to replace their old 747s with A380s is a pretty good indication that it's still cheaper to fly a 747 for 747-sized passenger capacities. 

The next place to watch is to see if Airbus will roll out a twin-engine competitor to the 777 (maybe a longer A350-1000?). Airbus' competitor to the 777 had been the A340 (both are in the 300-450 passenger range). But the A340 is a 4-engine plane which uses much more fuel. Consequently, the 777 beat the A340 into a bloody pulp in the market. The 777 has had 1827 orders in 20 years, vs 379 orders for the A340 in 20 years. Right now, that's the gap in Airbus' lineup 

A320 = 100-200 passengers.

A330/A350 = 250-370 passengers.

* A340 = 300-420 (retired in 2011)

A380 = 500-625 passengers. 

That leaves a gap between 370-500 passengers which is currently being filled by the 777 and legacy 747s. Airbus claims you can configure the A380 for as few as 407 passengers, but no sane airline is gonna do that when they can configure the exact same plane for 500-650. I suspect they're holding off on a 777 competitor in hopes of directing more sales to the A380, but such sales inevitably end up going to the 777. In contrast, Boeing's lineup tightly covers all passenger capacities pretty well right now: 

737 = 100-200 passengers

787 = 240-360 passengers

777 = 315-450 passengers

747 = 467-525 passengers

[SLASHDOT] Console Vs PC

Another Upscaled Console Game: Battlefield Hardline

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7070499&cid=49217729

Re: PC gaming is dead (Score:2)

by Nethemas the Great (909900) on Monday March 09, 2015 @03:28PM (#49217729) 

Consoles were perpetuated by the game industry's want of money. They decided that the only way they'd get cash from tweens, teens and twenty-somethings was to lock down the hardware. To bait them, they offered kit that rivaled mid-spec PCs (at least in some metrics) at a price that meant they be taking a loss on each sale. They figured they could play Lexmark's game--cheap kit, absurdly expensive ink--and make up for it selling games. Evidently their plan worked.

Console owners of course are now realizing the true nature of the trap which has been laid for them. The hardware actually isn't all that great--it is just a low-spec PC that happens to have a decent GPU after all. The ink costs a fortune. Hardware refreshes don't happen very that often, and when they do the old titles often won't run on them.

For PC gamers who didn't drink the Kool-aid, we've gotten a mixed bag from it all. The big game houses treat us the wayward step-child. They cater to the consoles, and occasionally throw us a few console ports complete with all the compromises necessitated by its heritage. This however opened a vacuum that indie dev-houses are filling reasonably well. The graphics generally aren't meriting the high-spec card(s) in our rigs, but we get to reclaim notions like novelty, plots, sophisticated play, user-created features and content, and most importantly the price-value proposition.

Quotes: Anti Web Brosign Manifesto

Source: http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2013-03-10-Anti-web-design-Manifesto.html

Anti-Web-Design Manifesto

The modern web is abusive. Browsing a succession of sites is, on the surface, a visual assault hoisted on us by designers with goals often counter to our own interests; under the hood, it is a vector for behavioral tracking in the name of commerce or, worse, for untold nefarious deeds. The proliferation of tools that transform web pages for readability, on the one hand, and ad- and javascript-blockers on the other point to a general dissatisfaction with the status quo.

We face jarring and questionable changes in layout and color schemes. Fonts change from page to page and introduce custom, one-off glyphs. The text we read is sandwiched by menus, ads and links to more "content." We suffer audio and video that start on their own. We are required to use proprietary, security-hole-ridden plugins. Meanwhile, in the background, countless scripts fetched from countless unrelated domains waste CPU cycles.

The more action one takes against these problems, the more broken the web becomes. Unfortunately, web designers have grown dependent on such behavior, while site owners are concerned more about their site's advertising revenue than their visitors' desires. With regards to visual design, the fact is that any individual has a far better idea of what constitutes comfortable-to-read text for them than a designer could. A designer either designing for his or her own tastes or trying to find some best-of-all-worlds design will ultimately fail to satisfy the vast majority of visitors to the site. Instead, we have begrudgingly grown accustomed to a completely heterogeneous web. As for advertising and behavioral tracking, no one should have to suffer that.

Here are ten maxims to which to adhere when building a new web site. Sticking to all ten of these will help restore some sanity to the world. As a quick and easy test to see how badly your site is broken, load it in a minimal web browser, such as Dillo with both remote CSS and embedded CSS disabled. Prepare to cringe.

1) Completely override-able CSS If your website cannot be viewed properly with a custom user CSS file, it is broken. Over-dependence on div tags to get the site to look exactly the way you want it is guaranteed to make it difficult to read for some of your visitors. Designers, it may come as a surprise to you, but not everyone loves your work. Many people use custom CSS files to force a style that is easy on their eyes. Yet, a surprising number of sites fail to render properly if their CSS is overridden. In my perfect world, no websites would provide CSS files; all styling would be done by the user. Of course, since most people do not use their own stylesheets, everyone would complain about how horrible all these plain black-and-white sites look. So at a minimum, your CSS should be minimal, such that overriding it causes little disruption to the flow of your site.

2) No client-side scripts If your website cannot be viewed properly with Javascript disabled, it is broken. There is absolutely no reason that your website should run a script on the visitor's computer, especially if the user cannot view the full source somewhere. No one is to be trusted online, not even you. For a normal, text-displaying website, using scripts is completely unnecessary since you can just store the text in an HTML document. That's what HTML is for. If you are trying to make a web application, just stop. Build a native application. It's nicer for everyone.

3) No proprietary plugins If your website requires the installation of a proprietary plugin, it is broken. The endless stream of news about security holes found in proprietary plugins like Java and Flash should be an immediate hint to you that you shouldn't be using them. The fact that they're proprietary means that we cannot benefit from the careful eye of other developers who can spot such flaws. Not only that but support for such software is limited only to what the company that produces it chooses to support, potentially leaving many visitors out. It is not safe to assume that everyone who visits your site can even run such plugins, due to said lack of support or due to lack of computing resources (not everyone in the world can afford a fast computer).

4) No advertising This is a touchy point but words will not be minced. Advertising is manipulative and obtrusive. Most people do not need to buy anything in particular at any given moment and they even less likely need to buy whatever is being advertised to them at that time. Further damning is that advertising is a common source of malicious content on the web, in the form of tracking cookies and cross-site scripting. Cramming advertising into your site in order to generate some kind of income is lazy at best. Some will argue that, since sites depend on advertising revenue to survive, then somehow blocking ads is immoral. It is simple: if your business model is simply to attach some "content" to advertising space, your business deserves to fail. Honestly, it will be no big loss to have such sites go out of business. The world does not need so many vapid link aggregating sites, press-release-rehashing review sites, or echo-chamber journalism sites. If you really must host advertisements, be respectful of your visitors. Host the ads on your own server; do not fetch them remotely. Do not use moving images, pop-ups, audio, video, "click-through" links, or anything else that serves to distract the visitor from what they actually came to your site to see.

5) No frames, multi-columns or other visual clutter If your main text is drowned out by the surrounding content, your site is broken. Trying to read an article when the text is crammed between navigation menus, advertisements, links to more articles, link-sharing widgets, blogrolls, and whatever other things you squeeze into your site to try to keep the visitors attention is an absolute pain. If your site were well-organized to begin with, none of these would be necessary. In fact, such layouts are absurd in that your site is competing with itself for the reader's attention! One single column of text is the most comfortable reading experience you can give your visitor. As for all that other junk, simply make your site well-organized enough for it to be easily discoverable without having to shove it in the visitor's face.

6) No non-standard fonts If your website absolutely depends on a particular font, it is broken. Fonts are subtle, in that most people probably do not pay much attention to which one is in use. That said, some people are absolute fanatics about fonts. Most web browsers allow the user to force the usage of their favorite one. Normally this is not a problem. However, increasingly websites are starting to use custom fonts with special glyphs that serve as icons on the site, presumably for bandwidth reasons (see Github project pages, for example). This completely subverts the user's right to select his or her own, preferred font. As in the above case of CSS, never presume that you have a better idea of what your visitor wants to see. If they do have a better idea, then you should not thwart their ability to implement it for themselves.

7) No tracking If your website leaks private information of your visitors to anyone, it is broken. This should go without question. You have no right to perform any behavioral metrics on your visitors. Their right to privacy should be paramount. Your revenue streams are irrelevant to them. Even more egregious is to allow third parties to do the tracking on your site and worse yet if it is done without any notification to the user. Nobody wants their every move tracked, be it in the web or in the real world. Respect your visitors' privacy and do not do any form of tracking. A word about cookies: unless you are providing a service that requires user log-in, you do not need to send them. Period.

8) No unnecessary pagination If your website cannot fit a normal-length article on one page, it is broken. Web browsers, unlike books, have this amazing ability to scroll. Unless you are presenting a genuinely long document, you should not need pagination (though, clearly for very long documents, some pagination is desirable to easily mark one's place). Nevertheless, these days many sites unnecessarily break relatively short articles into several pages. This is tightly coupled to advertising: the more pages the visitor has to visit to read the article, the more ads can be presented. With no advertising, as suggested above, this problem would disappear.

9) No abusive account requirements Many websites require accounts these days, for example to participate in some social aspect like a forum or comments, or to accommodate paying subscriber fees. This is fine. What is not fine is how much information is often required to subscribe. Under very few circumstances do you actually need the visitor's email address. Real names and mailing addresses are likely only necessary for online payment, which should be held quite separately from normal user information. In any case, if a login is required, take the absolute minimum of necessary information, ideally only a login name and a password.

10) No new annoyances The web is a swiftly changing thing and there is no way this paltry list can cover all the corner cases or future annoyances. Before you implement anything, know that we probably neither need it nor want it. Please spare us from having yet another thing to curse about. Remember, all we want to do is read what you have to say. Anything else is just in the way.

Also see:
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2015/02/rants-clever-malware.html

[SLASHDOT] Does God Exists? (SPOILER: No ;) )

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6579503&cid=48702993

It's not true that science can't prove that a god or gods exist - it's more that a god which can't be proven to exist is a god that does absolutely nothing (if it did anything then that would leave some evidence which could be userd to prove its existence) - and is therefore a god that may as well not exist, as is exactly the same as a god that doesn't exist.

A faith-only god is irrelevant - pointless.

Anyone who believes in a creator god that made us into rational beings and then demands that we ignore our rationality and use only faith to believe in it - because it refuses to provide evidence of itself - is a fuckwit.

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6579503&cid=48702989

Agnosticism alone is only about the contention that the existence of gods is unknowable and says nothing about the belief of the person.

The real categories IMNSHO:

* Gnostic Theist: I believe in god(s) existence and I know god(s) existence are knowable.

* Gnostic Atheist: God(s) non existence is demonstrable (and logically do not believe in gods existence)

* Agnostic Theist: I believe in god(s) existence but god(s) existence cannot ever be demonstrated, i.e. it is faith only, all the miracles and so forth is bullshit.

* Agnostic Atheist: God(s) is a construction of a human mind, but this cannot ever be demonstrated to the point of knowing that god(s) does not exists.

In the very end if you shrug and say I do not know, but live your life without any token prayer, then you are de facto agnostic atheist. There are a few agnostic theist I met, they are quite rare, the vast majority of self declared "agnostic" I met, are actually agnostic atheist, but unwilling to admit the atheist part to themselves.

[SLASHDOT] Firefox Sucks! (Slashdot Quotes)

Firefox is going down. Here are some Slashdot quotes:

Firefox Bloats Into Internet Explorer

Firefox To Mandate Extension Signing

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6958003&cid=49033805

Remember when Firefox was born as the stripped-down next-generation of the Mozilla Suite? When it was all about getting the code base to the bare minimum and letting the user decide which functions and features they wanted, and let them have those via extensions?

Yeah, me neither. Must have been a dream.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6958003&cid=49036383

Meh... Firefox has been on an increasingly-sharp decline to shittiness ever since version 3, which rapidly accelerated with 4 and the rapid-release bullshit schedule as well as all the changes for no good reason. Too bad no one ever forked the last good version (aka Firefox 2), and now we're all stuck with either Chrome or a Chrome rip-off, whether we want Chrome or not. I sure as hell do not, and therefore I am fucked. Hopefully the new browser by the guy who co-founded Opera actually turns out to be good, I always liked Opera... until they, too, shat all over their browser and made it yet another motherfucking Chrome wannabe (only going all-out in this case, literally basing it on Google's Chrome itself).

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6958003&cid=49038183

At this point I'm pretty much running an entire emulated version of old-sane firefox as extensions to current firefox. Lightweight!

Kickstarted Firefox OS HDMI Dongle Delayed, DRM Support Being Added

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6919181&cid=49002623

Mozilla is always playing catch-up these days.

Firefox? Well, Mozilla has spent the last few years doing everything they can to imitate Chrome. They've gone so far as to basically clone Chrome's UI. They're even trying to copy Chrome's process model, but Firefox's Electrolysis project is not going very well. They've been working on it for years, and even now it's still very buggy and broken.

Firefox for Android? Well, this is basically Mozilla's half-assed imitation of Chrome for Android. Pretty much nobody actually uses it.

Firefox for iOS? Trick question, it doesn't even exist! They have absolutely no presence on iOS today.

Firefox OS? Well, this is Mozilla's attempt to get into the mobile space, a good half-decade too late. Every review I've read of Firefox OS and the devices it runs on has been very, very negative. I mean, these are some of the most negative reviews I've ever read about any device, ever. We've seen Mozilla try to get poor third-worlders to adopt Firefox OS, but even they don't want anything to do with it, it's that bad!

Rust? Well, this is Mozilla's attempt to compete with Google's Go programming language. But while we've seen several stable releases from Go, and lots of useful software built using it, Rust is still spinning its wheels going nowhere fast. The 1.0 release will always be ready "within a few months". It's getting to the point where even Perl 6 is looking more likely to hit 1.0 than Rust is!

This useless device? Yet again, it's Mozilla trying to imitate what Google has successfully done, but again managing to do a very bad job at it.

Mozilla is a joke. Mozilla's projects are a joke. I've never seen an organization fail so badly, so many times over.

[SLASHDOT] Most Popular Passes

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6770841&cid=48859791

The Most Popular Passwords Are Still "123456" and "password"

Re:12345? (Score:2)

by Incadenza (560402) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @05:00PM (#48859791) 

I always use 666 as the lock on my luggage, just to be sure I won't get anything stolen by a christian fundamentalist.

Re:12345? (Score:2)

by marcello_dl (667940) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @06:34PM (#48860635) Homepage Journal

I'll flip it and open it with "999".

Your move, atheists.

[SLASHDOT] Precrime (LAPD Police Helicopters)

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7092863&cid=49251063

LAPD Police Claim Helicopters Stop Crimes Before They Happen

Let them also use police shooting ranges for free as long as they're in good standing.

Good standing? Let them use the ranges even if they are in poor standing. Provide proper training. The next turf war will decimate the gang member population, and reduce the number of stray bullets. Everyone wins!

[SLASHDOT] Praying at the Altar of Steve Jobs

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7080961&cid=49229515

Reactions to the New MacBook and Apple Watch

Re:Apple - the ultimate iHipster (Score:3)

by Kjella (173770) on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @07:26PM (#49229515) Homepage

Back in the day Apple was about bringing computers to the masses, and simplifying them to make them accessible. Selling a $10K watch just proves Apple only cares about profits now. Apple has become the ultimate iHipster.

What age was that? As far back as I can remember Macs were aiming for graphics artists, designers, sound artists, movie workstations, every kind of hip, creative industry. The "boring" segment bought PCs. There were nerdier and in many cases better audio players before the iPod, but the white earphones quickly became the telltale sign of a hipster. They've never ever released a cheap product trying to undercut others on price. They did have a runaway success with the iPhone but I think you're giving Jobs more credit than he deserves if you think breaking out of the "hipster" segment and becoming mainstream was part of the plan.

They launched a $599 phone in 2007 and after seeing it sell well beyond expectations they lowered it to $399 just a few months later realizing they could make up for it on volume and it boomed. I don't think that was planned at all, they just saw the opportunity and ran with it. Hell, they even got people so pissed by lowering the price so much they gave store credit so they could buy accessories that cost Apple almost nothing to produce, but I digress. And with the app store, they were sitting on a gold mine of more users -> more apps, more apps -> more users as well as the FairPlay near-monopoly. But they're still hipsters at heart, you can just look at their iMacs and the "trash can" Mac Pro.

If anything, I think this is an attempt to make a more exclusive Apple product again, because an iPhone just isn't very hip if your mom has one too. If they can't create a new "must-have" item that's cool I think they'll stagnate. Like I broke my iPhone and decided to give a cheap Android phone a spin, mainly because I'm missing an iPhone 6 Mini. It's not impressive in any way but it does most of what my old iPhone did at a much lower cost. They need to keep pushing new and better, because I don't think they can stay and compete on price. They need to justify a $500+ sticker price.

[SLASHDOT] Non Profit Industrial Complex Exploitation in Modern Society

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7108431&cid=49269971

A Mars One Finalist Speaks Out On the "Dangerously Flawed" Project

Re:It sounds fraudulent (Score:3)

by slew (2918) on Monday March 16, 2015 @04:22PM (#49269971) 

Also, who would have given these guys money?

People give money to groups all the time. Groups claim they want to solve poverty, cure diseases, help the children (or perhaps just little girls and not boys), eliminate racism, promote suffrage (well maybe one if you vote for the correct political party) things that they can never accomplish with the resources available to them (but they want to help the cause). People pony up because they feel connected to the cause, not because the groups can expect to achieve the goal.

These groups raise funds in order to pay staffers, hire consultants, give contracts to the their friends' companies for promotions, logistics and supplies (say like Interplanetary Media Group). If any money is left over, they sprinkle some of the spare change to the cause de-jure, and then call it a day. As long as it's considered a legal cause and is organized as a non-profit (or more recently, a type-B corporation), we have decided as a society that this is one way people are legally allowed to make a living redistributing income...

And even when their cause becomes passé (e.g., the March of Dimes was originally founded to combat infant polio), they will simply change the game and take on a larger more grandiose goal (e.g., combat birth defects)...

Move along, there's nothing to see here (unless you want to change these rules). Mars One is just one of many groups that exploit this niche in modern society ;^&

[SLASHDOT] Slashdot Regarding Zombies

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7040513&cid=49165381

Statistical Mechanics Finds Best Places To Hide During Zombie Apocalypse

Re:Zombies versus Predators (Score:5, Insightful)

by Kjella (173770) on Monday March 02, 2015 @01:34PM (#49165381) Homepage

In an actual zombie apocalypse I think my list of threats would be:

1. Opportunistic bastards (thugs, gangs)

2. Desperate bastards (hungry, cold, afraid)

3. Devious bastards (poisoned, stabbed in sleep)

4. Survival skills (and fighting for the good spots)

5. Zombies

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7040513&cid=49164551

Re:Best idea is not to hide. (Score:2)

by RivenAleem (1590553) on Monday March 02, 2015 @11:59AM (#49164551) 

If 95% of the entire world population was converted into zombies magically overnight, it would take the other 5% 20 days at 1 zombie a day to eradicate the horde. If any reasonable model of infection is consulted, a sizable enough portion of the worlds armies would remain uninfected to solve the issue in a matter of hours.

[SLASHDOT] American Justice System

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6667687&cid=48763271

http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/01/08/0234236/white-house-responds-to-petition-to-fire-aaron-swartzs-prosecutor

Re:As much as could be expected (Score:1)

by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08, 2015 @07:07AM (#48763271) 

The whole "plea deal" construct would fall apart if prosecutors were supposed to press reasonable charges. In that case, the defendant could just assert his Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial without being worse off.

The Department of "Justice" has been working hard on eviscerating the obstructive Civil Right amendments of the Constitution (not just the Sixth), and it would be a major setback if prosecutors were limited to reasonable charges.

It is important for the scheduling of legal, penitential, and career relevant resources that the outcome of a process can be planned ahead with sufficient reliability. The ability of a prosecutor to throw the book at people not willing to accept their scheduled charges is an important part of maintaining a reasonable throughput and dependable restocking of penitentiaries.

[SLASHDOT] Is Feng Shui Deadly?

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6750551&cid=48840371

Silicon Valley Security Experts Give 'Blackhat' a Thumbs-Up; Do You?

Hell Yes (Score:4, Funny)

by SuperKendall (25149) on Saturday January 17, 2015 @04:07PM (#48840371) 

Is Feng Shui deadly?

If you angle a mirror wrong it will FUCK UP someone walking into the space.

Not to mention that just one of the precepts of Feng Shui is that you not sit with your back to any openings in a room. They say it's for "good energy" but really it's so you can gun down every motherfucker that comes for you before they even see your face.

[Poem] Late Night, Year's End, Doing the Books with Du Fu

Late Night, Year's End,
Doing the Books with Du Fu

Ghost fires in the jade palace. Moonlight
a scattering of opals on the river. Over us
beasts of the zodiac march across the night.
We drink cup after cup of warm rice wine.
It's time to take out the ledger, to figure
the year's accounts. Du Fu, if our days
and nights are the principal, if all the years
are interest, then how much do we owe?
If I subtract my grief from joy, what is left?
Tell me, old friend, how does it balance?
In one of your last poems you talk about
the stars outside your hut, how impossible
to count them. There are no numbers,
you say, for this life. Who cares if we're
in the red? Or the black? Add a few zeros,
and we're rich. Erase a few, and we're poor.
You're right, Du Fu. Rich or poor, the night
each night burgeons within us. The mornings
open with sunlight, Why count them?
Instead of numbers, let me enter words
into the ledger, this account of our friendship,
this little poem from me to you, across
the glimmering, innumerable years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_Fu

[SLASHDOT] Resident Right Wing Authoritarian & Statist Cold Fjord

Just like Stephen Colbert, minus the satire.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/01/01/1359225/vast-nazi-facility-uncovered-in-austria-purported-a-bomb-development-site

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6593999&cid=48712243

Some comfort (Score:2, Interesting)

by cold fjord (826450) on Thursday January 01, 2015 @02:17PM (#48712243) 

Even though we have this distrubing news of a missed WMD program in Austria that lay hidden for 70 years under occupation and democratic governments, we still have the assurance of "top men" that we known all and found everything in Iraq. Yes indeed, ... "top men" .... some even post here.

[SLASHDOT] Sheep.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/01/15/232212/parents-investigated-for-neglect-for-letting-kids-walk-home-alone

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6736681&cid=48829205

Parents Investigated For Neglect For Letting Kids Walk Home Alone

Re:The Dangers of the World (Score:5, Insightful)

by idontgno (624372) on Friday January 16, 2015 @10:39AM (#48829205) Journal

If the local police feel that the world is such a dangerous place, perhaps they would be better employed fixing that, rather than interfering with young kids going out to play.

It's easier to corral the sheep than face the wolves. Even if some of the sheep don't want to cooperate. That's why you castrate them.

Maybe it's not so baaaad.

[SLASHDOT] Ouch...

ISIS Threatens Life of Twitter Founder After Thousands of Account Suspensions

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7036491&cid=49162053


I'd point out that you are almost certainly a chicken-hawk too, but that would be an insult to poultry.

[SLASHDOT] Dynamite Sound!: Audiophiles - Vinyl War

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/15/01/02/1850253/vinyls-revival-is-now-a-phenomenon-on-both-sides-of-the-atlantic
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6598491&cid=48719809

[SLASHDOT] Democracy and Surveillance Do Not Mix Well

NSA Spying Wins Another Rubber Stamp

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7030481&cid=49154127

Actually, spying on citizenry is really the effect of democratic rule if you think about it.

Any body with political power will naturally try to preserve its power, just like anything likes to hold onto what it has. Thus it will do everything possible to insure that it continues in power. Anything that is a danger to the exercise of its power must be observed, controlled or eliminated or else one loses political power.

In a monarchy, the threats to power are usually other possible candidates to the throne, or, more commonly, foreign powers. Thus a monarch will do everything possible to eliminate possible usurpers or foreign aggression. Examples of history are the War of Roses, or most of medieval Europe.

In a democracy however, the power devolves from the people, and so those in power need to know what the people are planning to do, especially on how they plan to vote, because this is the only real threat to their power. The power devolves more from public opinion, and so public opinion has to be known, observed and eventually controlled in order to stay in power. Since political power resides in the voting populace, there is a general tendency in any democracy to try to control the opinion of the populace, or at least to know the dangers to which their power is endangered. The phenomenon of gerrymandering is nothing else than political power trying to insure its continuance.

In a monarchy the people are naturally subject to the monarch, and the enemies are usually foreigners. Thus in a monarchy there is not much need of a general program of spying on citizenry. In a democracy however the people elect their ruler, and so a democratic ruler, if he wants to continue to rule, generally treats the citizens themselves as a threat to his power. Thus he must spy on them, know that they are doing, just like any political power spies on its enemies.

Even Aristotle said that a democracy naturally degenerates into despotism. The United States is simply repeating the past, though one must say in a much faster tempo than its predecessors.

[SLASHDOT] Internet Standard Operating Procedures: YouTube & SlashDot

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6772001&cid=48862427

by russotto (537200) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @11:03PM (#48862427) Journal

YouTube: Never read the comments.

Slashdot: Never read the article.

So it is written, so it shall be.