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ALSO SEE:
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.de/2015/06/slashdotquoteadblock-plus-vs-adblock-vs.html
RE "AdBlock Plus"
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2014/12/pro-tip-microblock-adblock-like-chrome.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2013/03/pro-tip-firefox-adblock-without.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2013/02/pro-tip-block-ads-like-pro-checklist.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2012/11/pro-tip-rogue-browser-extensions.html
RE uBlock
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2015/06/rantprotip-ublock-origin-vs-ublock.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2015/06/noted-ublock-config.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2015/04/protip-what-happed-to-ublock-aka.html
Source:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7570271&cid=49940893
Re:This is about "Adblock Plus" not "AdBlock" (Score:2)
by xenoc_1 (140817) on Thursday June 18, 2015 @07:38PM (#49940893)
And I say unto thee, "RTFP". I explicitly noted that with this: "has that feature turned on by default, so most non-techies see ads from Eyeo customers."
Wherein I made clear that most non-technical users, which are not most of us Slashdot members, will leave it as-is. Implied, and from years of experience with non-technical users, because non-techies don't know/don't understand how/are afraid, to change anything from "normal".
Which means that Eyeo, Inc. continues to create a big user base of "pay for play" payola opportunities to sell to Google, Amazon, and other ad networks. And indeed they do sell the right to be listed as "Acceptable Ads" - it's right on their website, buried in weasel-words but there, and it's been in plenty of news articles about them. You do the DuckBingGoogle if you want cites of sites. Yes, the small guys, like my blog or yours, can probably get listed as "Acceptable" for free, and Eyeo will have a big public discussion on each and every one of those on their site, because, "transparency". But the details of the huge moneyflows from Google et al will not be there.
Here's the thing: Ad blockers are not default in any browser nor as part of any operating system. Which means that anyone who installs an ad blocker has already made an affirmative choice to block ads. That means it's contrary to common sense and clearly against the desire of the user, for any "ad blocker" to have a default setting that deliberately allows ads - ANY ads.
Unless, of course, the "user" AKA "the customer" is NOT the person who installs the adblocker. Unless that person is the product. And for Eyeo, the person using Adblock Plus is no longer the user/customer, they are the "product" - the eyeballs being sold to their real customer, the companies that pay Eyeo to be part of the "Acceptable Ads" program.
It's not "you can just turn it off". It's how the very concept of a partially non-blocking adblocker, and a very non-transparent financial arrangement between Eeyo and "BigAdNetworks", is inherently contrary to the baseline concept and user case for an adblocker.
Obviously I didn't need somebody to lecture me about the existing of Adblock Edge, or the ABP checkbox, or the other various adblocking options, when I put references to such things right in my post.
And for the record, in the years of using Adblock Edge, its brief predecessor Adblock Light, the pre-Acceptable Ads Adblock Plus, and since this month, uBlock and now after reflection on their ethics, uBlock Origin instead, I have and continue to un-block many sites, specific third-party networks, major affiliate-link trackers such as Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, Shareasale, Linkshare, etc., so that small webmasters and some large websites who aren't eyebleed-inducing, can get some potential monetization from my use. I even sometimes go back to look for and click through an ad of specific interest, or via a site's affiliate link, to a product/service I'm considering buying. I also run a few affiliate link ads on some of my own sites - and make sure I do nothing to force people to unblock them. In fact, I suggest adblockers and privacy blockers right in the privacy policy on my sites.
Difference between that and the skeevy policies of Adblock Plus/Eyeo: Transparency and full choice. Choice on my part as to ads I want to see, choice on visitors to my sites on how they can not see ads and not get into my analytics. No pay-for-play, no whitelisting decisions made for somebody else.
Anybody who can't see the difference is either a) brainwashed, b) a sockpuppet for the ad industry, c) a sockpuppet for Eyeo/Adblock Plus (which really is part of the ad industry at this point), or d) naïve.
Ghostery, Inc is totally open and fully upfront about their connection to the advertising industry. And their not-quite-equivalent feature is OPT-IN, rather than OPT-OUT.
AdBlock (Chrome) as far as I know was never really Open Source - it was one-time-nag (install-time) donationware but not with a "libre" license. I may misremember that. They have an OPT-IN for "I like that text ads on Google search, let me see them" and I always opt-IN. Because, it's MY proactive affirmative choice. Just like Ghostery's OPT-IN to GhostRank, which I ignore and it defaults to the most-private setting.
Ghostery does not block anything by default, but they are clear about it, and the whole idea is to choose what to block.
There's nothing unethical about what either Ghostery or AdBlock are doing. There is plenty unethical and contrary-to-concept of what Eyeo/Adblock Plus is doing. And there's possible something sketchy about what uBlock is doing, which is why I have switched to the original creator's uBlock Origin.
Source:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7570271&cid=49938465
ALSO SEE:
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.de/2015/06/slashdotquotes-adblock-plus-successful.html
RE "AdBlock Plus"
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2014/12/pro-tip-microblock-adblock-like-chrome.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2013/03/pro-tip-firefox-adblock-without.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2013/02/pro-tip-block-ads-like-pro-checklist.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2012/11/pro-tip-rogue-browser-extensions.html
RE uBlock
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2015/06/rantprotip-ublock-origin-vs-ublock.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2015/06/noted-ublock-config.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2015/04/protip-what-happed-to-ublock-aka.html
This is about "Adblock Plus" not "AdBlock" (Score:5, Informative)
by xenoc_1 (140817) on Thursday June 18, 2015 @02:32PM (#49938465)
Seriously folks, pay some attention to the name of the product and what it means. It's stuff that matters.
"AdBlock": A Chrome, and later other platform, ad blocking extension that has nothing whatsoever to do with "Adblock Plus" either in terms of codebase or project history.
"Adblock Plus" (note no MixedCase): The increasingly-monetizing adblocker which is owned and marketed by for-profit company Eyeo, that Wladimir Palant created to make money with the open source adblocker he took over as maintainer years ago, but did not create. The one that takes money from advertisers to whitelist so-called "Acceptable Ads" and has that feature turned on by default, so most non-techies see ads from Eyeo customers.
"adblock": Not a product at all but a generic term for an advertising, and sometimes also privacy, blocking extension for browsers. There are many competing products which might be generically called "adblock".
"adblocker" A more obviously generic term for the set of "adblocker" products that include, among many others, AdBlock, Adblock Plus, Adblock Edge, Bluhell Firewall, uBlock, uBlock Origin.
"Adblock" One of, if not the, earliest adblocking extensions for Firefox. Long obsolete, it was the inspiration for, and partially the codebase for the first version, of Adblock Plus. The maintainer of AdBlock (note the MixedCase) also claims Adblock is an inspiration for AdBlock but is no part of its codebase.
The article is about only Adblock Plusâ from Eyeo Inc. Which has the most commercialized, most cooperative with advertisers, and some including me would say, most skeevy business model of any of the major adblocker. Though the drama around the creator of uBlock forking it to "uBlock Origin" and the massively overlarge donation-begging by the new uBlock owners are some evidence that new-uBlock is pretty skeevy too. Which is why this tablet has uBlock Origin running in Firefox.
Except For Millennials, Most Americans Dislike Snowden
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7301445&cid=49535567
Re:Doublethink (Score:5, Insightful)
by IamTheRealMike (537420) <mike@plan99.net> on Thursday April 23, 2015 @08:31AM (#49535567) Homepage
I think it's more likely to be because people under 35 are the first generation that have no memory of the cold war. People born before about 1980 lived in a world where there was a very strong, clear delineation between us vs them and that divide was seen as an existential struggle between good and evil. Merely by being born into a certain country, you too could take part in an epic ideological struggle between right and wrong. It is perhaps not surprising that people who lived most of their life in such a world instinctively support a strong, authoritarian state and react badly to a "traitor who gave our national security secrets to the Russians" or whatever garbled version of the story they received via Fox News. There's definitely a clear and strong tendency in older populations to support our side regardless of what that side actually does, and things that seem to bring back old certainties strongly appeal to them. Hence the desperate need of the establishment to make "the terrorists" to new Big Evil.
Contrast to people under the age of 35 who don't remember the cold war and have never lived in a world where there were clearly defined conflicts between us/them or good/evil. Instead there has been a series of endless wars started by us against dramatically weaker foes, based on vague and uncompelling justifications, the results of which have mostly been bedlam. Older people love this because it's an attempt to bring back the old certainties they remember. It leaves young people cold because they don't care about the old certainties, as they never had them to begin with.
Combine all this with the fact that the average software developer is 30 years old [stackoverflow.com] and the average age of Congress is 57 [slate.com] ... nearly double their age .... you have set the stage for an epic showdown between the technology industry and the political establishment. Which is exactly what's happening.
Scientists Discover Meaning of Life Through Massive Computing Project
Archived Discussion
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7188281&cid=49388773
Re:Bit late aren't you ? (Score:2)
by phantomfive (622387) on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @06:33PM (#49388773) Journal
I suggest you take a break, have some coffee, come back after several hours when the insanity has passed. There's a restaurant you can wait at, Moe's, lousy food but great view.
Previously:
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.nl/2015/03/slashdot-firefox-sucks-slashdot-quotes.html
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/05/22/1318215/ads-based-on-browsing-history-are-coming-to-all-firefox-users
Firefox 37 Released
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7182329&cid=49380931
Why doesn't Moz acknowledge the market share issue (Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @03:54PM (#49380931)
As a Firefox user, I'm very concerned when I see its market share dropping month after month.
These stats from US gov't websites [usa.gov] show Firefox's market share at 11%.
Other global stats [caniuse.com] paint a very similar picture.
Globally, I suspect that Firefox's share of the market is only about 10%. That's pretty abysmal, especially for a browser that was so popular once. It used to hold well over 30% of the market at one time.
Chrome for Android alone now has a greater share of the market than Firefox on all platforms does. Even IE 11, by itself, has about as many users as Firefox does in total.
Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?
Don't they realize that Firefox is the only reason they have any sort of influence over the web? Nobody really cares about any of their other projects, I hate to say.
Why don't we hear more from Mozilla about this market share issue? The number of Firefox users keeps dropping month after month, probably because so many Firefox users are unhappy about the awful UI changes, and about how its memory usage and performance continues to lag Chrome and even IE. I want to see real results, not just unrealistic benchmarks showing mythical improvements that I don't actually get to experience as I browse the web!
Nobody will care what Mozilla thinks if the number of Firefox users continues to drop each month. This trend won't continue forever. At some point there will be a negligible number of Firefox users around, and Mozilla will be powerless at that point. Google already has enough power as it is. In that situation, they'd have almost full control over the web. That scares me a lot, and it should scare Mozilla, too!
==
Re:Why doesn't Moz acknowledge the market share is (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @05:42PM (#49381779)
As a Firefox user, I'm very concerned when I see its market share dropping month after month.
These stats from US gov't websites [usa.gov] show Firefox's market share at 11%.
Other global stats [caniuse.com] paint a very similar picture.
Globally, I suspect that Firefox's share of the market is only about 10%. That's pretty abysmal, especially for a browser that was so popular once. It used to hold well over 30% of the market at one time.
Chrome for Android alone now has a greater share of the market than Firefox on all platforms does. Even IE 11, by itself, has about as many users as Firefox does in total.
Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?
Because the Firefox devs think their browser should pander to the tablet-interface loving users, with advanced features hidden and the GUI dumbed down - while a large part of their user base specifically wants an "advanced" browser with lots of addons which does NOT look like Chrome. So lots of users are leaving, and the Firefox devs in their ivory tower wonder why nobody likes their "vision" of the perfect browser and why the users do not "get" that the devs KNOW what's best.
==
Re:Why doesn't Moz acknowledge the market share is (Score:5, Insightful)
by nmb3000 (741169) <nmb3000@that-google-mail-site.com> on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @06:51PM (#49382237) Homepage Journal
Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?
I think they probably do. At least, that's the reason I've always felt explained the Chromification of Firefox. That dumbing-down and relative takeover of the project direction by "UX designers" and "social media engineers" was allowed because the powers at the top felt that it was the only way they could try and recover some of the userbase lost to Chrome.
What they don't realize is that Firefox was created to "take back the web" [mozilla.cz] from the stagnating Internet Explorer 6. It was never about replacing IE as some overbearing dominant beast.
And Firefox succeeded! Development on IE was revitalized by Microsoft, Google released Chrome, and work was renewed on web standards (a whole 'nuther can of worms there, but a separate topic). How did Firefox accomplish this? By being fast, lean, developer-friendly, power-user friendly, absurdly extensible, and with simple and clear design goals.
If Mozilla had simply stuck to these principles, Firefox user share would still have gone down -- it was a certainty due to the additional options for reasonable browsers, mobile usage, Google bundling Chrome with everything they can get their hands on, etc. However, I think it would have gone down less, and maybe even a lot less if they'd remained the browser they were rather than turning into the little puppy following Chrome around.
People who left Firefox for Chrome because they liked Chrome's design better would still have left. But with ChromiFox, people who don't like Chrome are leaving too, because if you're stuck with either Chrome or Chrome Light, you may as well go for the real deal. Sure, there are projects like Ice Weasel and LucidFox which attempt to bring some of that back, but they're relatively niche and don't have the visibility or word-of-mouth needed to take off.
In short: Mozilla abandoned their primary design goals and principles, the same ones that made Firefox great, and the result is user loss, stagnation and, probably, eventual obscurity. As someone who used Firebird, this make me very sad.
==
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7182329&cid=49382613
Re:Why doesn't Moz acknowledge the market share is (Score:5, Funny)
by amicusNYCL (1538833) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @07:46PM (#49382613)
You might be right, Firefox does seem to be experiencing a certain level of feature creep and bloat these days. Perhaps Mozilla should think about a new browser, one that is specifically designed to be fast and high-performance, while still adhering to the standards. They could call it Phoenix.
==
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7182329&cid=49381047
Too late (Score:3, Informative)
by ArchieBunker (132337) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @04:12PM (#49381047) Homepage
I dumped Firefox when they changed to the hipster bullshit minimalist interface known as Australis. For a while Waterfox and Palemoon were doing a decent job. One day I decided to try Chrome to see how 60fps video looked on Youtube. Talk about night and day. Chrome is so much more responsive and doesn't use as many resources. Grab the usual essential addons (uBlock, Flashblock, etc) and you're good to go. No wonder Firefox has a dwindling user base. Instead of improving whats already there I get a video chat client and a paper airplane button to alert people on social media? Is this like email forwarding of the 90s?
Microsoft Announces Windows Holographic Platform
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7344977&cid=49586615
Re:Capitalism is doomed (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30, 2015 @12:08PM (#49586615)
It's useless to argue. Most americans have been brainwashed by trashy TV shows since they were kids. Even cartoons (e.g., Superman, Batman) carried anti-communist messages, at least in the past.
If you told them that the richest country in the western world is basically a government-driven economy (I'm talking about Norway, where the State controls the 5 biggest companies and 50% of the GDP through the government budget), they just wouldn't believe it and would start singing the US anthem like idiot monkeys. In the meantime, Norway's citizens enjoy standards of life, salaries and healthcare that most americans can only dream of.
Let them get obese, alcoholic, and watch the katrashians on TV. That's what they deserve.
Tattoos Found To Interfere With Apple Watch Sensors
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7344831&cid=49585431
the $10,000 version has MORE problems. (Score:5, Funny)
by nimbius (983462) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @10:30AM (#49585431) Homepage
Im sure fellow readers are concerned about the $10,000 version of the apple watch, and as an early adopter I am truly livid. If the watch comes into contact with my tattoo of the spirit of extacy riding a diamond into tattooine astride a golden dove the sensors stop working entirely. The watch is also difficult to locate as im sure most people have undoubtedly found out. I had to search all five bedrooms on the yacht just to find the darn thing! Also the watch has difficulty determining if or when I am wearing the rare jade oriental pendant of everlasting immortality, and just last weekend I had to buy a new one after I bumped into the caviar chafing dish and spilled lemon rochette truffle remoulade on the band.
Its not that apple doesnt make an excellent product, they truly do! But I for one am getting tired of having to take the same bently to the same helicopter every other week to send my manservant into the apple "store" as the common people call it to have it replaced. A man can only tolerate so much car champagne before the aftertaste of the lox comingling with the alsace vintage becomes too much to bear.
What Happens To Our Musical Taste As We Age?
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7417081&cid=49692575
give up implies it has potential. (Score:5, Interesting)
by nimbius (983462) on Thursday May 14, 2015 @04:06PM (#49692575) Homepage
Pop music is 'given up' because it targets a demographic of youth as a branding and marketing driver. Bieber sells the idea of manufactured sex appeal to young women, while angsty pop rock sells the idea of rebellion and individuality through consumption to boys. LMFAO and Pitbull are just clever branded advertising for premium alcoholic spirits and luxury apparel/vehicles. They set a standard outside of childhood that no self-respecting adult would entertain.
Thirty somethings are a very difficult democraphic to market anything to. Pop themes like true love, freedom, rebellion, and partying fall on the deaf ears of millenials who've seen systemic police corruption and racism as a tool of an increasingly totalitarian state basically wipe the concepts out. Miley Cyrus' magical transformation into some glam rocker didnt shock us because we didnt grow up caring about the moral majority and conservative culture war dogma.
Also see:
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2012/05/quotes-on-american-wars.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2012/11/quote-democrats-vs-republicans.html
http://insurgencymod.blogspot.com/2014/07/quote-govermorations-repubmocrats.html
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7433199&cid=49726947
The Demographic Future of America's Political Parties
Re:One Assumption (Score:4, Interesting)
by eheldreth (751767) on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @12:25PM (#49726947) Homepage
You've made a basic error in your argument.
Your are confusing social liberals with social progressives. Specifically right leaning social progressives. One can be fiscally conservative (believing that we should limit and control increases in spending) but socially liberal (believing that we should not limit individual liberty beyond the limits of absolute necessity).
As one example moderate libertarians who don't go in for some of the more inane free market worship fit this bill. Remember left leaning indicates a dislike of governmental structure with the ultimate extreme being Anarchy while Right leaning indicates a desire for more, stronger government with the ultimate extreme being authoritarianism.
Traditionally the term conservative only implies that one is opposed to change, or more often sudden and untested change while the term progressive indicates one wishes to encourage change in the pursuit of what they deem progress.
In this day and age Republicans are in fact just as progressive as Democrats they simply have different ideas of what progress is.
Dems are right wing social and moral progressives while Repubs are right wing religious and corporatist progressives. There are very few true conservatives in our government these days and perhaps fewer true liberals.
Redefining these terms is one of the ways the two parties maintain control of there base. It allows them control the narrative with artificial divisions intended to alienate voters who may be allied on many other issues from each other.
I suppose if any two ideologies are opposed to each other it's social liberalism and right wing social progressiveness. After all how can you believe in limited government interference in private affairs but also believe you have the right to force others to behave in a fashion consistent with your own moral beliefs. Let each live in accordance with there own conscience in so far as their actions do not unfairly infringe on the basic rights of others.
==
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7422789&cid=49703911
Re:hardly surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
by rwa2 (4391) * on Saturday May 16, 2015 @01:45AM (#49703911) Homepage Journal
The link is that the conservatives blame everything bad that happens on liberal ideology when there's a Democrat in the White House, and the liberals blame everything on the conservative ideology when a Republican is in the White House, irregardless of what the rest of the government is actually doing.
Conservatives are stereotypically the party that wants to take the direct approach to solving problems, and prefer to spend tax money on helping winners: military, business, churches, prisons, etc.
Liberals are stereotypically the party that wants progressive solutions to problems, and prefer to spend tax money on helping losers: through education, labor unions, health care, environmentalism, community centers, etc.
So they both want essentially the same things... peace, prosperity, they just go about it different ways. Liberals would like to eliminate poverty by helping poor people become less poor; conservatives would prefer to eliminate poverty by eliminating poor people.
Because of things like this, conservatives view liberals as weak, and liberals view conservatives as afraid. And they like to point that out whenever they can.
==
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7482575&cid=49802071
Professional Internet Troll Sues Her Former Employer
Re:Professional trolls (Score:4, Informative)
by swillden (191260) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Friday May 29, 2015 @05:35PM (#49802071) Homepage Journal
This is wrong. As is the use of the word "troll" in the summary/article. Trolls and shills are distinct, and the difference isn't whether they get paid. You can be a paid or unpaid troll and a paid or unpaid shill.
Trolls post messages written specifically to generate responses. The term derives from fishing where trolling means to drag something through the water to catch fish. Internet trolls post baiting comments trying to get people to respond to them. Flamebaiting is a subset of trolling, where the aim is to generate angry responses.
Shills post messages to talk up some product, service, etc., trying to make it look good and its competition look bad.
Both categories also assume that the writer likely doesn't fully agree with what he or she is writing. If two people write the same words but one believes them while the other doesn't, the former is not a troll or shill, but the latter may be.
Note that paid trolls are pretty common on the Internet, but they tend to write the articles (or, on /., the summaries) not the comments. "Clickbaiting" is almost the same as trolling in this respect, except that a clickbait article is to collect clicks, while a troll article is intended to generate comments.
Ask Slashdot: Who's Going To Win the Malware Arms Race?
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7176423&cid=49378135
the obvious winner should be apparent. (Score:4, Funny)
by nimbius (983462) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @07:43AM (#49378135) Homepage
Whos going to win the arms race? easy. Maalwarkstrodon. Its a mythical beast that speaks in pornographic subplots and maintains direct communication with your girlfriends every wants and desires so as better to inform you on how to best please her. It has the feet of bonzi buddy, the torso of that man who uses 1 weird trick to perfect his abs, and the arms of the scientists that hate her. Most impressively, Maalwarkstrodon has a skull made from a Viagra, Levitra, Cialis, and Propecia alloy. This beast of malware belches sexy singles from former east-bloc soviet satellite states and is cloaked in the finest fashions from paris and milan, imported directly from Fujian china.
Maalwarkstrodon is incapable of offering any less than the best deals at 80% to 90% off, and will not rest until your 2 million dollar per month work-at-home career comes to fruition and the spoils of all true nigerian royalty are delivered unto those most deserving of a kings riches.
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.
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7188765&cid=49388983
Re:You "intern" for...? (Score:5, Funny)
by TWX (665546) on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @07:41PM (#49388983)
The employer probably wouldn't appreciate the police finding the cocaine hidden in the door panels, seats, rocker panels, tires, fuel tank, crankcase, valley tray, transmission pan, fender liners, dashboard, subwoofer box, air cleaner housing, and coolant overflow bottle.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 ;^&
