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Comment: Sounds like a similar story. (Score 1) 57

by nimbius (#48668311) Attached to: The History of the NORAD/Microsoft and Google Santa Trackers
in the sixties AT&T used to maintain a central communications hub with redphones in the event of orders for a nuclear launch. the phones would all ring, operators would then pick up the phones and wait for the base or military installation they were told and route the call accordingly. The number was mistakenly dialed once by a talk radio show in chicago looking to prank call a celebrity. the jocks were pretty shocked when all 15 redphone stations responded waiting for connection orders from the president.

Comment: perhaps a better title (Score 0) 439

by nimbius (#48654449) Attached to: How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans To Live 120 Years
bloomberg magazine reports that rich people are still crazier than a shit-house rat. This guys hopeful pledge is fundamentally pointless on a number of levels.
HGH: enjoy an increased risk of diabetes and Hodgkins lymphoma. HGH, or human growth hormone, is basically a recreational steroid for the well-to-do. its effectiveness in extending life has never even been correlated, let alone proven. At worst, its an example of just how broken the american medical system is.
Paleo: all meats in america are processed to some level, and red meat has been directly correlated with an increased risk of prostate and colon cancer. various additives like nitrites and processing methods such as using carbon monoxide to improve meat color, actually involve carcinogens or cancer suspect agents in their execution. Factory farming and the prolific use of sterroids and hormones in all american meat have virtually guaranteed an increased risk of cancer. enjoy significantly elevated levels of cholesterol, and supporting a fundamentally unsustainable concept of factory farming that contributes to everything from climate change to aggressively resistant bacteria and viruses.
Cure for cancer: yes. yes you will need this if you seriously think gobbling hormones and sterroids will prolong your life to 120. But if you think its coming in 10 years, you're out of your mind. Cancer is still a gruelling disease that we hardly understand. We have to throw some of our most advanced, and destructive, medical treatments at it just to ensure remission and even thats not guaranteed.

where this nut job really fies off the rails is the soverign nation at sea for 'like minded' individuals who also happen to be coincidentally filthy fucking rich and totally disinterested in normal society to the point that gated communities no longer cut it. Have fun defending it from cruise missiles and guided tactical nuclear arms once one of these 'like minded' people pisses off a foreign nation.

Comment: the things americans got to keep (Score 5, Insightful) 276

by nimbius (#48653215) Attached to: TSA Has Record-Breaking Haul In 2014: Guns, Cannons, and Swords
fear: Americans were once again this year permitted to take their uncodifiable fear of terrorism along each and every flight.
compliance:unquestioned, lock step obedience to a national travel policy thats done nothing to reduce or eliminate terrorism, as domestic events like the Aurora and giffords shooting have simply been redefined as tragedies. Anders Brevik's christian crusade of bloodshed was not stopped by the inability to bring nail clippers onto a plane.
poverty: americans got to take their looming debt, foreclosures, and reposessions along for the ride while dutifully shuffling sixty billion dollars to the department of homeland security, an agency that failed to stop terrorism like the benghazi bombing, or the boston marathon bombing, at all.

Comment: why should we even do anything? (Score 2) 153

by nimbius (#48647623) Attached to: US Seeks China's Help Against North Korean Cyberattacks
Seriously. Sony pictures is a subsidiary of a Japanese company, shouldnt the japanese government do something? North Korea has patently denied having a hand in the hacks or the threats against theatres, so shouldnt we work with them as theyre the victim here? This is a seriously disproportionate level of concern for whats basically been a pretty positive release. We found out studios are maliciously litigating google by bribing attorney generals, so who knows what other nefarious things theyre doing. Or is this all just ideological posturing on the part of an american government thats struggling to do something, anything, to prove its international policy is still relevant or meaningful.

Comment: it wasnt exactly unexpected. (Score 1) 555

by nimbius (#48631627) Attached to: FBI Confirms Open Investigation Into Gamergate
wanton threats of rape and violence en masse are commonly concluded with investigation by law enforcement in the United States. a 'gate' assignment has been made to ensure commercial viability of the brand. no further concern for gender or sex should be considered applicant to this scandal as its now tabloid fodder to be adhered to with the most cursory of interest. please continue consuming slashdot beta and the slashdot store.

Comment: Other films cancelled. (Score 5, Funny) 230

by nimbius (#48629211) Attached to: "Team America" Gets Post-Hack Yanking At Alamo Drafthouse, Too
mrs doubtfire: showing cancelled due to creaking theater entrance that sounded like a terrorist attack (even though keith said he closed it quietly)
saving private ryan: cancelled immediately after theater realized the entire film involved the concept of war, which was like terror but with more rock music
Batman: dark knight rises cancelled, banes coat reminded an elderly woman of an episode of mash. Dark knight cancelled by studio confused and frightened about 'unstoppable forces' and 'immoveable objects.' Batman & Robin cancelled by studio executive who simply found the nipples and codpieces too uncomfortable.
hot tub time machine: violates numerous causality laws and in the spirit of preserving much of our modern understanding of thermodynamics, has been cancelled by a studio that mistook the word 'causality' for 'terrorist'

Comment: what an embrace means. (Score 3, Insightful) 217

by nimbius (#48620125) Attached to: What Will Microsoft's "Embrace" of Open Source Actually Achieve?

Back in the day, Microsoft viewed open source and Linux as a threat and did its best to retaliate with FUD and patent threats.

then in 2013 Microsoft suffered a loss of more than US$32 billion and in 2014 it fired, er "layed off" almost 20,000 employees. faced with life support options of XBox earnings and corporate licenses, it excreted another phone no one wanted and held its breath. then it lost another 300 million on its nook investment and 676 million on the surface tablet in 2014. Then it remembered how well litigation as a business model worked for SCO.
microsoft is embracing Open Source in much the same way you embrace that creepy uncle that touched you as a kid during thanksgiving. Its a truce, because a patent war against amorphous things like windowing, clicking, or startup noises would haul big guns like apple and google into court, not just samsung and tomtom, and they would face the very real possibility of losing unchallenged but indefensible patents so its best to keep that paper tiger in the desk drawer. Their best bet is to hope people think Microsoft non OSI "open source" licenses can make some headway, and that people stop talking about BSD and GPL. Gobbling up more video games would do it well, but the innovation ship has sailed at redmond and there arent many options left for real growth. Watch for it to become a clearing house of small game studios and dessicated open source projects long since forked by dedicated dev groups that have very sour memories of Redmond. Microsoft knows it can expect businesses to pony up protection money but once Google or Ubuntu unveil an office desktop killer, thats the end of the show.

Comment: these goddamn kids on my lawn. (Score 0) 55

by nimbius (#48619825) Attached to: The Joys and Hype of Hadoop
Joys and Hype of Hadoop and Hortonworks and cloudera MapR...I'll say it one last time: I dont know what a pokaman is and i dont give a shit. this is slashdot for crying out loud and back in my day we played nethack on the VAX-785! and the only damn color we had was GREEN or ORANGE if you were in the upstairs lab! AND WE LIKED IT THAT WAY.

Comment: a riveting diplomatic exchange no doubt.. (Score 4, Funny) 435

by nimbius (#48618923) Attached to: In Breakthrough, US and Cuba To Resume Diplomatic Relations
US Government: hey cuba, since most of our refugees over 60 that remember why we shitlisted you are either dead or accidentally disenfranchised after the latest voter registration law, wanna kiss and make up?
Cuban Government: *sigh* sure. russia quit returning our phonecalls about 20 years ago anyway. Hey thanks for not making a huge deal out of castros death
US Government: yeah no problem. thanks for letting us run a torture prison in your country without complaining about it
Cuban Government: yeah.....that.....

Comment: lets get right to the point. (Score -1, Troll) 116

by nimbius (#48618815) Attached to: New Cargo Ship Is 488 Meters Long
as an american i dont give a damn about feet and meters are for terrorism. how many bubba keg plastic insulated drink cups or animatronic plastic singing fish will this thing hold. Hell, forget those two. if you tell me how many rubber pick up truck testicle ornaments this ship holds i wont have to convert to how many sham-wows.

Comment: what is this crap (Score 5, Funny) 208

by nimbius (#48617019) Attached to: New AP Course, "Computer Science Principles," Aims To Make CS More Accessible
society 40 years ago: learn a trade. computers are for nerds and bean counters.
society today: jesus christ everyone, from day laborers to housepets, must learn to write code.
The problem isnt that CS isnt accessible, its that its fucking hard. its why everyone isnt a mechanical engineer, or a physicist. and the demands arent exactly clear. Do you want C coders who churn out low level device drivers? or do you want devops hackers that write auto-reply python scripts for email farms and stand up python salt pillars? its two rather different skillsets. Or shall we get right to the point: profiteers are sick to death of paying a disproportionately living wage to a set of highly skilled workers.

and it wouldnt be slashdot without an obligatory rant from my front lawn as a greybeard. have you seen kids today? i mean actually seen how they use technology? they want E and I devices, cookie clicker and kesha. Kids today dont want to learn how or why their cloud storage works, but they want to maintain the illusion that they are somehow profoundly skilled users of their technology for getting garageband to install and upvoting the latest dreck to come out of their favourite pop star. Theyre divorced from everything but the most fervent memes, so unless you can propose a way to make object oriented reusable code as popular as kony 2012 or the latest malala freedom fighter, this wont work. Things like Pi, adafruit, and any other flavour of linux except ubuntu will forever be the love affair of the neckbeard. You cannot turn a herd of children beaten into blind tech consumerism into an organized group of kids that want to learn transcoding and class instantiation.

Comment: well obviously. (Score 4, Funny) 153

by nimbius (#48611587) Attached to: In IT, Beware of Fad Versus Functional
I'll have you know im very well versed in that which is fad, and that which is function, you insensitive clod. I attend my scrum stand-ups daily to make sure I get updates about our Cloud. once thats taken care of, I write the most functional devops scripts in nothing less than the latest ruby code to ensure our SAAS, PAAS, DAAS, and GAAS are all ITSG A OK. Now if you'll excuse me, I believe my Zune is finished charging.

Comment: few details digging into the articles. (Score 0, Troll) 99

by nimbius (#48608707) Attached to: Skype Unveils Preview of Live English-To-Spanish Translator
The few articles that are found from slashdot and the translation team blog seems to imply this technology wasnt developed in redmond, but in chinese universities by post-doctorates. For example, critical components like phonome learning and the social media training method were all conducted as research. Then, somehow, this magically became a microsoft product.

A major argument can be made that microsofts myopic approach to consumers still exists today. While skype is indeed popular, cobbling the breakthrough translation to an OS no one wants to use is nothing short of the redmond we've come to know and love for the past 20 years. Skype clients exist in linux, mac, and android, but Redmond is needlessly mandating the latest, and least popular version of Windows. lock it in, force it through, then quietly abandon it after 2-4 years when your customers rebel and you've hemmoraged too much cash from X-Box to keep up appearances.

Error in operator: add beer