steauengeglase

I fail to understand the point to this. People have been building GSM base stations with $1,500 USRPs for years (not knocking the USRP, awesome piece of test equipment; it has been on my wish list for years now). So someone tacked a $35 Raspberry Pi to it.

Now turning a Raspberry Pi into a USRP for $35, that would be disruptive.

The comic paints a picture from a very specific viewpoint, as if Huxley's were the rational, correct one and Orwell's came from a delusional fantasy land. Both men lived very different lives and they were responding to what they saw.

Huxley came from a family distinguished in science and rational thought, so he had something to live up to. He was intellectually gifted, but was a poor authoritarian who was barred from military service due to poor eyesight.

Orwell came from the gentry, was told that he was clever at a young age and when given the chance to see authority and violence he jumped at it. Both noticed just how broken the worlds they had stepped into were.

Huxley was never shot in the throat or saw the Soviets pervert his ideals in Spain or endure a slow death by TB. Orwell had little interest in examining the gullible, impatient, "zippy" world of the US that Sinclair Lewis and Co were responding to, so he missed out on a taste of what the future would hold for those with peacetime and plenty.

Honestly, at this point the lag is kind of the draw with Slashdot. Once a story has shown up elsewhere, you can go there 6 hours later or the next day and everyone has had time to mull over the story.

Scroll down to the middle of the page past the typical trash comments and you can find some useful info, often from old hands who have had a some first hand knowledge of the subject.

Of course that is also the downside. Every troll, malcontent, joker and astroturfer has had a good 6 hours to harden their position.

As I understand they do, but even if you had it been deployed seconds after it touched down, the wait for returning images would have been a while. Packet radio from that distance is no joke.

From Earth I'd rather have a few crappy thumbnails to confirm that the vehicle wasn't upside down or something in a few minutes than something National Geographic worthy in a few days.

At the end of the day that's why I'm perfectly happy with Greenpeace/etc doing their battling from the web. They get the ego rub they desperately desire and no fingers are brought close to dangerous machinery.

That is awesome news. Always glad to hear positive bits on the SDL front. http://lists.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl-libsdl.org/2012-July/0...

There are always the Unitarians.

The bar you go to makes all the difference. You are more likely to see Quiz Night at a Mom & Pop sports bar, a place where loud noise is acceptable. The quiet, little pub you go to for ale/stout and quiet conversation or a folk/jazz bar not so much.

"So let’s just suppose that Alan Turing is just the same personally: he’s a mathematician, an early computer scientist, a metaphysician, a war hero — but he’s German."

When the name von Braun is said, slave labor may come in mind for some, but for most they think rockets.

It is the Rolling Stone National Affairs Desk, essentially Taibi fills the Gonzo void. Someone has to do it to sell those cologne scented pages.

The Solove/Bartow thing has been bouncing around for a few years now.

One of Bartow's responses: http://madisonian.net/2011/05/26/of-debunking-and-willful-di...

She seems to be more annoyed with the idea that Solove's writings read like a High School sophomore's rather than the validity of his arguments.

He is lamenting the number of talented high school kids playing baseball, not who won the World Series.

In that case Mickey Mouse is already protected as a trademark. The real question isn't if Mickey is protected, but if Steamboat Willie is protected from now until the end of time.

Can't speak for "electronic music", but the binaural beat folks have their argument. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_waves

I'll be happy to put on my tinfoil hat and tell you what I think is really going on.

The USPS does a lot more than ship packages and letters. They are also the government's mass printer. That VA letter and social security check probably wasn't printed in a Virginia suburb, but at one of the regional USPS printing offices. They also handle very high security items, not just to you, but between government agencies under conditions that would make the warden of a maximum security prison blush. The term "going postal" isn't about some guy at your local post office flipping out over the number of people waiting to get their packages weighed, but about some guy who has spent decades wondering if the guy standing next to him is a postal inspector just itching to see him screw up.

To put it another way, they offset a lot of other agencies costs (at least in overhead). I'm certainly not saying it would be better or worse if all of this were handled by the private sector, but I will say it would require a lot of restructuring and make someone a huge pile of cash. Still, it is going to happen sooner or later. Politically it is just too sweet.

As Louis XIV said, never sign a treaty you don't intend to break and until the technological playground settles into a few large, relatively static players there is always room for a more lucrative treaty.

Plenty, a government is granted a monopoly on violence in order to block other players from getting into (or at least flexing their muscles in) the violence game.

Better question. Can you remember the plot of the last 5 movies you went to see?

For Ford, I'd imagine it is the same reason Fender is on that list. Somebody owns a lot of stock elsewhere (Fender was owned by CBS until they bought themselves out from under, but I'd imagine a significant number of shareholders still hold stock in both).

I started work on a "somewhat" similar project* around the beginning of the year. This was for the state level, not the federal level. There were quite a number of issues. The most annoying being that the state archives only went back so far. Checking it now, it goes back to the mid-70s (very encouraging, 9 months ago, it only went back to the mid-90s). If you need a reference on why this is important go back and read the Patriot Act (hint, without access to the legal code going back very far, it is futile).

As far as your bullet points, we already do much of that (ok, not in "real time", not with commit messages (you could have it, but everyone would quickly fill it in with "cause it's good for America"), but much of this is publicly available). Anyone who adds or votes for or against is very well documented. For my state it is a real PITA to parse out and apply but that information is provided and in a usable manner. The only thing missing is the speed and pretty ui.

Also, Sunlight has already done a great deal of work in this area (when I last checked they were still working on the API).

*Since, I've let the idea lay dormant for months now, I'll share it. The original idea was to setup a Facebook type "game" where bored housewives or whoever get a list of 5 random bills. They get the summary and it links to the bill's text and any current laws that will be affected by that bill. What they don't see is the bill's name and who the sponsor and co-sponsors are. After reading the summary they fill out a short survey of who and what party they think the bill came from, do they think the bill is a good or bad idea and any tags they think are appropriate for the law ("pork","insurance","nice", etc) and even add their own notes. After they do that they find out who the sponsor/co-sponsors are.

The idea was to give people an incentive to read pending legislation without an instinctive bias.

Though my code is ugly, I may GitHub what I have so far.

Dunno, they picked up twitter pretty fast.

Afta Serif has some issues. With weaker eyesight I find myself mistaking characters. That k keeps turning into ß.

Interesting, looks like the previous owner neglected to tell me that someone was killed in my driveway back in '07.

Just a bit of advice from back when I was sending letters over the DMCA.

If your congressman is supporting the bill, don't bother. My Senator at the time was Fritz Hollings; came from a poor district, so he was dependent on a lot of outside contributions. I recall Disney being one of his largest contributors. I received a response 3 months after it passed that more or less told me I was a enemy of commerce. I won't lie, I was a little shocked to get back such a pointed letter when I was as courteous and respectful as possible.

I learned my lesson from that one. You can send a letter to anyone and generally it is a great idea, but if they get a dime from your position's opposition, it is just pissing in the wind. It's just business.

I wouldn't even say it is geared towards the CS student/CS grad, more like general nerd reading. If I knew a kid who was "interested in computers", but there was no one around to give them a helping hand I'd definitely give them a copy of CODE and The C Programming Language.

Don't forget:

-They are trying too hard.

On a daily basis, this hurts me more than anything else.

The NYT is good at a lot of things, but I'm not sure if I'd put space reporting on that list. This is the same fine institution that assumed that Robert Goddard didn't understand the first thing about basic physics.

Most of those ideas are hair brained, serve only to waste dollars and I think that is the editorial board's point. So I'll just smile as history repeats itself.

Don't know about the US, but the UK has a number of anti-trucking laws that would possibly prohibit it.

I have a feeling that there is a bit more to it than that.

In America it is fairly common for employers tack on a little more vacation time every year for both salary and hourly employees. It isn't too terribly odd to have 1 to 1.5 months off a year after working for someone for 5 to 10 years, but Americans seldom stay at the same job for very long. Either you go off for greener pastures, quit out of frustration, get laid off or simply resign because they fear that prospective employers won't hire you because you stayed at one place for too long.

Deep down, I think we have a serious fear of being considered lazy by our peers.