Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:If it's done well... (Score 1) 117

Honestly, I might not even mind this... if it were easy to switch between accounts on most devices. On a PC, it's not super hard to log out and log back in as a different user, especially if you have a decent password manager. Mostly the same on a phone. But on a TV, it's a pain. Sure it's easy to switch between profiles on a single account, but switching to a different *account* on a TV is annoying at best.

Comment Re:Please do. I no longer have the car(s). (Score 2) 78

Different people have different experiences. I'm in the US, and I get approximately 40 calls *per day*. I'm pretty sure I'm an outlier.

Most of them are trying to sell me final expense insurance plans. Their script is "I'm calling to let you know about final expense insurance plans that have recently been authorized in your area that can cover up to 100% of your funeral, burial, and cremation costs."

Some are trying to sell me supplemental medicare. "I want to talk to you about new low-cost supplemental medicare coverage. I believe you have medicare parts A and B, right?" (I do not)

Sometimes it will be a blatant scam. "This is amazon customer service calling to verify that you have purchased a macbook pro for $950" (I forget the exact wording on that one) Sometimes I tell them that yes, I absolutely made that purchase. That makes them angry and they start cussing at me. Indian telephone scammers have brought English cussing to an art form. Sometimes I tell them I'm glad they called, I'm from Microsoft tech support and our logs show they may have a virus on their computer.

My phone is basically useless as a phone.

Comment Why just Monday or Friday (Score 1) 28

First off, that guarantees that half of your staff are gone two days out of the week.

Second, if it catches on (which would be great) it introduces new problems... one of the great things about this is that it allows you to simultaneously have a job and also go to businesses that keep what is ironically referred to as "banker's hours", so those businesses will have big spikes of activity on Mondays and Fridays, which isn't efficient or pleasant for anyone.

Third... Wednesdays suck.

I guess it depends in part on your point of view. If a day off is relaxing and lets you return to work rejuvenated, then taking off a mid-week day is great for productivity. If it's disruptive and causes problems when you context-switch, then it'd be better to clump off-days even more, say with a 9-on/5-off schedule, or 20-on/10off.

On the other side of things, this is great if you want to do leisure activities that take more than 2 days, like traveling somewhere kind of far away to do something. It's not so great if you don't have plans, half your friends don't have the same day off, and by the third day of every weekend you're sitting around, bored and listless.

Comment "word processor" (Score 1) 148

"word processor" is such a weird term. My favorite application for applying processes to words is Python.

But my favorite application for creating documents that contain primarily words is... it depends. Notepad++ for doing useful things with text. MS Word for making documents that are pretty. Google docs for making documents that may or may not be pretty, but that I can access from many places and will likely survive and be find-able through multiple computer upgrades and replacements.

Strangely, one of the big advantages of Google Docs (that it's in a browser) is also one of its big disadvantages (it gets lost in a taskbar filled with other browser windows)

Comment Re:Is this the nuclear salt water engine? (Score 1) 145

I also really wish that the article had more detail. "nuclear rocket" could mean a whole lot of things, from nuclear thermal rockets, (probably what they're talking about) to nuclear salt water, to Orion, to... technically, if you put an RTG on a craft with an ion thruster, it's a nuclear powered propulsion system, and both of those are currently fielded, though I can't find a single craft that uses both.

Comment I wonder how carefully they define driving? (Score 1) 163

I know there are some DUI laws that have taken "driving" to mean having access to keys while in a vehicle. Others define it more akin to being in control of a moving vehicle.

The question is, if you have a need to use your phone, can you pull over to the side of the road? Or do you have to pull over and shut off the engine? Or get out of the car? If you're trying to find your way somewhere, is it more legal to pull out a paper map and start looking for your route whilst hurtling down the highway than to tap your GPS app? (I know the post says you can use satnav in handsfree mode, but that's different than typing in an address).

Maybe someday they'll expand this to cover other distractions, like children and annoying passengers.

Comment While possibly accurate, this is still a ton of BS (Score 1) 229

If I'm reading this correctly, they asked people to self-report their diet *once* and then assumed that A) they were self-reporting correctly, and B) that they kept the same diet for the next sixteen years. What were you eating regularly 16 years ago? Do you still eat the same way? Do you know *anyone* who does?

That is terrible, terrible "science". It might still have found accurate answers, in the way a blind squirrel still nuts twice a day,

I do wish that something like this could be done in a better way. And I am curious about both their answers, and the actual truth of what they were trying to look at. Like, I'd love to know how fruit juices (which are non-carbonated, high-sugar drinks) fared. And milk (a non-carbonated drink with sugar, fat, and protein). Sports drinks (which are basically synthetic fruit juice with extra salt). And soda water, either plain or lightly flavored (unsweetened, but still carbonated). Like, what if the actual deadly ingredient is carbonation? Or maybe there's something else, perhaps caramel coloring is a silent killer. Or it could be that anything that triggers T1R* will straight-up kill you if you keep drinking it.

But we'll never know, because nutrition "science" is filled to overflowing with both corruption and incompetence, such that any actual useful research (of which this study is not) gets lost in the noise.

Slashdot Top Deals

Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don't add up.

Working...