Last year, I started looking for a way to communicate with my 3 teenagers while they were in their rooms with the doors closed, without yelling at the top of my lungs to be heard over their airpods. Texting would have probably worked but felt wrong. Dedicated wireless intercom systems are clunky, unreliable, and expensive.

Giving the kids each an Echo, either the Dot or the Flex, and putting one in the kitchen as well gave me an easy way to solve this problem. I can use the Echo as an intercom to drop in on one or all of the kids when I need to. This has been a lifesaver for us! I also use the kitchen Echo to play music, which works quite well of course.

I'm not a fan of the privacy implications of having Echo devices in my house. Amazon does provide some controls for that, at least.

Nothing says l33t like handing out that @aol.com address in 2018.

I don't know about that, TM-31-210 has a couple idiotic triggering mechanisms that can get you killed in a hurry, and whose only practical application would be terrorism.

"Energetic Materials" and "Energetic Materials in Application" are still still offered at a handful of schools in my state, but almost entirely for graduate students. Those used to be elective chemistry and engineering classes for undergrads during early 90's at the university I attended, but a slightly faster paced version was offered to graduate students or with department approval. I can't think of too may schools even then that offered those to undergrads back then, much less now.

School's have really taken the "fun" out of chemistry. I'm not sitting here advocating that we everyone needs to spend a couple semesters doing nothing but say fluorine chemistry (yet another thing they don't really welcome in the lab anymore, and maybe on this one I'll say okay, but someone has still to be trained to do it. Ticking time bombs in the sand bucket in the fume hood. Fun fun fun!), but until I had energetic materials chemistry ceased to be fun.

This whole discussion and the way its being moderated are severely turning me against continuing to use Slashdot. I've been a long time, probably 12-13 years on this account, and I don't even know when I registered the first one. I think we were on Suse 7.1 or so back then, which I actually bought the DVD + CD set for. I remember when this was a free place to discuss ideas, ideals, and even bring the occasional website crawling to its knees from the flood of traffic. Those were good times. Since about 2015 though, its drifted rapidly into this land of there can only be one right idea or ideal. SJWism has taken hold; even if there are still a large number who despite it, especially when stating that could cost them their employment. It doesn't matter if its a discussion about socks or a hurricane, people will find some way to make it political, and bring the worst of those elements into it.

There was a time when we elevated discussions, and moderators sought to. We could laugh at trolls, and simply disagree without the crud I see in so many threads now and use some of that to bring ideas to the table. We used to believe in freedom and pretty much in free speech. I'm sorry to see that era dying, but I cannot ignore that either. The end result wont elevate discussions. It wont draw new users in, and it will certainly push out long time users.

That is why groups like the: III%, Cajun Navy, American Freedom Keepers, Highwaymen, Riders of the Confederacy -- go out in groups, set up a base of operations with a logistical support network, and generally have some training. Many of them are also ex military, ex police, ex medics, worked in logistics, and many of them are techs as well. They also usually have human intelligence on the ground before they get there, tend to make contact with law enforcement when they arrive so they know who they are so they don't freak out with a mess of guys in gear show up. You don't want people to mistake you for an armed group of looters! They try to connect with businesses and church people ahead of going. They tend to take multiple forms of communications gear, extra fuel, and whatever other resource they can with them that might not be available that they can carry.

That does not mean its always perfectly organized, pretty, free from chaos, nor that it is free from danger. If your area of operations is bacteria infested water, that alone is a danger. It does not mean you cannot end up a part of the problem even after successfully being a part of the solution. Especially if there is no logistical support available to you easily beyond what you can carry. Situations can change rapidly. A levee breaks or a river crests or a road is completely washed out after you get in. Stuff happens. I've seen some of these groups do some pretty amazing things with what they have to work with. Sometimes that is the only support that will exist.

    An example of that danger from Hurricane Harvey is where several people took the only good option available when effecting a rescue or bringing in supplies would otherwise have to be brought in by air -- the monster truck or 5 tons with very high intakes and exhausts. These could get into areas that boats could not, and other vehicles definitely could not. They were even in areas that helicopters would be useless in. However, wheels have wheel bearings. They don't perfectly seal. At best they can be packed with grease to keep some of the mud and cruddy water out. After a few days of operating these in that water while sometimes carrying in heavy loads of supplies and ferrying people out, they literally drove them until the wheels came off. The issue of logistical support being unavailable put at least one of them in a bad situation. They did way more good than bad, but not having that support when the rest of society is washing away down the river is never a good thing, especially when the waters are rising all around you and you cannot effect a roadside repair.

All of that being said: A lot of rescue, national guard and support organizations simply bypassed the smaller towns leaving them to fend on their own. The militias and other groups saved a lot of people, coordinated their own usually completely free of your tax dollars support of communities, ran and helped organize the only distribution points available, coordinated with other charities, trucking companies (which is what I did on this end) to get supplies in and help stabilize things. They also did it faster than government response and resources could allow in a great many cases. Many of them are sticking around for as long as they are financially able to to continue providing support during the clean up phase. Or at least sticking around until that mission can be handed off to someone else.

People having downloaded zello provided a way to communicate where people had little else. It also led to a fair amount of duplicate calls for assistance because not everyone is on the same networks. Its still a great resource to have. The more options you give yourself ahead of a crisis the better.

I agree. I'm not paying good money to have hollywood's multicultural and politically correct agenda rammed down my throat. Even on those rare occasions where that agenda is not as blatant the movie itself is usually geared toward lowering the values and generating a decline in the culture. I've largely given up on TV for the same reasons.

The NextGen program has had several high-profile failures. The implementation of new routes in Phoenix resulted in a large number of complaints and lawsuits against the FAA. The more recent changes in the SF Bay Area including routing a much higher number of aircraft over Palo Alto and lower elevations in the Santa Cruz Mountains, both of which have angered a great many residents.

Jet traffic brings noise pollution and air pollution to the corridors they travel, resulting in health impacts (though difficult to measure) and sometimes significant reductions in property value. The previous corridors have been used for decades and the impact is well-understood by residents in those areas; the change was not well-communicated before being implemented and residents were mostly caught unawares.

The benefits of these changes include a higher volume of traffic to airports, increasing airport profits; more efficient routes for airlines, increasing airline profits; and potentially cheaper fares for customers resulting from the first two changes. Speaking personally, I would rather keep my home value and quieter skies.

There's one advantage to using the rsync protocol like this; you can provide file access without creating a user account on the system. Even if you secure that user account (e.g. by using an ssh key and limiting commands init, by setting the shell to /sbin/nologin, using chroots, etc) it's still an account with access on the system. Using rsync in this way is analogous to putting some files on a web server behind Basic Auth. And like using a web server, it should never be used for files that contain sensitive information!

Its a little more than that, but that is certainly a part of it. I blame the smart phone. I thought I had a great marriage right up until my wife got an Iphone. Now admittedly I do spend a little too much time with computers and music gear. So I wasn't that worried about it when my wife first got her Iphone, but 6 months later I was genuinely lonely, felt ignored, felt like I could not a have a decent conversation with her, and its been a battle since. I try to have a conversation with her, she has to check this thing and wont give the courtesy of putting it away for all of it. I try to go places and do things with it -- we could be at an incredibly fancy restaurant sans kids and still has to whip this one (and yes, it might be limited to a brief snap of this to post about it, but its often not), I have sex with her and 30 seconds later that blue light is on. I can't even watch a movie with her without her checking it.

I even took the step of introducing a high voltage static discharge into her prior one. She simply bought another within hours. She is not a morning person, so to see her sprint up even before I did to rush out to the Apple store was disheartening. Coming up upon a decade and I decided to file for divorce now rather than risk my retirement to it.

Some people may have a less intense reaction to it than I do. It depends upon what speaks to you about being loved and feeling loved. For me its no different than choosing crack cocaine over your partner. 16 years together, the last 10 of them married.

Events like this are what keep sysadmins employed. If you're not paying someone to protect your technology infrastructure, including a layered backup strategy, an effective security policy, and regular audits, this is going to happen to you too.

San Francisco has implemented a school lottery. Siblings get first priority, followed by kids from low-income neighborhoods, followed by actual local residents. Almost everyone I know who had kids while living in S.F. either paid for private school ($25k/year and up) or moved out of town, because they didn't get into a good school.

Yes, housing is expensive and public transit is inferior and the crime rate is undesirable and there aren't enough public parks. Most people I know would tolerate all of that if they could get their kids into a good school. Instead you can get a better house, a better school, a better crime rate, great big parks, possibly even a better public transit system by simply moving 30 minutes drive away. It means giving up the big city life and anyone I know would do that happily to give their kids a better shot at a good education.

Check this against the browser strings of those surfing Slahdot. Even as bad as Win 10 is I bet those numbers do a flip.

One of the first things you learn as a new driver is not to watch the car immediately in front of you, but rather to watch several cars ahead (and behind). This gives you more time to react to traffic changes, and you still see the actions of the nearest vehicle anyway.

Sure, Tesla's Autopilot will have a much faster reaction time. That will help, but it's not good enough - it only allows Autopilot to react to conditions that the nearest vehicle also reacts to. A deer running toward the road, looking to jump in front of you? A kid chasing a ball toward the street? The vehicle in front of you swerving out of the way of an object in the road? Autopilot doesn't handle any of them, and can't as long as it lacks the ability to see more of the environment around it.

Autopilot is dangerous to Tesla drivers and others because it removes the attention of the driver from the road. It's basically like asking a nearly blind friend with fast reflexes to take the wheel while you read a book or play games on your phone. If it's not legal for a nearly blind driver to take the wheel, Autopilot shouldn't be legal either.

Well, I'm sure they really would have taken them, but the customs paperwork is just SO unpleasant, you know? And there is the matter of the 17% import duty on livestock, and there needs to be proof that someone will feed and house the chickens so that they don't become a burden on society. We can't have foreign chickens just coming into the country whenever they want.