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User: jnnnnn

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Comments · 110

  1. Burn stuff. on Fun To Be Had With a 10-Foot Satellite Dish? · · Score: 1

    Evaporate a thin layer of aluminium onto the surface and use it to burn things with the power of a million suns.

    As if there was any other choice.

  2. Open source no. on Open Source Transcription Software? · · Score: 1

    Here's a list. In my experience, only Dragon is worth trying, with the following caveats:

    • It helps to spend ten minutes training it for each voice
    • It will still only get 99% accuracy
    • You need a high quality (low noise) recording with a good microphone

    On the plus side, correction is easy -- read the document, and select words that look wrong to hear what they sounded like.

    Most of the other programs are aimed at very small vocabularies (i.e. 100 words) for accessibility applications (controlling a computer).

  3. Re:Some details from the article... on Vaccine Patch Removes Needle Pain · · Score: 4, Funny

    Slashdot has eaten my unicode. All those "m"s should be micrometers.

  4. Some details from the article... on Vaccine Patch Removes Needle Pain · · Score: 4, Informative

    The needles are conical, about 200m diameter by 650m long, with 10m radius of curvature at the tip. They are made from a biocompatible polymer, polyvinylpyrrolidone, and mostly dissolve after about five minutes (they are highly water-soluble). The manufacturing process can be done at 23C (using a mold), avoiding damage to sensitive biological molecules. Each patch held 3 g of vaccine.

    For comparison purposes, human hair ranges in diameter from 20-200m.

    Here's the article, with some low-res pictures even for non-subscribers.

  5. Re:Time Capsule on Cheap ADSL Holds Up 802.11n Router Design · · Score: 1

    The Asus RT-N16 has been great for us. The wifi signal is stronger than the one you suggested. It's also $92 (maybe $150 with a hard drive -- it has two USB ports for hard drives) compared to your minimum $299.

  6. Re:But, but, but,,, on Spanish Judges Liken File Sharing To Lending Books · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, America is trying to strengthen copyright law so that it can make more money.

    Multimedia is one of America's biggest exports. It is economically obvious (at least in the short term) that those who look after the country should strengthen copyright law.

    It's up to other countries to flip the bird or extract economically equivalent concessions in return.

    IANA (I am not American.)

  7. Re:Chameleon-Like Behavior? on Chameleon-Like Behavior of Neutrino Confirmed · · Score: 1

    One of the properties of subatomic particles is referred to as colour. The particles are not coloured (they are far smaller than the wavelengths of light that give colour), but it is a simple system of classifying particles, similar to resistor colour codes or the "terrorist" alert system.

    The study of the colour properties is called "chromodynamics", and I guess "chameleon" must be a similar extension of the metaphor.

  8. Re:Die? on Flash Destroyer Tests Limit of Solid State Storage · · Score: 1

    Your NAND SSD is going to fail during an erase-program (aka "write") cycle, and except in the extremely unlikely case that the pattern you were writing did not involve changing any previously stored 1s to 0s on stuck bits, then the result is going to be wrong. You could read it, but you'd be reading the wrong data.

    I disagree. Flash memory erases whole blocks in one go (with a high-voltage pulse). It should be simple enough to check that the whole block got properly erased during the erase part of the write cycle. If not, that is a worn-out sector, and can be marked as such with no loss of data.

    Getting stuck in the programmed state is a good thing, it makes the check easier (check for all zeroed before writing instead of checking for a correct write afterwards) and possibly faster.

    Correcting some other inaccuracies I noticed during this discussion, flash memory is a specific type of EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory). The main failure mode occurs because charge builds up in the gate oxide (the insulator between the floating gate and the substrate).

  9. Re:Not Holding My Breath on Researchers Create 4nm Transistor With Seven Atoms · · Score: 1

    They did it using an atomic force microscope (very sharp needle) to make room for the phosphorus atoms on the silicon surface (removing the hydrogen termination in certain places). Phosphene gas PH_3 then places phosphorus atoms in the vacated holes, and finally silicon is grown over the top using a low-temperature CVD process. It's a beautiful technique that took them several years to get right.

  10. How about 144km... in 2006? on Quantum Teleportation Achieved Over 16 km In China · · Score: 1

    16km, while impressive, is not the record. The summary is completely wrong. Ursin et. al. did it over 144km in 2006, and have plans to do it via satellite (with interesting implications about whether it works through a changing gravity well, and so on).

  11. Re:Read your history on Pakistan Court Orders Facebook Ban Over Mohammed Images · · Score: 1

    In a few centuries, or less, Islam will be mellowed out.

    I hope Scientology never gets a turn...

  12. Bit-flipping on NASA Finds Cause of Voyager 2 Glitch · · Score: 1

    Here's an interesting thing: older computer chips are more susceptible to bit-flipping by cosmic rays, because they are thicker. The increased thickness gives the cosmic ray more chance of interacting with the chip (rather than passing straight through), scattering charge all over the place, and stuffing things up. IBM had a serious modelling project in the 80s that culminated in SRIM (free download), but apparently it's not much of a problem for modern computer chips. SRIM has since gone on to bigger and better things.

  13. Re:Quantum computers aren't X times faster. on 1 Molecule Computes Thousands of Times Faster Than a PC · · Score: 1

    The summary states it is 1000s of times faster *for a certain problem*, which is quite possible.

  14. Re:Institutional Traders Don't Enter Trades Like T on Stock Market Sell-Off Might Stem From Trader's Fat Finger · · Score: 1

    I did work experience at a large broker once, and spent a day watching the actual traders (there were only two, even for that large company, on text-based terminals). They say that quite regularly traders at other firms enter the price wrong, e.g. leaving the zero off the end of the price of a large sell order, which eats through all the buy orders and reduces the price quite significantly... they said that most of the traders were pretty good about reversing such transactions.

    So things something like the OP describes can and do happen.

  15. Re:Not the first, not by a long shot on MIT Unveils First Solar Cells Printed On Paper · · Score: 1

    Yeah, that and MIT is good at publicity.

  16. Re:But I haven't even gotten my Mac Beta to work y on StarCraft II To Be Released On July 27 · · Score: 1

    Oh wow I hope there's a Linux version.

    Even if it is through Steam.

  17. Re:They lasted too long. Bad engineering. Big fias on NASA Mars Rover Spots Its Ultimate Destination · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wow, I bet you're the guy who makes laptops fail two days after the three-year warranty ends.

    I am all in favour of careful engineering. Designing things to fail is extremely antisocial.

  18. Call me when... on IBM Creates World's Smallest 3-D Map · · Score: 1

    they hit 2nm resolution. That's when the quantum happy fun times really start.

  19. Re:The device is cheap, but the cartridges ... on Wake Forest Researchers Swap Skin Grafts For Cell Spraying · · Score: 1
  20. Re:Gyroscopic effect? on Porsche Unveils 911 Hybrid With Flywheel Booster · · Score: 1

    If the flywheel is horizontal, it will strongly resist roll (where a car's weight moves to the outer wheels on a corner), and may improve handling significantly.

    If the flywheel is vertical (very unlikely), the car will resist turning and have very poor handling.

    Conservation of angular momentum is the same force that makes bikes easy to balance (slow to fall over) when they're moving.

    With a spinning wheel, rotating the axis (axle) towards the plane of the wheel is hard, but rotating around the axis offers no resistance.

    More reading.

  21. Re:this is simple on AU Gov't Still Wants ISPs To Solve Illegal Downloads · · Score: 1

    I agree.

    I have no idea what fraction of the population does it, but I wouldn't be surprised if more than half would, given the opportunity.

    How can something that most people do be illegal? (in a democracy)

  22. Re:Consistent Histories? on Physicists Discover How To Teleport Energy · · Score: 1

    That sounds right to me.

    The interpretation I like is that the superposition of states simply gets larger and encompasses the person doing the measuring. The person themselves is then in a superposition, each part believing a certain measurement was recorded.

    This is just an interpretation (the "many worlds" theory) -- I don't think it can be tested any more than the fact "God"(s) exists can.

  23. Just remember... on Can Curiosity Be Programmed? · · Score: 2, Funny

    the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program

    .. as long as you start with a piece of fairy cake.

  24. Re:Stating the obvious on A Space Cannon That Might Actually Work · · Score: 1

    What about deep-frozen pizza? Does the ISS have a microwave? ;)

  25. One more small step... on Aussie, Finnish Researchers Create a Single-Atom Transistor · · Score: 1

    Apart from the implications this might have for classical electronics, the long-term goal here is to build solid-state quantum computing devices. The phosphorus donor has one lonely electron, and that electron's spin is a good candidate for a qubit. One of the good things about P in Si is the long decoherence times -- T2 times of almost one second have been demonstrated. The phosphorus' nuclear spin of 1/2 stays coherent for hours, if we can find a way to get at it.

    Of course, the NIST guys with their ion traps have demonstrated several interacting qubits, but perhaps P in Si chips might be useful as a more stable, more scalable, cheaper or smaller alternative.