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User: raymansean

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Comments · 93

  1. Re:Minicomputer? on First Outdoor Flocks of Autonomous Flying Robots · · Score: 1

    I fear the day that a UAV has the payload capacity available to lift a "minicomputer." Also not to mention what is a pretty impressive feat; being able to have code that can perform all the tasks (quickly), mentioned in the summary, running on a minicomputer. Never mind the ability to lift one.

  2. Re:Activism on eBay Founder Pleads For Leniency For the PayPal 14 · · Score: 2

    I agree to an extent. However; in one case you actually show up for the protest, in the other case you get a bunch of proxies to show up instead. Had the protest been achieved via the "slashdot" effect, nothing would have came of this. However manipulating machines to amplify your effect should be frowned upon.

  3. Re:When you have a bad driver ... on Is the Porsche Carrera GT Too Dangerous? · · Score: 2

    If I had $450,000 to drop on a supper car, the last thing I would want is stability control trying to correct me. In this instance, even if the vehicle had stability control it would have been turned off. Then the question remains could have stability control stopped this? Obviously the driver failed to keep the vehicle on the pavement; however, stability control does not promise to keep on the pavement, nor from wrapping a vehicle around a tree. It attempts to keep the vehicle upright and aimed in the direction that the front wheels are pointed. To me lack of stability control is a red-hearing, added to the article to promote stability control adoption in all vehicles.

  4. Global Cooling? on World's Largest Ocean Thermal Power Plant Planned For China · · Score: 1

    So if we extract the energy from the ocean, we would be cooling the ocean.

  5. Re:Why are these stories on /.? on Huge Explosion at Texas Fertilizer Plant · · Score: 2

    News for Nerds! There are other nerds than those who sling lines of code all day or design computers. Explosions are of interest to Chemical, Mechanical, Civil engineers, etc. EE's may also be interested depending on what was the ignition source.

  6. Way to piss off your customers on A New Benefit For Logged-In Readers: Meet Slashdot's ROT13 Initiative · · Score: 1

    I usually have a pretty decent sense of humor. However this ROT13 joke, is not funny and shows no creativity. For a website that USED to be about news nerds/ stuff that matters, this is a new low. You are forcing your target audience to do more work, which may temporarily drive up ad clicks, but in the long run you will loose your base and the site will continue to decline.

  7. Re:Thousands what? on Thousands of Natural Gas Leaks Found In Boston · · Score: 1

    Leaks is the quantifiable noun.* While leak is normally a verb, leaks can be used as a noun just like runs. For example, I have a case of the runs. The verb in the quoted sentence is detected!

  8. Captain misqoute wikipedia on Electric Car Environmental Impact: Power Source Matters · · Score: 1

    According to the link you provided the theoretical max is ~73% . The 35% you cite is the average we are doing now.

  9. Answering the Question on Ask Slashdot: How To Ask College To Change Intro To Computing? · · Score: 1

    The best thing to do right now is to ACE the course and continue acing your courses. Then once you are close to your final year, go have a chat with the dept chair/ dean. You will be amazed at how receptive the admin will be to your suggestions, since you have 30 yrs of experience and you will have all A's in your course work. (Unless you are attending one of the for profit universities then they want to do what is easy/ most profitable). The trick is to offer suggestions on what will make the course better for the entire class. Some students come in not knowing how to log onto a computers, others believe that internet explorer is the internet. Thus the course is required. You could also talk to your prof now and see if there is a way to get exempted from the course through a petition to chairperson for curriculum. In my dept that would be the undergrad curriculum director or the grad director. Usually if you can demonstrate you have mastered the objectives of the course (usually through a written or oral exam) then they will exempt you from the course and ask you to take a more challenging course and count those credit hours towards your degree, or just give you the credit hours. While most of us at Slashdot get to use our computers for more than word processors/ spreadsheets, this is hardly the experience of most users. Not only that, "intro to computing" is likely to be one of those "core curriculum" courses that every one is required to take. That way when you are a senior and required to write up your capstone/ design project the prof does not have to waste time teaching the students how to insert equations/citations or how to set up a spreadsheet to run some simple calculations. Yes it sucks but push through and you never know you may learn some useful feature in word, highly doubtful as we are talking about MS.

  10. Re:$300 is a lot of money. on 90 Percent of Eligible Kansas City Neighborhoods Sign Up For Google Fiber · · Score: 1

    $300 for 10Mbps for 10 years is $2.5/mo. That's less than a penny a day. Please deposit 12,000,000 of those pennies into my bank account, I will gladly pay you $120,000 USD upon verification from my bank ;-).

    In all seriousness, google is charging their "customer" $300 for this service for 10Yrs, and they are then charging their true customer for the ability to know all the online activity of the "customer." It is like Google is reading right from the cable companies play book.

  11. Dell TOO on Google Awarded Face-To-Unlock Patent · · Score: 1

    TL:DR the patent. However, Dell (a leader in innovation) has had facial recognition to log on to a user account for at least 2 years now, as my studio XPS 16 has the ability to do so.

  12. Re:temperature on CERN Physicists Generate Hottest Man-Made Temperatures Ever: ~5.5 Trillion K · · Score: 1

    I would imagine there there was more than enough particles/ sub particles present, even if there was only a zepto-mole of particles that Heisenberg would have said that two digits of precision is allowable.

  13. Re:Statistics anyone ? on Kepler Spots "Perfectly Aligned" Alien Worlds · · Score: 1

    I was thinking the same thing, in a limitless universe you are likely to find at least one instance of a "flat" solar system. However, in a limitless universe, there is likely a large number of "flat" solar systems.

  14. Paper burner on A Faster Jigsaw Solving Algorithm · · Score: 2

    Your paper shredder is no longer sufficient. I am here to market to you a paper burner!

  15. Re:good idea on DARPA Aims To Reuse Space Junk · · Score: 2

    The cost to launch DOD satellites is usually a small percentage of the over budget for the build of the satellite.
    I am having a hard time with how we get things that were not meant to be interchangeable to link up in orbit to take on a new mission. Now if we could build a WALL-E (SPACE-E) that is capable of catching, manipulating, disassembling and construction of a new satellite that would be pretty impressive. However by the time we develop that technology we will have spent a considerable amount of money.
    Perhaps the path forward is to develop satellites that can either connect (dock if you will) to the ones currently in orbit and use some of the preexisting equipment on board to perform a new mission, or build new satellites with a "SPACE-Port" that allows future satellites to dock with it and use the host's equipment. Right now I see the problem on the order of trying to connect a CDC 6060 with a K Computer.

  16. No internet!!! on Megaupload Co-Founder Allowed Bail · · Score: 1

    I wonder if that includes telephone?

  17. Start with the classified documents on Obama Orders Federal Agencies To Digitize All Records · · Score: 1

    If a commercial vendor can manage to write the required code in the time given, the budget given, and meet all interface demands from the various perspective users. There is still no way that certain TLA (three letter agencies) will let all their documents be indexed. Thus, the project is DOA.

  18. Coldwar on Neil Armstrong To NASA: You're Embarrassing · · Score: 1

    NASA's strategic goal was to force the Russian's to spend more money on their space program, while they maintained a healthy defense budget to protect itself from potential US threats. Now the USA has an obese defense/ security budget protecting itself from... ???? and it has managed to "bail out" several large companies with large PAC's to protect the USA and "global" economy from.... ??? If there is any question as to why the USA is falling behind, just read a little history about the cold war, or if you prefer the short version look at the National Budget ~20% GPD v. Taxes ~15% GDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget I suspect that while Neil used the context of NASA, he was talking about a much larger problem than the insignificant budget of NASA, forget man space flight.

  19. Obligatory on The Chemical-Free Chemistry Kit · · Score: 1
    • 1) Invent chemical free chemistry set
    • 2) Market said set to Morons
    • 3)....
    • 4)profit

    and I though selling 16oz bottles full of water was never going to catch

  20. Re:Epic Fail on Wi-Fi Shown To Interfere With Aircraft Systems · · Score: 1

    I do not expect to use any electronics that transmit or receive radio data on a flight. However, as an engineer I do expect that someone will forget to turn off the radio on their device. Thus if I was designing flight control hardware, I would want to ensure that my equipment would not be adversely affected by someone who forgot to turn off their device(s).

  21. Epic Fail on Wi-Fi Shown To Interfere With Aircraft Systems · · Score: 1, Insightful

    How in the world are new devices developed and approved for production that ignore the possibility of EMI from portable devices? There are no excuses for such negligence.

  22. woosh! on Utah To Teach USA is a Republic, Not a Democracy · · Score: 1

    To all those who have commented about because a "Democracy" would have "Democrat" in it did you not notice that Republican has republic in it. Unfortunately, CmdrTaco quoted someone's editorial comment and most people seem to be reading the quote as fact.

  23. Science man's attempt on The Encroachment of Fact-Free Science · · Score: 1

    The equations and theories used in science are man's interpretation of how the universe works. They are our human attempt to understand and to be able to predict how the universe behaves from our perspective.

    We have developed the peer review process as a means of allowing experts to look at our work before it is published to decide if our findings are believable based on the current scientific understanding. The peer review process is a lot like a democracy, it is not perfect but it is the best thing we have come up with so far. The scientific community should resit making policy and the politicians should quit trying to do science. Even experts in their fields will cite sources when they are available, why should non experts be expected to do any less?

  24. Re:Dont forget the choreographed dance/fight numbe on IT Turf Wars: the Most Common Feuds In Tech · · Score: 1

    What a sad day it is, I read DOS as denial of service through most of the first verse. The sad thing is I grew up on DOS, ok MS-DS.

  25. Re:Only $8 Million ? on US Begins Sophisticated Wireless Jamming Project · · Score: 4, Insightful

    to quote the summary: "$8.4 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to begin work on what's known as the Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare..." This is likely a phase 1 or 2 porject were they have to show proof of concept. This is the DOD we are talking about, I am sure that before BLADE is done that the total cost will be in the 100's of millions.