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User: jeffb+(2.718)

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  1. Re:Let's get this out of the way... on Magnetic Stimulation Boosts Memory In Humans · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's the rate of change of magnetic flux that does the trick. You get changing flux from a changing electrical current, or from a moving magnet. So maybe if you loaded the magnets into a shotgun, then fired them through your brain, you'd notice an effect.

  2. Let's get this out of the way... on Magnetic Stimulation Boosts Memory In Humans · · Score: 4, Informative

    These are magnetic pulses. No, strapping magnets to your wrist/ankle/belly/tinfoil-hat still won't accomplish anything.

  3. Re:So, is there any shred of EVIDENCE? on How the Ancient Egyptians (Should Have) Built the Pyramids · · Score: 2

    Yeah, I guess I should've just shut up and waited for others to comment.

  4. So, is there any shred of EVIDENCE? on How the Ancient Egyptians (Should Have) Built the Pyramids · · Score: 1

    This is very interesting, and maybe that's good enough. But isn't there some evidence of what method they might have used? Wood fragments? Tracks? Tools?

    I'm asking this as a completely naive onlooker. I'm sure there is research on this spanning hundreds of years; anyone want to provide a quick summary?

  5. Re:4.5" Newtonian on an EQ Mount on Slashdot Asks: Cheap But Reasonable Telescopes for Kids? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you foresee going far with this as a hobby, you will want to go 8-10" at some point. It's better to decide now as telescopes are utterly worthless on the used market.

    This would seem to present a compelling case for buying a telescope on the used market.

  6. Re:V2V like the "baby on board" sticker on Google's Driverless Cars Capable of Exceeding Speed Limit · · Score: 1

    We've all seen those "baby on board" stickers/signs, with the intention being that you should keep your distance or take extra caution.

    Wait, I thought you got double points for those!

  7. "...catalog images AS cities, stars or..." on ISS Earth at Night Photos Crowdsourced For Science · · Score: 2

    I'm intrigued. This project seems like a more engaging and worthwhile use of my time than the crowdsourced editing of Slashdot summaries.

  8. Stenography for CODING? LOL! on Type 225 Words per Minute with a Stenographic Keyboard (Video) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Take a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for stenotype to see why using a stenographic keyboard for coding is such a laughable idea.

    Stenography relies heavily on a highly-trained stenographer to do the recording, and on a similarly highly-trained individual to turn the record into recognizable English. Trying to use that for writing code, where you don't have the redundancy and patterns of English, is a bit like trying to use Swype to transcribe telephone numbers. Wrong tool for the task, period.

  9. If you think nobody's head is that big... on Google's Satellites Could Soon See Your Face From Space · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...you obviously haven't been hanging around here for long.

  10. Re:Anecdotal on About Half of Kids' Learning Ability Is In Their DNA · · Score: 1

    Interesting, and thanks for posting this.

    Apologies for the uninteresting followup, posted to remove an accidental down-moderation. I suppose it would be too much to hope that the next version of Slashdot will not let you mis-moderate simply by releasing the mouse when it's one pixel off from the intended target.

  11. Can we wire Timothy to prevent duplicate posts? on Wiring Programmers To Prevent Buggy Code · · Score: 3, Informative
  12. Municipal fiber? You poor victims. on For Fast Internet in the US, Virginia Tops the Charts · · Score: 5, Funny

    Fortunately, we here in your neighboring Free State of North Carolina elected a legislature that was willing to protect us from the predatory pricing of municipal broadband.

    Well, we elected them, but the big telephone and cable companies did provide a little financial incentive to help keep them honest, as it were.

  13. Oh, for... on Ask Slashdot: "Real" Computer Scientists vs. Modern Curriculum? · · Score: 4, Funny

    Well, in MY opinion, CS students who learned in C or C++ or Pascal or PL/1 are inferior because they use the stack as a crutch, instead of manually keeping track of callback history. If you don't have to write explicit code to keep track of every call, or allocate every local variable, your code will... well, actually, it'll likely be easier to read, easier to maintain, and easier to optimize. But it won't be as good as the code we had to write back in my day.

  14. Re:Funny on Cell Phone Unlocking Is Legal -- For Now · · Score: 2

    Yep, it must be terrible to live in a land where Big Government can high-handedly and arbitrarily restrict the Freedoms of large corporations. It's a shame that the serfs living under such repressive regimes don't have skilled and benevolent lobbyists to help them rise up and throw off their shackles.

    At least, that's what the corporate news outlets here in the US are leading us to believe.

  15. Re:Have you seen Gedit lately? on Comparison: Linux Text Editors · · Score: 1

    Yup. Usable once you surmount the learning curve, and ergonomic.

    I had wrist problems occasionally when I was using keyboard-only UIs, but all I ever had to do was rearrange keyboard and chair to the right positions. (Okay, WordStar on a TRS-80 Mod I was killing me, until I hacked in foot-pedals to use for Shift and up-arrow, er, Control). "Modern" pretty-much-need-the-mouse IDEs pained me enough that I went to a Fingerworks Touchstream keyboard for a number of years, even though it slowed my typing by almost half.

  16. You're welcome to them. on Comparison: Linux Text Editors · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It may not have been wise for me to spend years training vi into my muscle memory, but it's done now, and I'm not especially interested in giving up that advantage.

  17. Flying a TECHNOLOGY DEMO? WTH? on NASA Announces Mars 2020 Rover Payload · · Score: 1

    I'm just about the spaciest space-nutter around, but why the hell are they spending precious money and opportunity to fly a freaking demonstration instead of another actual observational tool?

    Look, we know the composition of Mars' atmosphere. We know how much sunlight falls there, what the temperature range is, and so on. It's dead simple to set up a testbed here on Earth, in a jar, and run the oxygen-production process in the testbed. Better yet, you get to measure its output, tweak its operating parameters, and even do an autopsy on it if something goes wrong.

    The only thing I can see us getting out of "make oxygen just like we did before, but ON MARS" is PR, and I don't really see the PR upside. All the science packages that were accepted, and a lot of them that didn't make the cut, would've given us new knowledge about the planet. Why in either world are we sending this package instead?

  18. Re:interesting split developing on Dear Museums: Uploading Your Content To Wikimedia Commons Just Got Easier · · Score: 1

    I had been wondering about this. A FOAF was a curator at a museum on the West Coast, and when I talked to him about the idea of online displays, he was completely dismissive -- it seemed like anything other than "Maximum Lockdown" didn't even register with him. Then again, this was probably 15 years ago. Was Maximum Lockdown the usual stance before the Internet explosion, or do all three approaches have a well-established history?

  19. I wouldn't keep the hardware intact. on Ask Slashdot: Preparing an Android Tablet For Resale? · · Score: 1

    If you really want to sell it for parts, disassemble it and destroy the main circuit board, or at least grind or pry off the chips with nonvolatile storage.

    Any general treatment (heat, overvoltage, etc.) will surely destroy the rest of the phone before you can be sure it's cleared the nonvolatile storage.

  20. I'm worried about a hurdle nobody's mentioned. on Stanford Team Creates Stable Lithium Anode Using Honeycomb Film · · Score: 1

    It makes perfect sense to use lithium metal as an anode, as a way to minimize weight and maximize specific energy.

    The problem is, it's an alkali metal, useful in a number of chemical processes -- including processes used to make meth. And so far, regulators in the US (and many other areas) have demonstrated that they'll do whatever they can to Fight the Meth Menace, no matter how much collateral damage they cause to industries, economies, and human well-being.

    What kind of ridiculous regulations do you think they'll try to impose on devices that contain a multi-kilogram slab of Widely-Known Drug Precursor? Will we get cars that would have 500-mile range, but for the extra 500 pounds and two kilowatts of DEA/HSA-mandated security shielding and monitoring around the battery pack?

  21. Re:*Yawn* on Stanford Team Creates Stable Lithium Anode Using Honeycomb Film · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yep, real men would never be happy with today's battery technology. That's why I still use a two-cycle engine in my phone.

  22. Don't be silly. on Stanford Team Creates Stable Lithium Anode Using Honeycomb Film · · Score: 1

    You know that light delivery trucks will soon be replaced by drones. That's why we really need the improved batteries.

    At least, that's what Amazon seems to want us to think...

  23. Re:I know you're trying to be funny, but... on Linus Torvalds: "GCC 4.9.0 Seems To Be Terminally Broken" · · Score: 1

    So you're saying that the trains run on time?

  24. Well, I'm picking my jaw up off the floor... on Two South African Cancer Patients Receive 3D Printed Titanium Jaw Implants · · Score: 2

    No, actually, I'm fortunate enough not to have that option. Still, it's good to see this happening for the people who do.

  25. Re:fundementally impossible on Nightfall: Can Kalgash Exist? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Epsilon Lyrae, and the vast number of amateur astronomers who've known about it for ages, would beg to differ. Two components that are naked-eye visible, one a double, one a triple. All gravitationally bound, and apparently quite dynamically stable. Five other nearby stars may be gravitationally bound to the system as well.

    Castor (Alpha Geminorum) is a sextuple system.

    But, of course:

    "It's simply not possible for a system like this to exist. If you point out that systems like this do exist, it doesn't mean that my statement is wrong, it means that you're a wack job, so just shut up."

    Bravo, good AC. Bravo.