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User: nickersonm

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Comments · 186

  1. Re:Been there, done that on Google's House of Cards · · Score: 2

    WinKey+Tab is an alternate presentation of the standard Alt+Tab window. I don't find it particularly useful, but I imagine someone does. Perhaps when working with many similar windows?

  2. Re:"UN Says: Why Not Eat More Insects?" on UN Says: Why Not Eat More Insects? · · Score: 1

    Personally, the "gross" part about eating insects is that they're too small to easily remove the guts and other undesirable portions from. With a large mammal it's (relatively) easy to chop off chunks of meat and fat and not much else. Even if it's not particularly harmful, I don't want to be eating insect brains, indigestible exoskeleton, and guts with my small amount of insect muscle.

  3. Re:F22s on Ender's Game Trailer Released · · Score: 2

    All that stuff in atmosphere is presumably part of a recap of the invasion of Earth.

  4. Re:We Wish on Ask Slashdot: What If We Don't Run Out of Oil? · · Score: 2

    Transmission losses in the US are only about 7%.

  5. Re:Please no on Politician Wants Sci-fi To Be Mandatory In School · · Score: 1

    I've been reading several SF novels per week for over a decade. Some are certainly garbage, but with the extremely large selection available, there's no reason to pick those.

  6. Re:Third parties, generally, are not good on Ask Slashdot: What Planks Would You Want In a Platform of a Political Party? · · Score: 1

    Precisely. One has to think long term and be willing to accept a few years of spoiling effects in order to induce the larger political parties to change their policies to what one prefers.

  7. Re:Do the waves matter? on World's Largest Ocean Thermal Power Plant Planned For China · · Score: 2

    "The boundary between cold water and warm, the Thermocline, has been important to undersea warfare for hundreds of years of man's history. Now we have found away to harness that power for constructive purposes. Once what cloaked us can now feed us. Once what shielded us from death, now brings us life."

    Captain Ulrik Svensgaard, "The Ripple and the Wave"

  8. Re:Not your father's delicate psyche on Tiny Tentacled Microorganisms Named After Cthulu · · Score: 2

    I found Lovecraft's cosmic horrors to generally be interesting aliens or alien artifacts. I always feel sorry for the Old Ones when I read At the Mountains of Madness.

  9. Re:Wire ties on Ask Slashdot: Extreme Cable Management? · · Score: 1

    Yes. You can buy cheap rolls of velcro strap marketed for use as plant-ties in the gardening section of hardware stores.

  10. Re:Pilot Hi-Tec Pens on Ask Slashdot: The Search For the Ultimate Engineer's Pen · · Score: 1

    I also prefer the Signo DX - while similar to the Hi-Tec-C, they're actually waterproof. The Hi-Tec-C ink smears in water. Signo DX pens also have a stronger nib that won't bend if you drop it. That said, either is pretty good for plain office writing.

  11. Re:so all those people weren't crazy on US Air Force's 1950s Supersonic Flying Saucer Declassified · · Score: 1

    Sounds like aurorae. Perhaps temporarily extending down to their latitudes as a result of a solar flare.

  12. Re:All Edison's fault on Light Bulb Ban Produces Hoarding In EU, FUD In U.S. · · Score: 1

    My bathroom has had few-dollar CFLs running fine for >6 years without a single replacement, and that includes moving apartments (and reusing the same bulbs). They just came from the cheapest Costco CFL-pack I could find. I have no idea how people are killing CFLs, I have never seen one die, and they're all I use.

  13. Re:Why coffee is so hard to carry without slopping on Ig Nobels Feature Exploding Colonoscopies, Left Leaning Views of Eiffel Tower · · Score: 1

    If you move your cup up and down at the frequency of your pace, it will double the apparent frequency as seen by the mug. This is usually sufficient to prevent it from slopping.

  14. Re:Methinks people don't appreciate the scales her on Bill Clinton Backs 100 Year Starship · · Score: 2

    The problem with constant acceleration is energy. It doesn't really matter how long or how hard you're accelerating, with 100% matter to energy conversion and a photon drive (100% energy to thrust), you would only be able to reach 0.6c by converting half your ship's mass. A constant 1g trip to anywhere interesting would take unimaginable amounts of energy.

    This requirement can be slightly reduced via external acceleration (eg. laser boosting), but then you're talking planetary-scale focusing mirrors if you want to beam power out of your local Oort cloud. That would only get you a moderate gain, though: 0.7c for a ship-mass of beamed power at 100% efficiencies. All this is of course ignoring the interstellar medium, as well.

  15. Re:But ... on The World's First 3D-Printed Gun · · Score: 1

    If one looks at similar statistics by state in the US, murder-by-firearm also does not correlate with gun ownership. Rather, it slightly tracks population density. I recently updated my murder and firearm statistics spreadsheet with the FBI's 2010 murder data.

  16. Re:The true enemy... on 12 Dead, 50 Injured at The Dark Knight Rises Showing In Colorado · · Score: 1
    Thanks, that data is somewhat more recent than what I previously had. I've used it to update my by-state US gun ownership and murder data. Conclusions:
    • Gun ownership and gun murder are uncorrelated or slightly inversely correlated.
    • Gun ownership is strongly inversely correlated with population density.
    • Murder rates are slightly correlated with population density, gun murder slightly moreso. (I'd guess the relation would be stronger if I did a by-county comparison instead of by state)
    • Gun ownership is weakly inversely correlated with overall murder rates.

    Note, the gun ownership data is from 2001 - if someone can find something more recent, I'll update it.

  17. Re:Here's a better article... on Dark Matter Filament Finally Found · · Score: 5, Informative

    Strangely there's no citation of the paper in that article. Here's the arXiv preprint.

  18. Re:The strange world of futurist on A Look At the "Information Superhighway," As It Looked In 1985 · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's an excellent point - there seems to be a certain timeframe beyond which futurists fail to consider the implications of progressive implementation. On only slightly shorter timeframes, they can actually do quite well - for example, AT&T had a series of "You Will" ads in 1993 that were strangely accurate in predicting modern technology. Presumably it has something to do with extending an existing technology in a logical way rather than trying to determine the intermediate uses of new concepts.

  19. Related story from last year on MIT Creates Glucose Fuel Cell To Power Implanted Brain-Computer Interfaces · · Score: 3, Informative

    This looks quite similar to a European effort reported last year that successfully tested glucose fuel cells in rats in 2010. This MIT one can be fabricated in silicon, though, so hopefully has the potential to be cheaper.

  20. Re:So.... on Venezuela Bans the Commercial Sale of Firearms and Ammunition · · Score: 1

    Fun fact: Surgeons are 130 times more likely than gunowners to leave a foreign object in someone (assumptions: all gunshot wounds count, and surgeons never leave foreign objects in patients which do not undergo general anesthesia).

  21. Re:Out of curiosity on Online Courses and the $100 Graduate Degree · · Score: 1

    Higher education degrees in the US for science and engineering degrees (not usually mathematics, I don't know about non-science technology degrees) are generally paid for by working as a TA or research assistant half-time. This usually waives or pays tuition and provides a moderate stipend, often funded via grant money or similar from the research group the student is working for. This is less common for Masters than it is for Doctorates, though.

  22. Re:How? on Human Water Use Accounts For 42% of Recent Sea Level Rise · · Score: 1

    Perhaps you should do the math. Assuming a 3.6e8 km^2 surface area for the ocean, the largest reservoir alone, going by Wikipedia's 180km^3 figure, could account for 0.5mm of sea level. A trivial calculation. Others have posted similar further up the page.

  23. Re:There's no starship with just an ion drive on Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise In 20 Years · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately, constant high acceleration is energetically impossible. By the time you get to ~0.7c, you've used up half the mass of your ship if you have a perfectly efficient matter to kinetic energy converter (eg. a 100% efficient photon drive). I.E. your kinetic energy is now equal to your rest mass. Good luck getting anywhere near that with conventional propulsion methods!

  24. Re:WTF on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Benchmarked · · Score: 1

    They seem to have merely omitted the games which favor AMD more strongly. Compare, for example, the Metro 2033 benchmarks (or BF3, or Skyrim) and you can see that they are relatively similar. THG did not test Crysis or Total War: Shogun 2, which the AMD cards perform better on.

  25. Re:anyone surprised? on Whistleblower: NSA Has All of Your Email · · Score: 2

    I'll be voting for Ron Paul not because I agree with him on everything (although I agree with him on several things), but because I think it would be better to have a significant change, even if it includes crazy changes, rather than more of the same. It would be beneficial to shake up the current Federal government policies.