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User: ajrs

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Comments · 169

  1. Re:Broken? on Google's Next Challenge, Spam Results · · Score: 1

    http://duckduckgo.com/

    Hey, duck duck go found duck! duck! Go!
    duck! duck! Go!

  2. Re:Broken? on Google's Next Challenge, Spam Results · · Score: 1

    Duck Duck Go

    ? Duck Duck Go is a game featuring rubber duckies, not a search engine.

  3. Re:Good on Why Special Effects No Longer Impress · · Score: 1

    Avatar: The last air bender, a three season cartoon story produced in the United States, is quite good. Not to be confused with the big blue Avatar, or the live action movie that condensed the story from the first season.

  4. Re:Aussies IT Directors Retarded on Aussie Government Gives PDF the Thumbs Down · · Score: 1

    there is a perl library for that

  5. Re:Subjective on The ~200 Line Linux Kernel Patch That Does Wonders · · Score: 1

    By 'they' I mean a distro, like Ubuntu for instance. If 10gui eventually comes up with their own window manager (I'm not sure how they plan to distribute or implement their desktop idea.) Ubuntu could let you choose between it and a more standard one like Gnome the same way you can decide between gnome or kde.

    Also though, the 10gui concept does change the interface pretty dramatically, the concept would work for any program out there out of the box. In fact, if you use one of wacom's bamboo devices which are already available you'd have the benefit of pen input for fine grain control in artsy applications.

    hey, its Linux. They is you! Take a chance, make a new distro.

  6. Re:Now... on Gold Nanoparticles Turn Trees Into Streetlights · · Score: 1

    Make it occur naturally.

    Or rather - aren't there some kinds of mushrooms and other flora that glow in the dark? Why not just splice that plant with a tree. I know, I use the term splice like its an easy task.

    actually, splicing is fairly easy with trees- or did you mean genetic splicing?

  7. Re:There.... on The Hobbit To Be Filmed In New Zealand After All · · Score: 1

    there... the movie!
    back again... the sequel!

  8. Re:what? on Google To Shut Down 411 Service · · Score: 5, Funny

    Never even heard of it. I wonder how many dozens of obscure Google services there are out there

    If only there were some automated tool to find them all. A search engine, if you will....

  9. Re:Laser cooling? on Scientists Using Lasers To Cool Molecules · · Score: 1

    didn't grok the summary?
    article too long, didn't read?
    There has got to be a better way!

    Thanks, ClickOnThis!

    I know, actually a useful contribution... but I couldn't resist.

  10. Re:Ah yes on Wikipedia Entry Turned Into Actual Encyclopedia · · Score: 1

    Truth of it is, if you didn't witness it first hand, you'll never know what actually happened. Everyone revises history, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. The best we can do is ask around and use the majority of agreeing sources as "fact". This is why it's important to be a part of things, as opposed to reading them (says the guy in his mom's basement).

    Even if you do witness something first hand, your own biases and limited perception can change the 'facts'.

  11. Re:Oh, nevermind. on Zombie Ants and Killer Fungus · · Score: 1

    Neither "controlled" the host, it is blind evolutionary luck.

    There's no such thing as non-"blind lucky" evolution.

    Or, from the opposite PoV, there's no luck in large numbers.

    With a large enough number of ants, spores and years, you're bound to get a fungus that makes the ant write Hamlet.

    crap. I just squash that ant last week when he crawled onto my keyboard. How was I to know he was trying to write hamlet?

  12. What a difference a year makes! on Four Men Go Bar-Hopping For 26 Years · · Score: 3, Funny

    25 years of passing out drunk in graveyards and not being able to remember things is a drinking problem.

    26 years of passing out drunk in graveyards and not being able to remember things is a record!

  13. Re:That's how the market is supposed to work. on Just One Out of 16 Hybrids Pays Back In Gas Savings · · Score: 2, Informative

    that is how the market worked. For some period of time you could sell a used Prius for about what you paid for it.

    1. buy a prius
    2. dive it around for a year
    3. buy another one
    4. sell the old one
    5. get a tax credit
    6. profit!

    no ????. The size of the 'profit!' depended on the value of the tax credit, the cost to buy and sell a car (taxes, fees), and one year of depreciation after supply rose to meet demand.

  14. Re:We take great pains on Child Porn As a Weapon · · Score: 1

    I think the only real defense is not to p!ss people off enough to go to these lengths.

    Then there is no defense; some people are just crazy.

  15. How can this be? on If Games Had Super Easy Mode · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wikipedia has a picture of your mom with the definition of 'Super Easy'...

    well, somebody had to say it.

  16. Re:MS invented here JUST LIKE THEY ALWAYS DO on Microsoft's Sleep Proxy Lowers PC Energy Use · · Score: 1

    I'd demo'ed multi-threading systems to a bunch of Windows developers years ago and they were unimpressed.

    Uh, multi-threading wasn't available for the PC until the Pentium 4 was released. Prior to that, x86 processors were incapable of it in anything but multitasking and non-simultaneous multi-threading (same thing, really). If it can't be done simultaneously, there isn't much point to multi-threading.

    That was a full year after Windows XP was released, which came with support for simultaneous multi-threading.

    So I'm not sure what systems you were running with multi-threading, but they for damn sure weren't x86, so there was absolutely no point for a Windows developer to pay any attention to you. It's like saying "my sailboat does 50 knots" to someone who races motorcycles. That may be extremely impressive to a sailor, but to a biker won't be impressive in the slightest.

    Actually, there a quite a few problems that are easier to manage with multiple program pointers with separate memory stacks in the same general address space, even if they are not truly simultaneous. Web servers, for example. Sure, you could have separate process communicating though shared memory- but context switching introduces a fair amount of overhead.

    Anyway, thats what I was using threads for back before windows 98 was released.

  17. Re:Whaazzaaaa? on How To Destroy a Black Hole · · Score: 1

    Have you read some of the crazy shit some string theorists publish? You only think you're joking (and your "misinterpretation" is only about 50 milli-Tiplers of crazy). 100 years from now the publications in string theory-related journals will be a textbook example of how a scientific community can collapse into uselessness.

    You can't reproduce my results because your interpretation of string theory shifts the universe into a non compatible state every time you try the experiment! Did you try more bat guano?

    When experimental results are reproducibly different based on the beliefs of the experimenter, we will have a definitive test for existence of god. Who will exist or not exist depending on what people want to find.

  18. Re:Whaazzaaaa? on How To Destroy a Black Hole · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, theoretically, (unless the theory has changed) during the big bang matter could have been compressed past the Swartzschild radius due to pressure and black-holes formed that mass much less than is required for a black hole to form today from gravity alone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_black_hole Most of these will have evaporated by now (or maybe not depending on how you interpret the string theory), but if they can exist there should still be a great many of these in the universe. We know that a black hole can carry a charge, and the surface gravity can be calculated. It is possible that there may be some of these in the solar system, perhaps in many years we will discover a way to detect them, and increase their charge to the point where they could be manipulated electromagnetically.

    I love a sentence that can be misinterpreted to imply that I can retroactively change the workings of the universe based on my presumably mutable interpretation of a theory. I'm sure magic works just like this.

  19. Re:ya right on New Declassification Process To Open 400 Million Pages of Records · · Score: 1

    The motivation to overclassify is not very strong. It's blatantly against the rules to use classification to hide something embarassing to the US government; The classification on almost all classified documents "leaked" recently was decided long before the embarassing event occured. And yes, people do get reprimanded and punished for applying inappropriate classificiation routinely, since the system is way too complex to be done well.

    I would like to think that, but my expectation is that classification is routinely used to cover up embarrassing events. The legal precedent for the "state secrets privilege" was nothing more that that. If we take the term embarrassing to include criminal, negligent, and treasonous.

  20. Re:ok everyone on New Declassification Process To Open 400 Million Pages of Records · · Score: 1

    These are old documents. Assuming they are black and white scans or original sources in simple text based formats, you're probably looking at less than 100TB of data. Any medium sized business could build out the infrastructure to search that.

    Any medium sized business has better uses for its resources.

  21. Re:A redundant first post on Time To Dump XP? · · Score: 0, Troll

    All "fixed that for you" posts are not just redundant. They're also redundant.

    Fixed that for you.

    mods, please mod parent as redundant

  22. Re:One of the biggest problems is configurability on 'Month of PHP Security' Finds 60 Bugs · · Score: 5, Funny

    You young kids and your legacy php applications. Get off my network.

  23. Re:Reverse Works Too on Part-Human, Part-Machine Transistor Devised · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Future devices could work just the opposite, where an outside electrical current could power the pump and alter how quickly ions are pumped into or out of a cell.

    That has potentially far reaching effects assuming they can eventually find a way to install these things throughout the body (or even better just on targeted cells). You could install one of these devices on each cancer cell, for example, and power a pump that forced chemo drugs into the cells. That means that cancer cells would receive a much higher dose than non-cancer cells meaning less side effects and/or more effective treatments. Of course, there's a million problems to be solved before such a treatment could become reality, but the possibilities are endless.

    If you could install one of these devices in a cancer cell, it wouldn't need to pump it full of medicine. Water or would work just fine. Pop!

  24. Re:How is this human? on Part-Human, Part-Machine Transistor Devised · · Score: 4, Funny

    Imagine a Beowulf cluster powered by slashdot users!

  25. Re:Interesting on Researchers Create 4nm Transistor With Seven Atoms · · Score: 1

    if it needs to be in a vacuum then it would use a vacuum tube

    It would have to be in a tube to be a vaccuum tube, but it would still be a transistor. The way a vaccuum tube works is electricity heats a filiment (cathode), analogous to a transistor's emitter, which throws out electrons and photons. There is a mesh, analogous to a transistor's gate, that the current to be amplified is fed to which controls controls how much energy reaches the tube's anode. The anode is analogous to a transistor's collector.

    Even if this were inside a vaccume tube, it would still be a transistor, while an old-fashioned amplifier tube is not a transistor.

    So, were talking about a series of tubes then?