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User: dotsandlines

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  1. Re:So another "Hailo"? on Arro Taxi App Arrives In NYC As 'Best Hope' Against Uber · · Score: 1

    The last (and I mean /last/) time I hailed a cab it was with an app called Taxi Magic (now Curb). After 40 minutes and a muffled unintelligible phone call from the driver, I got back on the app and saw the little GPS icon of his car had gone to the airport instead of picking me up.

    A friend accidentally left her purse in a Lyft car. Clicked one link in the confirmation email, which started a text conversation with the driver, who promptly brought it back to her apartment. Try that with any taxi service.

  2. Not going to matter with a full moon on The Meteors You've Waited All Year For · · Score: 1
  3. Re:what price increases? on Time Warner Deal Is How Comcast Will Fight Cord Cutters · · Score: 1

    Maybe where you are. For me, at three miles south of a state capital's downtown core, DSL can't be had at any price.

  4. Re:Cloud Rendering on Throwable 36-Camera Ball Nearly Ready To Toss · · Score: 1

    Jonas, what sort of pixel dimensions are we talking about on an equirectangular projection?

  5. The astronomy community begs you on Could Flying Cars Actually Be On Their Way? · · Score: 1

    Dear god no.

  6. Re:Next Gen Q on Ask Slashdot: How To Introduce Someone To Star Trek? · · Score: 2

    I actually think Voyager needed a character like Q a lot more than TNG did. Voyager needed a recurring villain that they could meet up with every now and then even though their main goal was to travel as fast as possible back home. Q could have done that, while tempting them with instant transport home if only they'd sufficiently prove their humanity out in the oh so dangerous delta quadrant. That might still qualify him as a dumb plot device, but it would have made a little more sense. Instead, Voyager kept meeting with the same dumb villains over and over again even though they should have fled their territory after three episodes, and killed off potentially interesting shipboard recurring characters, like Brad Dourif's psychopath crewman.

  7. Re:Also... on Venus To Transit the Sun In June, Not Again Until 2117 · · Score: 1

    Agreed! OK, so I work at a planetarium too. We really need a secret handshake or something.

  8. Re:Ahhh...memories and Blutack on For Sinclair Fans, The ZX81 Lives On · · Score: 1

    Never thought of that - that would have saved me no end of grief.

    But I did have a Winky Board - a little circuit board to go between the ZX81 and the cassette player, presumably to improve reliability of loads and saves. For all I know it just made a couple LEDs blink.

    I had both a ZX81 and a TS1000. (and the TS1500 printer.) One of the computers couldn't use the memory expansion pack, and the other one couldn't use the cassette deck. And me with a stack of tapes of games that required 16K memory...

  9. Re:You too can do this on Turning the Hayden Planetarium Into a Giant Videogame · · Score: 1

    There would also be some difficulty in getting each of the computers to run the same game engine simultaneously, taking in the same input and outputting its appropriate piece of the dome image, in real time and all synchronized. It's certainly possible, but I doubt with some unmodified, off-the-shelf game.

  10. Re:I like the old ones on Turning the Hayden Planetarium Into a Giant Videogame · · Score: 2

    My dome has a GOTO Chiron hybrid system + E&S Digistar 3, that communicate together to keep digital constellation figures and other graphics aligned with the mechanical star field. The Chiron has a reasonably small profile and doesn't get in the way like some of the old beasts did. Wouldn't trade it for anything.

  11. Re:I like the old ones on Turning the Hayden Planetarium Into a Giant Videogame · · Score: 1

    You forgot about the color of the old Digistar stars, uniformly pale green. Digistar 3 is significantly better, but no substitute for a optomechanical star ball. About the best attempt at digital stars I've seen is in the newly renovated theater in Chicago, with 8K resolution, distributed over NINETEEN video projectors. Each requiring automated alignment, registration and color balance. The projectors also have an insane contrast ratio so that the stars are bright and the black in between is black (not washed-out grey)

  12. Not NASA on What If Aliens Came To Save the Galaxy From Mankind? · · Score: 1

    Not a NASA study There seems to be an increasing problem - people who happen to work for NASA do some other side projects, and NASA gets credit/blame for it.

  13. Re:nt on Hijacked Fox News Twitter Account Falsely Claims Obama Shot Dead · · Score: 1

    That's local news from a Fox affiliate, not Fox News.

  14. Re:The Answer on Could Apple Kill Off Mac OS X? · · Score: 1

    I don't know. Can you repeat the question?

  15. brand names on France Bans Facebook and Twitter From Radio and TV · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not that I agree with the French policy (or RTFS), but it's recently bothered me (in a very slight way) that we now have forms of communication that can only be referred to through the brand name. We could chat, text, fax, phone and blog without referring to a company name, but Tweets and Facebook posts seem harder to generalize. Just saying something's been "posted online" seems too vague. The proper generic verb hasn't been invented yet.

  16. Re:There's a big difference, though on Netflix Subscriber Base Eclipses Comcast's · · Score: 1

    I can't. Three miles south of downtown of a state capitol and I don't have coverage. Comcast, Clearwire, or dialup. Them's the choices.

  17. Re:You're A Newbie on Blender 2.57 Released — and It's Easy To Use! · · Score: 1

    I'd wager that 95% of those who give up on Blender right away do it because they couldn't left-click on an object to select it. Face it, you're in weird territory if you can't even assume *that*.

  18. Re:Politics... on NASA Announces Final Homes of Shuttle Fleet · · Score: 1

    Um, yeah but the Columbia broke up over Texas and Louisiana.

  19. Re:Begging the question on Tennessee Bill Helps Teachers Challenge Evolution · · Score: 1

    Translated into 6th grader speak: "Why do I have to learn this? It's not like I'm ever gonna use it!"

    If evolution is wrong, and the universe is 6000 years old, than most of biology, geology, physics, and just about every other science is also grossly wrong. It's a cornerstone of modern scientific knowledge and far, far from inconsequential. You want kids to learn biology but leave out evolution?

  20. Re:No No No !!!!! It will be BARELY noticable on See The Supermoon Tonight · · Score: 1

    Quote from wiki: "The name SuperMoon was coined by astrologer..."

    aaand that's about as far as I need to read.

    It's 14% larger than its smallest possible size. 1.4% larger than it was last month. There is absolutely nothing 'super' about this. You won't be able to tell the difference without a measuring device.