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User: almitydave

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  1. It's a name badge on Curiosity Spies Unidentified, Metallic Object On Mars · · Score: 1

    It says "PINBACK"

  2. Did you hear the one... on Free Font Helps People With Dyslexia · · Score: 1

    ...about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac?

    He used to lay awake at night wondering if there was a dog.

  3. Re:One thing is missing: on Supreme Court Won't Hear Body-Scanner Appeal · · Score: 2

    I read this blurb as well, and it sounds like the issue under appeal was the Florida federal court's dismissal based purely on jurisdiction. Ok, refile in D.C. I don't understand if there's more to it than that - anyone know more? There's no mention of case # or anything in this blurb.

  4. ACTUAL FORTUNE COOKIE on Appeals Court Caves To TSA Over Nude Body Scanners · · Score: 2

    ... that my wife opened contained this message:

    "Man who walks sideways through airport security is going to Bangkok."

  5. Re: Re: RE: REGARDING: re: QUOTEDRe:(5) offtopic on Light Bulb Ban Produces Hoarding In EU, FUD In U.S. · · Score: 1

    (Score:5, Animaniacs)

  6. Re:Autobahn on Texas Opens Fastest US Highway With 85 MPH Limit · · Score: 4, Informative

    Going a safe speed is the most important thing, I applaud you for that, but there are a couple of other relevant facts:
    1) Impeding the flow of traffic is illegal.
    2) Driving in the passing lane without passing is also illegal.
    3) Your speedometer may not match those of other drivers. They may be "going the speed limit" as well.

    I've heard this argument many times, and people need to remember there are more laws than the speed limit that govern how you should drive, especially what lane you should be in. Respecting the posted speed limit is good, but so is respecting all those signs that say "slow traffic keep right." If your aim is to follow the law, follow ALL of them. And probably don't assume people going faster are jerks. Speedometers can vary quite a bit. See Car and Driver's feature on the topic.

  7. Re:Autobahn on Texas Opens Fastest US Highway With 85 MPH Limit · · Score: 1

    Amen to this. If your car, road, and driver are all prepared for 100 MPH, then 100 MPH is safe. The problem in the US is that while roads and cars are suited for high speeds, most drivers are not. We need to raise the quality standards for drivers.

  8. Re:Autobahn on Texas Opens Fastest US Highway With 85 MPH Limit · · Score: 1

    A vehicle at 85mph will use about 40% more fuel than one at 70mph. That means it costs more, it uses up a finite fossil fuel faster, and causes more pollution and CO2.

    In both the car's I've owned, this is not the case. Other factors, especially gearing (controlling where in the power band the engine is running) have a huge effect. My current car (Pontiac G6) gets about the same mileage at 80 MPH as it does at 70 MPH. My previous car (Pontiac Grand Am) got better mileage at 85 than at 70. Yes, you're burning more fuel per unit of time, but depending on horsepower curve, your fuel per unit of distance may actually be the same or lower since you're covering more ground in that time.

    Because of aerodynamics, the wind resistance curve will at some point always win out and drive that efficiency curve downward, but you can't universally assume the peak of that curve is below 85.

    Both cars I had were mechanically fully capable of 90 MPH+ cruising speeds, as long as the driver were able. The reason that high speeds are dangerous in the US is because (as stated elsewhere in this thread) drivers here are not very good at it. I've long thought a country of this size would benefit from a high-speed toll road with special licensing and vehicle requirements. It would work fine as long as lane discipline and safe following distance were enforced, like on the Autobahn.

    Things like staying in the left lane without passing, driving too slowly, making unsafe lane changes, inattentive driving, etc. are already illegal and enforceable in most if not all jurisdictions, and I wish cops started paying equal attention to these drivers that create problems and not just speeders.

  9. Minesweeper times on Ask Slashdot: What Should a Unix Fan Look For In a Windows Expert? · · Score: 2

    Make sure he can beat expert in less than 90 seconds. Only then can you be sure he has enough years of experience with Windows.

  10. Re:No.. on Is It Time For an OpenGL Gaming Revolution? · · Score: 1

    Ah yes, the "good old days" of using memmaker and trying to figure out how in the heck I'm going configure my boot disk to get X-Wing CD to run when it required 585KB of base memory and my CD-ROM drive's manufacturer driver took 40KB. Thank God for that Oak Technology driver I found somewhere that only used 18KB and seemed to work with every drive!

    Kids these days, they don't know how easy they've got it!

  11. Re:No.. on Is It Time For an OpenGL Gaming Revolution? · · Score: 1

    Yes, exactly. Thanks for clarifying. I should also have been more clear that I meant that Direct3D is the only part of DirectX that competes with OpenGL directly.

    I remember when MS announced the whole DirectX concept, and I never thought it would work - I had thought the overhead of the Windows OS was too much of a resource hog compared to DOS to get reliable performance in games. But the ease of writing to one API, versus having to code your game to support all the different hardware on the market, won out among developers.

  12. Re:No.. on Is It Time For an OpenGL Gaming Revolution? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Did we ever need direct X? Any reason why direct X couldnt be an open standard? Were they too self centred to just work on opengl?

    Don't forget the origin of DirectX: Microsoft wanted to encourage game developers to embrace Windows 95 at a time when Win 3.11 had been seen as a business-application-only platform, with DOS preferred for games. DirectX was developed as a collection of APIs for games running in Windows 95 that handled input, graphics, music, sound, networking, etc. Only Direct3D, which initially shipped with DirectX 2.0, is directly competing with OpenGL.

    I don't think there was a similar comprehensive API available for the PC market at the time DirectX was released. My copy of Need for Speed SE actually runs on either DOS 6.22 or Win95 w/ DirectX.

  13. Re:Biohazard suits.. on After a Year In Orbit, US Air Force's X37-B Will Conclude Its Secret Mission · · Score: 1

    ... don't know the official name of the ... guy who dumps fuel in the race cars ....

    If it were the space program, he'd be the Propellant Installation Engineer.
    If he were in a union he'd be a Flammable Fluids Expert.
    In the military, he'd be a Motorcraft Refueling Technician.
    But this is auto racing we're talking about, so we just call him the Fueler.

  14. Re:News Corp making a play for Rovio? on Fox News Ties 'Flame' Malware To Angry Birds · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... or "BMW 3-Series tied to Nazi death camps" ... or "Nuclear testing tied to Fukushima disaster" ... or "President Obama tied to Florida cannibal"

    It's almost like a game, find the most outrageous thing you can tie to the most popular innocent sounding thing, using the most superficial of reasons.

    "Killer Physics: Gyroscopic Effect Tied to All Motorcycle Fatalities!"

    I'm not even all that creative, I'm sure others can do better.

  15. Re:770,000 parsecs? on Andromeda On Collision Course With the Milky Way · · Score: 2

    The way George Lucas explained it is, hyperspace is the same speed for everyone, but travelling through hyperspace requires complicated navigational computations to avoid gravity wells, and the Millennium Falcon's computer was so powerful that it could quickly compute a more complex, shorter route through space than the average smuggler's ship. Han was a hacker/overclocker, you see, as well as a mechanic. There are a couple references in the movies to "calculating the jump to lightspeed" and whatnot. Lucas claims of course he knew that parsecs were distance; this is how he always meant it from the beginning.

    DISCLAIMER: I'm not defending Lucas' explanation, although his explanation is plausible, I always thought the term was just misused. I don't buy that he meant it that way from the start, although it adds an interesting element to that method of FTL travel.

  16. Re:Headphones do improve concentration on Do Headphones Help Or Hurt Productivity? · · Score: 3, Informative

    I wear headphones (and usually listen to music when I'm wearing them) to quiet the conversations and noisy distractions, including the ever-present white noise generator, which is designed to drown out the conversations and noisy distractions caused by our open floor plan (no cubicle walls, to facilitate communication), but is so loud that conversations are difficult unless you speak loudly.

  17. Re:Brain on Did a Genome Copying Mistake Lead To Human Intelligence? · · Score: 1

    Great, now I've got this stuck in my head.

    They're laboratory mice,
    Their genes have been spliced,
    They're dinky,
    They're Pinky and the Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain,
    Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain...

  18. Re:really? on Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief · · Score: 1

    I could even (theoretically) perform the same experiments to see if I get the same data.
    The difference is that with trust there *are* experiments I can perform.

    So if/when scientists at CERN announce they've discovered the Higgs Boson, are you going to claim trust in their findings is valid because you could, in theory, build your own LHC and validate their findings independently?

    Pope John Paul II in his "Fides et Ratio" defined faith as "giving intellectual assent to revealed truth," and religious faith as the same with respect to divinely revealed truth. Thomas Aquinas actually viewed theology as a science, with divine revelation as its data.

    1 Thessalonians 5:21 says "Test everything; retain what is good". From the commentary there:

    The meaning here is, that they were carefully to examine everything proposed for their belief. They were not to receive it on trust; to take it on assertion; to believe it because it was urged with vehemence, zeal, or plausibility. In the various opinions and doctrines which were submitted to them for adoption, they were to apply the appropriate tests from reason and the word of God, and what they found to be true they were to embrace; what was false they were to reject. Christianity does not require people to disregard their reason, or to be credulous. It does not expect them to believe anything because others say it is so. It does not make it a duty to receive as undoubted truth all that synods and councils have decreed; or all that is advanced by the ministers of religion.

    At least that's how it's supposed to be. This fundamentalism from both sides ("Leviticus says gays are evil!" "Leviticus says kill yours kids if they talk smack so God is evil!") completely misses the point of what the Bible is, namely a collection of books chronicling the relationship of God to his people. This is the inerrant truth of the book(s), the development of the covenants between God and man, the story of salvation. It's not a scientific text; the truth in the bible is not cosmological (God didn't create the universe in 6 days), geological (the earth isn't just 6000 years old), biological (Adam didn't live to 900 years), or mathematical (pi != 3). It's mixed parts history, poetry, mythology, record-keeping, and moral lessons like Aesop's Fables.

    Fr. Barron puts it better than I ever could.

  19. Re:If it is his brand of liberty. on House Passes CISPA · · Score: 1

    It is for the unborn.

  20. Re:Opening the JPEG takes Eternity on World's Largest Digital Camera Project Passes Critical Milestone · · Score: 1

    Well that's significantly cooler. I did read TFA, but didn't click through to the LSST site itself. Thanks for the details, and obviously you can't image the whole sky at once from the Earth. This would allow planetary surface details to be studied over time (although rotation means you won't see the same side in every image).

  21. Re:Opening the JPEG takes Eternity on World's Largest Digital Camera Project Passes Critical Milestone · · Score: 2

    Has anyone worked out what the pixels-per-arc-second resolution would be?

    OK, if my math is correct, assuming a single image encompasses the entire sky, this is 167 square arc-seconds per pixel, or about 13 linear arc-seconds per pixel. This would mean the moon would be 645 pixels across, Venus would be (currently) about 3 pixels across, and Jupiter at its closest would be about 4.

  22. Re:Opening the JPEG takes Eternity on World's Largest Digital Camera Project Passes Critical Milestone · · Score: 1

    Quick, buy stock in HDD manufacturers! 6 million gigabytes (by which I assume they mean 5.7 petabytes) per year comes out to roughly 113 terabytes per week. I hope they get volume discounts on drives!

    Seriously, though, this is cool. I can't wait to see what sort of time-lapse videos they can make from this. Has anyone worked out what the pixels-per-arc-second resolution would be?

  23. Re:"The only music that you can hear for free..." on Canadian Media Companies Target CBC's Free Music Site · · Score: 1

    Indeed.

    And purely to prove him wrong out of spite, here you go Canadian (and all other) Slashdotters: I hereby release this recording I made into the public domain: Bach French Suite #3, Menuet & Trio. Free music.

    (Oh what, you wanted good music?)

    See also Wikipedia

  24. Re:5 meters per second and it's how long? on Nanoscale Race Car Gets 3D Printed With a Laser · · Score: 1

    I was confused by this as well.

    The printer isn’t slow, either. In just 4 minutes it can print 100 layers consisting of 200 lines per layer. That translates into five meters of polymer printed in one second, which is actually a world record.

    So 20,000 lines in 240 seconds comes out to 83.3 lines/sec, making each line 60 mm wide? Either I'm misunderstanding (always a strong possibility) or there's a typo there somewhere.

  25. Re:More details on MIT Lecturer Defends His Standing As Email Inventor · · Score: 4, Informative

    According to the Wikipedia article linked above, he copyrighted his email program which was called "EMAIL". So the copyright is on the software, not the term, which as numerous people here have mentioned is not eligible for copyright.