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User: VAXcat

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  1. Re:Coastal people live in their own universe on We Are Running Out of Sand · · Score: 2

    It's sort of like the Dunning Kreuger effect - the cognitive skills that wold enable you to tell if you are rational are exactly the ones that the lack of makes you irrational...thus, your assertion that you are rational is just another symptom of the California effect.

  2. Re:Don't we already do that? on Study Shows Direct Brain Interface Between Humans · · Score: 1

    But happy...and from what his wife was saying later in the movie, no longer impotent....

  3. Re:It's been done...in 1959 on New Particle Collider Is One Foot Long · · Score: 1

    AAIEEEE! I don't' know what I'd be more scared of - the X-rays this thing generates, the high voltage potentially lethal power supplies, the flying glass when one of the reservoir jugs breaks, or the incredibly toxic vaporized mercury!!! in the diffusion pump. People didn't scare very easily back in the 50s

  4. Re:Tip of the iceberg on Pope Francis Declares Evolution and Big Bang Theory Are Right · · Score: 5, Funny

    HA! That reminds me of what Terry Carr, a science fiction writer, once said, that if the Bible was released as an Ace Double, it would have been titled "War God of Israel", with the flip side called "The Thing with Three Souls".

  5. Re:Not sure about this one on Austin Airport Tracks Cell Phones To Measure Security Line Wait · · Score: 1

    So, you think there is a WiFiNoFly list of mac addresses maintained by the government?

  6. Re:global warmening worse than we thought... on Lockheed Claims Breakthrough On Fusion Energy Project · · Score: 1

    Skinkworks? I like it - where all the lizard based technology is being developed.

  7. Only one way to deal with this problem on If Your Cloud Vendor Goes Out of Business, Are You Ready? · · Score: 2

    Make sure you keep your resume up to date and on local storage. When your company's cloud vendor fails...print your resume and use it to get a job somewhere else.

  8. WiFi boombox on Raspberry Pi Sales Approach 4 Million · · Score: 2

    I bought a Pi to stick into an old Sony Boombox that had a worn out CD player. I added a WiFi USB adapter andI loaded MPD/MPC on it and use it to stream music from the house server. I mostly use it in in the garage and the backyard. I added a USB sound adapter, and spliced its output into the boombox's CD input. Sounds great and now I can listen to any of the albums I've loaded on the server instead of having to carry CDs with the boombox.

  9. Bill Gates... on Bill Gates: Bitcoin Is 'Better Than Currency' · · Score: 1

    ...I've seen what his work is like - not all that interested in his opinions...

  10. Re:Let us not forget, this man committed treason on How President Nixon Saved/Wrecked the American Space Program · · Score: 1

    I agree! Time for a Synod Horrenda to try and punish Nixon. I'm not joking - it should be done.

  11. Re:Missing out on Man Walks Past Security Screening Staring At iPad, Causing Airport Evacuation · · Score: 1

    Most people are such poor shots with a handgun, if you get more than 10 feet away from them, they haven't got a hope in hell of hitting you.

  12. I can't stand this kind of disrespectful joking around, with puns no less. I'm positive that we can run the negative energy displayed by your post to ground.

  13. Re:Not all contributions / sacrifice are equivalen on Publishers Gave Away 123 Million Books During World War Two · · Score: 1

    Robert Heinlein, in Glory road, quoted Major Ian Hay, back in the “War to End War,” who described the structure of military organizations: Regardless of T.O., all military bureaucracies consist of a Surprise Party Department, a Practical Joke Department, and a Fairy Godmother Department. The first two process most matters as the third is very small; the Fairy Godmother Department is one elderly female GS-5 clerk usually out on sick leave.

  14. Pentangle on Northwest Passage Exploration Ship Found · · Score: 1

    That reminds me of this great Pentangle song. You can hear it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... And since it reminds me of that song. now I have to listen to all of the Pentangle's works again - it'll be a good day.

  15. Can't let the Russians get ahead of us on this! on Restoring Salmon To Their Original Habitat -- With a Cannon · · Score: 1

    Mr. President! We must not allow a Salmon Cannon gap!

  16. HP vs TI on How the Outdated TI-84 Plus Still Holds a Monopoly On Classrooms · · Score: 1

    This reminds me of the first time I tried to use an HP RPN calculator. It was circa 1972, and I was taking undergraduate courses at Rice University. I showed up for my physics final only to realize Id forgotten my calculator, a TI SR-10 - an early replacement for the slide rule, the basic 4 functions, square root, inverse and squared added. There were lots of calculations to do on these tests, and it was gonna be a slog without a calculator. The TA proctoring the exam had his calculator on his desk, an HP35, but he wasn't using it, so I asked him if I could borrow it. With a sly grin he asked "ever used an HP calculator before"? I said, no I hadn't, but, how different could it be, a calculator's a calculator, isn't it? "Sure", he agreed, and pushed it over to me with a smile. So went my first encounter with RPN, which I had never heard of before....I didn't do at all well on that exam. Oddly enough, years later when I got an HP16 for my programming job, I felt in love with RPN, and prefer it to algebraic entry calculators to this day.

  17. Re:article summary is wrong on Aussie Airlines To Allow Uninterrupted Mobile Use During Flights · · Score: 1

    From my flight training, two things they say you can't have too much of - runway ahead of you, and altitude.

  18. Waiting for summer to end... on Slashdot Asks: Should Schooling Be Year-Round? · · Score: 1

    I'm looking forward to the end of summer, when all the college kids go back to school and stop spending all day taking down my Ingress portals...

  19. It's obvious on What Do You Do When Your Mind-Numbing IT Job Should Be Automated? · · Score: 1

    Automate it, don't tell anyone, and then get paid for doing nothing while you waste all of your time browsing stuff on the Interweb. That's what I've done...

  20. Re:VMS is dead; long live WNT on HP Gives OpenVMS New Life and Path To X86 Port · · Score: 2

    You are only middlin' right. WNT is like VMS as far as the general design of the kernel goes - but most of what makes VMS the wonder that it is is missing. No versioning file system, no DCL (DEC Command Language), no Distributed Lock Manager, no clustering (WNT clustering isn't even in the same league as VMS clustering), no logical name support, no RMS (Record Management System), no sophisticated Batch and Print environment, the list goes on and on. Without these things, WNT may schedule tasks and manage memory more or less like VMS does, but does not deliver the utility and user experience that make VMS legendary.

  21. Banjos...not a fan... on Secret of the Banjo's Unique Sound Discovered By Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist · · Score: 5, Funny

    One day my old pal David has played a gig with some local musicians, including his roommate, Bob, who was a banjo player. After the set, Bob was going somewhere else with some other people, so he asked Dave to take his banjo home for him. On the way home, David stopped at the convenience store to get a six pack. As he was standing in line, he suddenly realized that he had left the car windows down, and that he was in a bad neighborhood. He rushed out, but, sure as hell, the worst possible thing had happened - exactly what he was afraid of - someone had spotted the open car windows, and thrown two more banjoes in the car.

  22. Earliest I know of... on The Rise and Fall of the Cheat Code · · Score: 1

    Inthe 70s, Zork on PDP11s had GDT (game debugging tool). It allowed you to manipulate the arrays of objects, locations, etc. It had a password prompt, that demanded your name, cat and zip code. I recall that the name was supnik, the cat was barney, and I've forgotten the zip code. Bob Supnik was the DEC engineer that translated ZORK frm MDL to Fortran.

  23. Re:A bunch of nuns? on Autonomous Car Ethics: If a Crash Is Unavoidable, What Does It Hit? · · Score: 1

    I steal the lever and see what I can get for it on Ebay.

  24. Re:I wonder if I'm on the list on Researchers See a Post-Snowden Chilling Effect In Our Search Data · · Score: 1

    Before you try using H2O2 80% as propellant, read about how dangerous it was as the monopopellant "T-Stoff" in the ME163. Lots of explosions and dissolved pilots...

  25. Re:Are there any old drives around that read these on US Nuclear Missile Silos Use Safe, Secure 8" Floppy Disks · · Score: 1

    DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) sold lots of systems that used these 8" disks. Lots of PDP-8 systems and PDP-11 systems used them for system devices. DEC's first VAX computers, the 11/780, used them as load devices for loading the microcode before the system would boot from a real hard disk. I have a bunch of them in my collection, attached to PDP-11s, still working fine.