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User: bdubSOv1iKIJ403M

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  1. Smell map ? on Ask Slashdot: Local Navigation Assistance For the Elderly? · · Score: 1

    I don't know how to keep stable gradients indoors, but I find smell sometimes very helpful in creating internal maps, providing continual unconscious analog distance measurements to known landmarks of known scents.

    Trouble is, it's absurdly easy to completely saturate indoor air with a given scent; and it's gradients that are useful for unconscious mapping, not intensity per se. A source at one end of a room, needs to be complemented by a sink at the opposite end; otherwise the map becomes useless in half an hour, when the air becomes fully saturated and stable.

  2. Even if something like this is totally worthless, its' existence should make the eventually make the midrange 2k @ 17"- 25" displays, cheaper than they are today. And I could certainly use a few dirt cheap 2k desktop displays.

  3. Re:Needle in a haystack on Why We're Looking For ET All Wrong · · Score: 2

    Light travels at roughly 300,000mph.

    ERR_INVALID_UNITS. Light travels at roughly 670,000,000 mph.

  4. Re:These tips work. on Ask Slashdot: Tips For Getting Into Model Railroading? · · Score: 1

    FYI, I tried strangulation 2 years ago, and don't recommend it. My hands went numb before I lost consciousness, which was really scary, so I chickened out of the whole affair. Hanging would probably be pretty similar, only faster and harder to back out of.

    If you're going to die, do so in style -- heart attack while munching doritos and posting to slashdot.org. A death that we all aspire to achieve.

  5. No one uses inline skates anymore ? on Japanese Engineer Develops 'WalkCar,' a Mini-Segway · · Score: 1
    Faster than walking, easier than running, and smaller than a bicycle ? Sounds like the target market, for a pair of inline skates.
    I tried picking up the sport a few years ago. The basic directions are,
    • - push sideways, to go forward
    • - keep straight, to coast
    • - use the heel brake, to stop rapidly
    • - if you can't use the heel brake, WEAR GLOVES.
    • - rain plus concrete don't mix. (too slippery)
  6. Re:50% is lost in AC to DC conversion? on Giving Up Alternating Current · · Score: 1

    The other way to beat the 67 % initial loss, is to START with a solid oxide fuel cell, then do a steam cycle afterwards with the waste heat; with considerably higher total efficiency.

    Solid oxide fuel cells are basically like normal fuel cells, except instead of using a proton exchange membrane, they use an oxygen exchange membrane, giving them flex-fuel capability and the ability to burn almost anything. Only catch being that the "oxygen exchange membrane" needs to be pretty hot before it starts working at reasonable throughput; which makes everything else outrageously expensive because the coefficient of thermal expansion of all the metal contacts have to be matched, and the ceramics crack if warmed up too quickly. The most widely commercialized solid oxide fuel cells today, are in the 50 kw - 1 mw scale and sold for building-scale backup power . . . only 1000x - 20,000x scaleup required before we can replace a single coal plant.

  7. On LUKS on Tomb, a Successor To TrueCrypt For Linux Geeks · · Score: 1

    When I was looking at encryption options a few year ago, I ended up skipping LUKS and using dm-crypt directly instead. LUKS uses some large blocks of random data to postprocess the user-provided key and make brute forcing and dictionary attacks very slow, even with initially weak keys.

    Downside is, is that if the LUKS header gets corrupted or destroyed, the entire partition is lost. It's more serious than an MBR, which is easy to reconstruct.

    I wanted the purity and hardcoreness of my key = actual key, so I ended up just invoking dm-crypt by hand.

  8. It would be a waste. on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Gets Death Penalty In Boston Marathon Bombing · · Score: 1
    This guy obviously has a higher tolerance for risk, than most people do.

    One dream I had, which was quickly categorized as way too risky to attempt; was to try to get to japan (because japanese girls are super cute) without flying (because I'm too claustrophobic to fly again). Researching it a little; looked like one way might be to
    • - Take a bus to new york city.
    • - Take a cruise ship from NYC to England (they run about once every 3 months)
    • - Somehow cross europe
    • - Take trains across all of russia (one of the only countries that doesn't accept USA passports)
    • - Take a ferry from the easternmost part of russia, to japan

    Even if I had lotsa lotsa money (which I don't) and lotsa lotsa free time (which I don't), that would be kinda risky. So many places for stuff to go horribly wrong.
    But, if we've got someone with one free life (Tsarnaev, if he's not executed) . . . why not send him on the above risky trip, and if he survives, pay him to write a book about it ? It would be fun to read.

  9. Not possible. on The Challenge of Web Hosting Once You're Dead · · Score: 2

    As a believer in presentism, I believe that your problem is unsolvable -- after you're dead, no matter how many preparations are made, there's no guarantee that your descendents will respect your wishes.

    But, that said, best of luck trying. The pursuit of the unachievable, often leads to useful side effects.

  10. I tried learning esperanto, several years ago, from the argument of efficiency.
    - esperanto is supposed to be 4x easier to learn than most other languages
    - therefore, if I want to communicate with any single person who doesn't already speak english, it would be only 1/2 the effort, for BOTH of us to learn esperanto, than for either of us, to learn the other's native language.
    ---
    Mi komencis lerni esperanton, antaux multaj jaroj, de la motivo de facileco.
    Esperanto estas kvar-obla pli facile konigi, ol multaj alia lingvoj.
    Do, se mi volas korespondi kun tiu kiu ne kompreneblas anglo, estus nur du-ona laboro, por ni ambauxe lernus esperanton, ol oni de ni lernus la alia pralingvon.
    ---
    But in practice, everyone I've ever met, either has english 10x better than my esperanto, or knows absolutely zero esperanto whatsoever, and "ne habla espanol" is the only phrase I've needed.
    ---
    Sed en vero, cxiu kiu ke mi rekontis, havas anglo dek-obla bona ol mia esperanto, aux konas nulo esperanto, kaj "ne habla espanol" estas la nur vortoj mia bezonis.

  11. From spy satellite to cellphone ? on New Smartphone Camera Could Tell You What Things Are Made of · · Score: 1

    There's some older data on hyperspectral imaging at https://www.schneier.com/blog/...

    General limitations.
    It's only skin deep. It's not a tricorder.
    Composite and mixed signals, aren't labeled for you. While hyperspectral imaging gives more-unique material signatures than RGB imaging, figuring out the most likely combination of known pure signatures, to match a noisy input signal, is still hard. Have fun with linear algebra and matrix inversion ?

  12. Re:50-100 years? on Ask Slashdot: Video Storage For Time Capsule? · · Score: 1

    I have some dvds burned in 2006, that are still readable. About 20 disks read back completely successfully. If disks degrade before failing completely, and parity or duplicate copies are included, it's not a stretch to say that they might last 20 years instead of only the 9 elapsed so far.

  13. I tried to commit suicide once on Facebook Puts Users On Suicide Watch · · Score: 1

    . . . in 2013, but wasn't an active user of facebook at the time.

    Lives saved by facebook: zero
    Lives saved by oh-shit-this-hurts-way-more-than-wikipedia-told-me-it-would-hurt: one

  14. Re:Cardassian of course on What Language Will the World Speak In 2115? · · Score: 1

    Prave! Certe, cxiuj cxie parolos esperantojn hodiaux!

  15. Re:yeah not really on Peter Diamandis: Technology Is Dissolving National Borders · · Score: 1
    This.

    It's perhaps 1/2 search bubble effect -- online, I tend to read about stuff I enjoy, and feel fellowship with the authors.

    In meatspace, part of living in a city, is tuning out and ignoring, 99.95 percent of everyone I see. It's easy to feel that the entire universe is just myself and this laptop.

  16. Re:This is the same community on Debian Votes Against Mandating Non-systemd Compatibility · · Score: 1

    Sorta off topic . . . but emacs wins.

  17. Re:Maybe this is a good time to ask a question on It's World Backup Day · · Score: 1

    If it's not compressed, losetup -r -o OFFSET works really well. I have a couple of loopback mounts done this way on my system.

  18. PDF to ODF conversion on KDE Readies KOffice 2.0 As OpenOffice Competitor · · Score: 4, Informative

    Converting a PDF document into an editable form is like taking a screenshot of slashdot and trying to reconstruct what the HTML and CSS was.

    Postscript, the precurser to PDF, is basically a layout system; draw a string here, draw a string there, etc. It is very good at preserving layout. However, some information is lost. Consider an embedded table, for instance. In the original document, a table might be defined with

    -table
        -row
            -Firstname
            -Lastname
          -row
              Jack
              Bauer
          -row
              Anonymous
              Coward
    -endtable

    Once converted to pdf, it might be represented by

    Drawline(200,200,400,200)
    Drawline(200,300,400,300)
    Drawline(200,400,400,400)
    Drawline(200,500,400,500)

    Drawline(200,200,200,400)
    Drawline(300,200,300,400)
    Drawline(400,200,400,400)

    PaintString("Firstname", 200,400)
    PaintString("Lastname", 300,400)
    PaintString("Jack", 200, 300)
    PaintString("Bauer", 300, 300)
    PaintString("Anonymous", 200, 200)
    PaintString("Coward", 300, 200)

  19. Jamie Zawinski has already done this. on Bulletproof Tool For Golden Age Browsing? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Aside from the large text size requirement, this sounds really similar to something that Jamie Zawinski (http://jwz.org) did for the DNA Lounge kiosks -- a set of diskless linux systems that all network boot from a central NFS server, and are easily resettable. (Sounds like quite a weekend to set up, though.)

  20. Re:Does this have something to do with porn? on Fewer People Copy DVDs Than Once Thought · · Score: 1
    No. Mencoder and Mplayer (Media Encoder and Media player) are high-performance (much less CPU usage during playback then other media players), cross platform, open-source applications easily available from http://mplayerhq.hu. The above command,

    mencoder dvd:// -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -o thematrix.avi Reads "dvd://" as the input file, and uses lavc (a codec distributed with mencoder) as the Output Video Codec, and uses mp3lame (to convert the audio to mp3) as the Output Audio Codec, and uses "thematrix.avi" as the Output_file. From this, we can conclude that the grandparent poster had a copy of the matrix dvd and an open terminal / Konsole window when he posted.
  21. Re:Here's a real good one on New Anti-Forensics Tools Thwart Police · · Score: 1

    I have not used encrypted filesystems or partitions (even though they are possible to set up under linux), because I figure that I am much, much more likely to damage a drive by mistake, and require the services of OnTrack, then I am to have a perfect drive, and a need to also make that data unavailable to others (by encryption).

  22. Re:Bookmarks? on Firefox 3.0 Makes Leap Forward · · Score: 1

    (If this has already been fixed, please ignore this message.)

    Relying on url autocompletion is not very scalable. I once tried setting the history_expire_days
    to some insanely large value, such as 3000, so that urls would never be forgotten by mozilla, and
    always appear in the url autocompletion bar. However, once the history file became too large
    (a few thousand entries? I'm not sure of the exact size), mozilla slowed down considerably in
    several ways.
    - Browsing through the history became unusably slow
    - Url autocompletion became unusably slow, and lagged behind typing considerably.
    - Rendering pages slowed down a bit, because of the extra time needed to color links. (For every link in the page, it needs to check the history file to see if the link should appear in the "visited" color.)

    After a certain point, I stopped using that profile, because it had gotten so slow.

    (This was with Mozilla 1.6)

  23. Deja vu heap layers on Build Distributed Object Mgmt Frameworks for J2EE · · Score: 2, Informative

    This reminds me of Heap Layers and others; they both try to reinvent malloc()/new().

  24. Re:Scroll Lock Key on What's A 'Scroll Lock' And Why Is It On My Keyboard? · · Score: 1

    This was modded funny? Well, perhaps it will be renamed the CD Lock key someday.