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User: weilawei

weilawei's activity in the archive.

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Comments · 1,105

  1. Re:Not what i hoped on Google+ Divided Into Photos and Streams, With New Boss · · Score: 2

    So, tagging? Everything old is new again.

  2. Re:The truth on 20-Year-Old Military Weather Satellite Explodes In Orbit · · Score: 1

    Now we know where the old Slashdot Beta went.

  3. Re:New design on 3D Printers Making Inroads In Kitchens · · Score: 0

    Just wanted to say thank you. This is a big improvement over beta.

  4. Re:Let it try at 80s/90s games on Artificial Intelligence Bests Humans At Classic Arcade Games · · Score: 1

    import random
    import urllib.request

    player = random.choice(['You', 'I'])
    station = str()

    tube_stations = urllib.request.urlopen(r'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rk295/tube-postcodes/master/tube-postcodes.txt').readlines()
    tube_stations = [i.decode('utf-8').split(',')[0] for i in tube_stations]

    while True:
            if 'You' == player:
                    station = input('Enter a station: ')
            else:
                    station = random.choice(tube_stations)

            if 'Mornington Crescent' == station:
                    print("%s won!" % player)
                    break
            elif station in tube_stations:
                    print("%s chose %s. Wrong!" % (player, station))
                    player = 'I' if ('You' == player) else 'You'
            else:
                    print('Try a real station!')

    Ask and ye shall receive?

  5. Re:Actually, ADM Rogers doesn't "want" that at all on NSA Director Wants Legal Right To Snoop On Encrypted Data · · Score: 1

    A bright red spook, eh? Oh, did you mean, "rogue"?

  6. Re:I'M A CODING GOD! on Attention, Rockstar Developers: Get a Talent Agent · · Score: 1

    But are you a shiny coding god?

  7. Are the two mutually exclusive?

  8. Re:OMNI on The Science of a Bottomless Pit · · Score: 1

    How about a vacuum tube that was formed in a loop passing through Earth and then back around the outside? It would need to be around 8000 miles in diameter (as a circle), since Wolfram Alpha says Earth's radius is 3957 miles. The tunnel would have a circumference somewhat over 25,000 miles.

    The engineering is left as an exercise to the reader.

  9. Re:No F-Keys, Arrows, Numeric Keypad on Building the Developer's Dream Keyboard · · Score: 1

    Clearly, we need a keyboard which constantly shifts the positions of the keys around randomly.

  10. Re:The alternative on Your Java Code Is Mostly Fluff, New Research Finds · · Score: 1

    If it were so reliable and universal, Mr. Kurt Gödel wouldn't have had such a big argument with Mr. David Hilbert.

    Just nitpicking, since we ARE talking about math as a whole, here. You didn't specify any little bit of it.

  11. Re:the winter dragon is coming, on Something Resembling 'The Wheel of Time' Aired Last Night On FXX · · Score: 1

    Yep, that was a fantastic shooter. Nothing out at the time (that I know of/played; someone will correct me here) really had interacting weapons like that. Turned it into a very fast-paced version of chess, plus you could lay traps in your area before a match started.

  12. Re:Ask Japan... on The IPCC's Shifting Position On Nuclear Energy · · Score: 1

    I think a better question is: why use a design requiring active cooling? Obviously, this only applies going forward.

  13. Re:About time. on The IPCC's Shifting Position On Nuclear Energy · · Score: 1

    Yes. I live approximately 35 miles downstream from an active plant. Wouldn't mind them building a new (emphasis on new: modern design, preferably a MSR) plant nearby either.

  14. Re:Money to be made on Major Retailers Accused of Selling Fraudulent Herbal Supplements · · Score: 1

    This is essentially the process for beer.

  15. Re:Trust on US Army Releases Code For Internal Forensics Framework · · Score: 2

    It's like having a super-long prehensile finger with a tongue at the end. You do the math.

  16. Re:Trust on US Army Releases Code For Internal Forensics Framework · · Score: 2

    There are summaries? What are these "articles" you speak of?

  17. Re:Shame on them on Mathematicians Uncomfortable With Ties To NSA, But Not Pulling Back · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Indeed. It's blood money they're taking.

  18. Re:Once more on U.S. Gas Stations Vulnerable To Internet Attacks · · Score: 1

    Pay a decent wage and you'll get better candidates. Gas station attendants are generally part-time, no benefits, minimum wage, not paid nearly enough to give a shit in a dead-end job. You get what you pay for.

  19. Re:Really Neat on Scientists Slow the Speed of Light · · Score: 1

    That was the point of my comment. I stated what had been done previously and then moved on to the new work.

  20. Really Neat on Scientists Slow the Speed of Light · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is incredibly cool. Previous work has managed to fully stop light, but this is quite a finding (that light can travel slower through a vacuum).

    The old stuff, from Wiki:

    In 1998, Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau led a combined team from Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for Science which succeeded in slowing a beam of light to about 17 meters per second,[1] and researchers at UC Berkeley slowed the speed of light traveling through a semiconductor to 9.7 kilometers per second in 2004. Hau later succeeded in stopping light completely, and developed methods by which it can be stopped and later restarted.

    However, now we can alter the structure of the beam of light and measure a slowdown (from the abstract):

    Our work highlights that, even in free space, the invariance of the speed of light only applies to plane waves. Introducing spatial structure to an optical beam, even for a single photon, reduces the group velocity of the light by a readily measurable amount.

    Details from the pre-print:

    We use an ultraviolet laser incident upon a beta-barium borate (BBO) crystal to produce photon pairs with central wavelength at 710 nm. The photons, called signal and idler, pass through an interference filter of spectral bandwidth 10 nm and are collected by polarization-maintaining, single-mode fibers. One fiber is mounted on an axial translation stage to control the path length (Fig. 2A). The idler photon goes through polarization maintaining fibers before being fed to the input port of a fiber-coupled beam splitter (Fig. 2B) (17). Instead of going straight to the other beam splitter input, the signal photon is propagated through a free-space section (Fig. 2C). This consists of fiber-coupling optics to collimate the light and two spatial light modulators (SLMs). SLMs are pixelated, liquid-crystal devices that can be encoded to act as diffractive optical elements implementing axicons, lenses and similar optical components. The first SLM can be programmed to act as a simple diffraction grating such that the light remains collimated in the intervening space, or programmed to act as an element to structure the beam (e.g. axicons or lenses with focal length ). The second SLM, placed at a distance 2, reverses this structuring so that the light can be coupled back into the single-mode fiber that feeds to the other input port of the beam splitter. The output ports of the fiber-coupled beam splitter are connected to single-photon detectors, which in turn feed a gated counter (Fig. 2D). The coincident count rate is then recorded as a function of path difference between the signal and idler arms. The position of the HOM dip is recorded as a function of the spatial shaping of the signal photon.

  21. Re:Slashdot full of hypochondriacs? on Should Disney Require Its Employees To Be Vaccinated? · · Score: 1

    Even better. I was a military brat. During my childhood, I lived overseas and in various locations around the US (both coasts, north and south, rainy/wet/cold, hot/dry, and hot/wet).

    You know how people go to college and get sick because they're exposed to new infectious agents? (I'm steering heavily into <anecdote> territory here, take it with some salt.) I don't recall an excess of children being sick after transferring in, nor do I remember getting a major illness, with one exception. One of the couple times I got the flu was immediately after moving (we were still in billeting). That said, it was still rare overall to get sick.

    I often wonder if moving frequently and receiving vaccinations for everything under the sun (military requirements) helped. But I can't really say. Perhaps the extensive and thorough vaccination did reduce the numbers of sick people, but I don't have data to say either way.</anecdote>

  22. Re:Slashdot full of hypochondriacs? on Should Disney Require Its Employees To Be Vaccinated? · · Score: 1

    Sure, I got the flu a couple times (in my childhood). Sure I had ear aches (however, I have serious ear problems, resulting in multiple surgeries and my being nearly deaf). But: athletes foot? migraines? frequent sore throats and pink eye? pneumonia? Nope, none of it.

    I certainly didn't get the flu every year and I definitely didn't get most of the stuff you listed. I've been quite healthy, with the minor exception of the ears being useless. The CDC's own stats support this, with only roughly 20-30% of specimens tested being positive for influenza. That's not "most people". It's significant, sure, but it isn't "most people" and it's definitely not "most people every year".

    I think you might consider getting your hypochondria checked out.

  23. Re:Slashdot full of hypochondriacs? on Should Disney Require Its Employees To Be Vaccinated? · · Score: 1

    I was sick often as a child. Flu every year, pnuemonia once, numerous ear aches, athletes foot, migraines, frequent sore throats, pink eye.... just like most kids.

    Someone really didn't want to go to school. I can't speak for you, but I don't recall being sick all the time "just like most kids". As I recall it, most kids were healthy most of the time.

  24. Re:Absolutely fair.. on Apple Agrees To Chinese Security Audits of Its Products · · Score: 1

    I can't really answer that, since I don't have any information on their internals, thus, I'd be speculating. I was merely pointing out what the GP appeared to be saying.

    Do I agree with the GP? No idea. It's rather difficult to pass judgement on things without any actual details. I'd prefer to skip speculation and just wait for the results.

  25. Re:Absolutely fair.. on Apple Agrees To Chinese Security Audits of Its Products · · Score: 3, Informative

    I believe the GP was suggesting that the phrase "security audit" was being used in a euphemistic manner.