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User: localoptimum

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  1. nope on Airplanes Cause Accidental Cloud Seeding · · Score: 1

    Jetliners do not have propellers. ;)

  2. Stupid question on Golden Nanocages To Put the Heat On Cancer Cells · · Score: 1

    If you can irradiate it with a laser then you can see it. So why not just cut the bastard out? Or hit it with an ion beam which does much more damage than a laser and is just as selective as the gold nanocage method?

  3. Sparse sampling journals! on Recovering Data From Noise · · Score: 1

    Here's an idea. Lets pretend that a rigorous bayesian method like maximum entropy doesn't exist. :P

  4. Will it run windows? on Intel Says Brain Implants Could Control Computers By 2020 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Seriously, this is a great idea. Only teenagers would agree to such a ridiculous implant, and you could rootkit the bastards and zap them when they piss on your car on a Friday night.

  5. Re:Rsync? on Synchronize Data Between Linux, OS X, and Windows? · · Score: 1

    Agreed. I have a desktop and a laptop. Company "helpdesk" blocks everything except ssh and http. Work desktop has firewire800 disk attached to it, running time machine for hourly work backups. I have two bash scripts that I use once per day: "arriveAtWork" and "goHome", containing various rsync commands over ssh. Works great.

  6. The devil is in your question on Why Isn't the US Government Funding Research? · · Score: 1

    "what practical research do you think the US government should embark upon to get the most return for it's citizens and the world"

    That's the problem right there. The government should be funding fundamental scientific research without worrying about technological spin-off and profitability. The reason the US is in this mess, just as in the UK, is that science has become the playground from which wealthy business steals its sweets, except for the last few decades they are also the same people who lobby politicians distributing the sweets. In effect, the taxpayer ends up funding R&D for business with patents and IP slapped all over it, and business is creaming off the brightest talent whilst calling it a "partnership".

  7. Re:Only in the USA on Time For Voice-Mail To Throw In the Towel · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, all that you say is true, but that isn't what I meant.

    The money comes from people phoning you. Voicemail is active as default and most people don't disable it.

    When you ring someone else and they don't answer, the voicemail picks up and you pay for one minute of a phone call. That is a lot of money when your customers have thousands of missed calls per day. If the other network reciprocates, then the networks have a tidy income and the customers pay to listen to a robot beep at them.

  8. Only in the USA on Time For Voice-Mail To Throw In the Towel · · Score: 0

    Orange, TMobile and O2 milk far too much cash by diverting to voicemail after as few rings as reasonable.

  9. Germany has it on New Irish Internet Tax? · · Score: 1

    The Germans conveniently define an internet connection as "a new kind of radio device". Since TV and Radio devices are chargable by the GEZ then the definition means you have to grab your ankles and think of England... um... I mean Germany.

    As a physicist, I tried to point out that an ADSL connection isn't a radio device, but they were more interested in tracking down all the addresses that I'd ever had and trying to charge me for as much shit as possible. They are still sending me letters now that I live in France, the bastards.

  10. Sorry America! on Amazon Culls "Offensive" Books From Search System · · Score: 1

    No changes on amazon.co.uk, I can see all these "unranked" books just fine in their ranking system. Not so for the amazon.com site. Maybe you've hit on the old "SEX=BAD" problem. Another example of this is Grand Theft Auto (steal cars and kill people, totally illegal) being fine for older kids; but when it's found that the main character can engage in a sex game with his lady friend (not illegal for older kids and necessary for the existence of life) the game is banned and then later released x-rated. Go figure.

    I blame obese conservative wankers in suits who think that sex only exists on Sunday evenings through a hole in a sheet, when absolutely necessary, and between a married man and woman in their late 30s who don't actually know each other anymore. These are the people who's lawns are identical and for whom "different" is a virtue of the satanic and godless heathen who deserves to burn in hell for eternity. Lets just boycott these obese wankers.

    In the mean time, good luck with your amazon.com campaign. My tip: order from the UK site. You'll have to wait a while longer for your books, but with the british pound worth less than a teaspoon full of gooseshit and falling you'll probably get a good deal :P

  11. fuel on Better Living Through Nukes? · · Score: 1

    That's a crap article. And anyway, the only realistic solution is to burn them to make electricity.

  12. no they don't on Chimps Have a Built-In GPS · · Score: 1

    Does the chimp GPS provide automatic traffic avoidance? It must be the same implanted GPS as featured in London Taxi Driver 1.0?

    What a load of bollocks.

  13. we've tried a few of these... on Collaborative Academic Writing Software? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Google docs is fine until you start dealing with anything different to a Mail on Sunday article. Forget equations and figures. And if google goes down like it has the last few weeks...

    Apple's new web based system is alright for footnotes and things, and for comments, but for serious collaboration with merging different versions and edits, then you can forget it. (If someone from apple reads this, please add gawdamn ODF support to pages for the love of all things sacred).

    I still end up using latex to render equations and slap them into the document as a tiff file. And last time I used pages to collaborate with M$ office users it messed up the footnote marks for institute addresses and I ended up installing the mac version of office anyway :S So lets rule out apple for the time being.

    Lyx didn't support the styles and bibliography for the physics journals I was writing for last summer (phys rev, elsevier). Lyx is not a bad idea, is it ready?

    Microsoft word + equations = hell on earth. And having just lost 2 weeks of my life dealing with micro$oft's APIs, circular help systems and automatic updates every 3 minutes, I threw the thing straight back at IT and vowed never to go there again. Someone else might be able to tell you how good the M$ online collaboration tools are, but it won't be me! ;-)

    If your collaborators are like mine, they want to see a return to fortran and VMS. My current line of thinking is to try to coerce them into using latex instead of m$ word, and volunteer to be version control. Then use something like git on your own machine to merge all the different branches as they e-mail their changes back to you. For me it's the lesser of all evils.

    When you actually come to submit you'll still have to jump through hoops to please the journal editors with figure file formats and stuff ("we want 4 gigs of EPS files please author") but the process of collaborating on the authorship will be a damn sight easier.

    Good article subject though. You've hit on a topic that has been in my mind for the last few months too (sorry about the long reply!)

  14. Do you have what it takes? on Australian Police Given Covert Search and Hacking Powers · · Score: 5, Funny
    Police Entrance Exam

    Question 1 Please demonstrate the correct police procedure for gathering evidence from the rogue website "www.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org".

    Your answer

    freedom4all:~$ nmap -A -T4 www.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org
    Interesting ports on www.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org:
    Not shown: 1688 closed ports
    PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
    22/tcp open ssh (protocol 2.0)
    .
    .
    .
    freedom4all:~$ ssh root@www.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org
    root@www.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org's password:[britneyspears]
    Permission denied, please try again.
    root@www's password: [poshspice]
    Permission denied, please try again.
    root@www's password: [thepiratebay]
    Last login: Mon Mar 2 22:58:01 2009 from disarray.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org
    root@www:~$ ls -l
    total 13
    drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2009-02-27 09:01 My_Terror_Plans
    drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2009-02-27 09:05 My_Child_Porn_Movies
    drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 2009-02-27 09:09 My_BitTorrent_Files
    .
    .

  15. just forget it on Repairing / Establishing Online Reputation? · · Score: 1

    Don't spend any time worrying about it. It won't change a thing, and if a potential employer accuses you of being a paedophile based on a google search, you do NOT wanna be working for them :P

  16. Love it on How To Argue That Open Source Software Is Secure? · · Score: 1

    Tell your customers and clients that any security system based on secret information is doomed to fail as soon as the secrets are distributed. If it's really secure it won't matter that the bad guy knows how it works. If words aren't enough, make a test case out of the guitar string company "Ernie Ball" that featured recently in /. Mr Ball points out a whole list of M$ propaganda and myths.

    Gotta love these M$ guys. "That free shit over there that can be scrutinised is not as safe as our expensive shit here that relies on secrets and lawyers. By the way, do you have the newest version of our piece of expensive shit? If you don't have the latest version of our shit then TerrorPaedophileCommunists will e-rape your wife and kids (terms and conditions apply)."

  17. Re:Try this on How To Diagnose a Suddenly Slow Windows Computer? · · Score: 1

    lift the computer an inch or two off the desk then drop it

  18. Re:Install mac os-x on Configuring a Windows PC For a Senior Citizen? · · Score: 1
    Well, I quoted him. He was spending more time messing about than working.

    XP would fall over. He'd give up after a few days messing about and take it into a shop. Couple of weeks later, it would fall over again. If I was nearby I'd fix it, but often it wasn't possible because I live in a different country. The problem is my that dad doesn't know what he's doing (like the people in the question) and his 'repairs' were often worse than the perceived problem.

    The reason my dad is doing better now is because he isn't fixing his computer all the time. Now his system is easy to use and it doesn't fall over. No brainer.

    I do know what I'm doing with windows (and a few other OSs) but my job is not being on call to fix my family's computers :D

    I disagree with the "OSs don't matter" part, for the record. In my opinion, there are good OSs and bad OSs for a particular job, the trick is to match the two together. For example, if the question was "what system should I get my teenage kids who like gaming?" then my suggestion wouldn't be a mac! :P

  19. Install mac os-x on Configuring a Windows PC For a Senior Citizen? · · Score: 5, Informative

    My father has his own business with two employees - him and his wife. He wasted years of his life (and lots of money) messing about with XP. He came to me in despair one evening, he'd had enough. I told him to try a mac (linux was not very friendly 3 years ago). Now he runs his business himself with zero IT problems and he owns about 5 macs. He still has no idea how computers work, but it doesn't stop him getting the job done.

  20. What about question 9? on CSIS Cybersecurity Commission Chairman Jim Langevin Answers Your Questions · · Score: 1
    Response to Q.9 doesn't impress and doesn't answer the question.

    P.S. Why does slashdot take half a minute to respond to the first press of the "preview" button when I only typed one line of ASCII? :-)

  21. Re:Right - WRONG! on UK Cops Want "Breathalyzers" For PCs · · Score: 1

    The intelligent criminals are the ones on TV with the fancy suits who tell you what's gonna be illegal and what isn't. They are the ones who speak blackwhite at you and say they are doing the right thing for the country rather than the right thing for them and their rich friends :P

  22. Be very, very careful on Rewriting a Software Product After Quitting a Job? · · Score: 1
    Put yourself in their position. Sales are going to over-hype it because it's their job. Maybe management structure needs changing but big bosses always have their own ideas about what is best.

    If you were a big boss at a company, and a whole bunch of your little gnomes ran off and made a clone of your product and tried to sell it in direct competition with you, wouldn't you sue?

    I'm not saying "don't do it" because a lot of good businesses have emerged from people thinking that they could do it better, I'm just saying be careful and get a lawyer.

    Lastly, I'm willing to bet all of my shirts and trousers that this is illegal in most western countries. It sounds illegal, and given that lots of normal-sounding stuff is being made illegal these days then this smells worse than bad eggs to me :)

  23. Re:Easy! on Google Has All My Data – How Do I Back It Up? · · Score: 1
    :D

    Nice comment!

    Incidentally, I tried MobileMe. It's a heap of garbage, it should be up there with all other good ideas that are atrociously implemented with zero useful help.

  24. ah the BBC again... on One of the Coolest Places In the Universe · · Score: 1, Informative

    1.9 Kelvin isn't that cold, and if the BBC are so excited about the temperature then they should check out pretty much any magnetism lab on the planet and they'll probably find colder spots than this! They were excited last week about energy from nothing (8 & 9th paragraphs).

  25. seems not to be the case in Europe on Google Blurring Sensitive Map Information · · Score: 1
    The Hahn Meitner Institut, Berlin, Germany, is not pixelated, nor is the Technical University of Munich, but the world's most powerful research reactor - the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France, is in an area where google doesn't have imagery at the highest zoom level.

    Still, this bollocks doesn't really help does it? A determined person could certainly charter a small plane and do their own photography if they wanted to, even over sites like this!