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Comment First time? (Score 2, Informative) 269

Scientists have captured antimatter before. I recall an interview with a physicist (I believe Colbert Report) who mentioned they had antimatter captured before. Doing a quick Google search, I found references to captured antimatter going back to 2002: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1957-antimatter-atoms-captured-for-the-first-time.html

Comment Re:Sign me up! (Score 1) 839

I agree, I'd be one of those volunteers. I have minimal emotional connection to Earth, and would relish the adventurous opportunities that would await. I would never be accepted though, since I would also demand a painless suicide pill to be used at my own discretion if things turned out poorly. And no, stepping outside to the horrible death that would await from the martian atmosphere is not acceptable.
Businesses

Submission + - Former physicist investigates May 6 flash crash (physorg.com)

Gnaget writes: Gregg Berman, a former particle physicist with 16 years of experience on Wall Street, is working for the Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) to lead a team of more than 20 investigators to find out what caused the flash crash. Over the past several months, the investigators have gathered and analyzed large amounts of data and interviewed hundreds of companies, and now plan to publish a report of their findings within the next two weeks. Although Berman isn't revealing details about the results, in an article in The New York Times he says that he found no evidence of a deliberate attempt to manipulate the markets. Instead, the investigators have identified a specific series of events that led up to the crash.

Submission + - Major budget cuts to slow down progress at LHC (physorg.com)

Gnaget writes: Major budget cuts at the world's biggest atom smasher over the next five years are set to slow down its quest to unlock the deepest secrets of the universe, management and staff warned on Wednesday.

The director-general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), Rolf Heuer, presented a proposal for 450 million Swiss francs (433 million dollars, 343 million euros) in savings in 2011-2015 to its 20 member states at a meeting here, spokesman James Gillies told AFP.

Great, each country saves less than $25 million dollars at the cost of human advancement. I'm sure that will make a huge dent in those deficits.

Comment Re:What indeed? (Score 1, Interesting) 316

They really are full fledged computers, with big possibilities. I have spent the last couple of days in the planning stage of a home automation / personal assistant project, and plan to use several guruplug computers to pull it off. Connect a mic and webcam to it, and I should be able to pull off voice and facial recognition in a system that can always be on. I'm glad the guruplug was eventually mentioned, it is the same price as the sheevaplug, but has 2 USB ports instead of 1, an eSATA port, and wifi builtin. The SheevaPlug is grossly underpowered in comparison, but it was the first.

Comment Re:I think they made a small mistake. (Score 0) 558

I would like to take a moment, and point out the moderation category of funny... It was a joke. And believe me, I have seen plenty of bad code written in c#, I know. I once found an 80 line function which took a decimal, converted it to a string, chopped off part of the string, then converted it back to an decimal. I replaced the entire function with math.Floor()

Comment Never hurts to see a doctor (Score 0) 601

Not to give an alarmist answer, but a doctor visit can be prudent. I had a similar problem years ago, where I for the life of me could not write code. It was bad enough that I got out of programming for a period of time. After a couple of years, I was diagnosed with a medical condition that was more than likely the cause. Obviously, your case can be different, but coding requires a lot of mental fortitude, and it doesn't take much to turn a good programmer useless.

Comment AJAX (Score 0) 379

If you want to save bandwidth charges, there are much better ways to do it which will drop bandwidth by a lot more than the length of a URL. Move to AJAX calls, replacing only the parts of the DOM which need to be updated, instead of refreshing the entire page.

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