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Comment I've owned every BF Game (Score 1) 208

I've played a lot of BF, since owning 1942 on release day. I can't think of a version I've missed (though I've stopped buying expansion packs).

That said, I stopped buying on release day a while ago. My gaming time is maybe 2% of what it was a decade or so ago, so it's valuable and not to be wasted on buggy releases and bad games.

Comment Re:Thanks for the tip! (Score 3, Interesting) 448

I'm embarrassed to say that I pledged $70. I thought being on Kickstarter provided some level of protection against this, and that no one would be so brazen as to hijack people's names and credentials, and post them a popular website to promote their claims.

Thanks, Slashdot. I promise I'll be more careful next time.

If someone tells me the PowerUp 3.0 remote-controlled airplane is a hoax, I'll be devastated...

Comment Re:The great thing about diets (Score 1) 459

"The goal is to make you eat less, anyways"

No, the goal is to get your body to stop storing your calories as fat, and instead burn them right away. The way to do this is to stop your blood sugar from spiking, which in turn leads to an insulin response. Just eating less means your body has less energy for it's day-to-day, and you get tired and sluggish.

Cut out the sugar and the processed foods (including flour). Get your calories from raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, whole grains, protein, and fat. That's really all there is to it. Easy to say, harder to do.

Comment Re:Get a local phone number (Score 2, Interesting) 506

I think companies don't want to bother interviewing and recruiting for someone who's not local. If offered the job, chances are that you'll not actually follow-through with the relocation. I know when we go looking, and we get someone from out of town, they almost always drop out of the running, or can't move in the time-frame required.

It's a chicken and egg thing. Potential employees don't want to move till they get a job. Employers don't want to hire anyone not local.

Comment Re:New insecticide (Score 4, Interesting) 432

What about diatomaceous earth? It's fossilized algae, and a natural insecticide, absorbing the lipids from the exoskeletons of insects.

I've read that if you pull your bed from the wall, take 4 empty/clean tuna cans with diatomaceous earth in them, and put one under each leg of the bed, you can get rid of them. They crawl in and out of it on their way to feast on you.

If I had them, in addition to the cans-under-legs, I'd be dusting the floors, the sheets, the bed-frame, the bed-boards, the electrical sockets, etc, to get rid of them.

There was also a BBC show, either Edwardian Farm, or Victorian Farm, where they showed the housewife scrubbing bed frames down twice a year with lye to keep them under control.

Comment Re:NO NO NO (Score 1) 687

Well, as for the price of nuclear power, there is a 30-year, multi-billion dollar cleanup in the works. Even if a private corporation is paying for it, they'll be recouping their money somehow. There is no such thing a free lunch, or a free nuclear decontamination.

From another /. article today,

"A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation, equivalent to five year's maximum exposure for a site worker. In addition up to 300 tonnes a day of contaminated water is leaking from reactors buildings into the sea."

You might be able to argue that, in a safer place, the Fukushima reactor would have been fine, but Japan is one huge earthquake waiting to happen. Maybe solar, wind, and wave power make sense in a place like that.

As for what people "like", using that as a basis for what's right or good is ridiculous. People want want everything for nothing - someone else should pay. They want cheap power, but don't want a power plant in their back yard. On average, we're not a terribly rational species.

Comment Re: Hmm... (Score 2) 135

Boeing decided to farm out the manufacturing of parts of the plane to various companies around the world. The fuselage was built in Italy, and there were small issues with wrinkles on the surface. The wings were made by Mitsubishi, in Japan, and there were issues with the stringers.

Who knows if they would have had the same issues with in-house development, but there were lots of quality and logistical issues with building a "global" plane.

Comment Re:Hmm... (Score 2) 135

Way back when Boeing was going for a smaller, more efficient jet. Airbus wanted to build a big plane, aka an Ultra High Capacity Airliner to challenge Boeing's dominance of the large-jet market.

Boeing built the 787, and Airbus built the A380. I guess the market is now forcing Airbus to compete with Boeing's 787, and thus the a350.

Comment Re:Circular logic (Score 2) 331

It's easy to make fun of IT managers. At the company I worked at, our last one was pretty bad. He was a terrible coder, couldn't estimate or keep a project on track, made bad technology decisions.

Our current one is excellent, however. Not sure how technical he is, as he hasn't had time to write code, but he asks us hard questions that challenge assumptions, projects go through the documentation phases that we need (business rules, elaboration, use cases), there is a full project plan that is updated weekly, and management knows as soon as something start slipping.

It's no problem to get a day off on short notice, he helps out on weekends when servers need to be moved, he fixes issues with vacation-day-allocation HR, and goes back to the product management group when to challenge them when change-requests start to get a bit silly. After every cycle, he drives a process to figure out what could have been done better, and then we attempt to put methodology in place to try to fix it for the next cycle.

Our company is small - 20 or so people, and a dev/qa team of 10, but he's done a great job of getting the maximum return on investment on our development efforts.

Submission + - Electrical Brain Stimulation Improves Math Skills (medicaldaily.com)

ewolfson writes: Dinner is over, and the waiter is handing over the bills to everyone when the collective tension sets in... how much do we tip? Math can trigger anxiety in adults and kids, but now scientists at Oxford University have developed a way to flip a switch and turn a normal person's brain into a math machine. They found painless, electrical brain stimulation in combination with easy number exercises can significantly improve math ability.

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