Comment Re:speech recognition is noisy. (Score 2) 692
Daily I wish people would indeed stop doing this.
Comment speech recognition is noisy. (Score 1) 692
Ever since I used speech recognition software for a while for entering text, I have worried that it would become popular and take us back to the noisy days of typewriters. Except this time for people talking to their electronic devices all the time.
Comment Re:3.5? What about 5.25? (Score 1) 375
I recently bought a zoomfloppy to connect a 1571 drive to USB:
http://store.go4retro.com/products/ZoomFloppy.html
I'm up to about 200 C64/C128 floppies from around 1990 backed up, and about 90% still work.
Comment Prices in Holland are considerably lower. (Score 1) 698
€600 ($820) for a basic device, about €1200 ($1640) for a good device, and up to €2500 ($3420) for a superior hearing aid in Holland:
http://www.hetgehoor.net/info/hoorapparaten-prijzen
http://www.optiekvangorp.be/index.php?id_wp=46&id_ws=1
The US price situation looks like a cartel to me then.
Heat 'Most Likely Cause' of Pioneer Anomaly 133
astroengine writes "Everything from clouds of dark matter, weird gravitational effects, alien tampering and exotic new physics have all been blamed for the 'Pioneer Anomaly' — the tiny, inexplicable sun-ward acceleration acting on the veteran Pioneer deep space probes. However, evidence is mounting for a more mundane explanation. Yes, it's the emission of heat from the spacecrafts' onboard radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), slowly nudging the Pioneers off course, that looks like the most likely culprit. It's unlikely that this new finding will completely silence advocates of more exotic explanations, however."
Comment Re:Kahle could have saved himself the trouble (Score 1) 669
The Dutch national library has been storing every book and magazine published in Holland since 1974 (and has the majority of works published before that), now about 100km of paperwork.
Digitisation is under way.
http://kb.nl/index-en.html
Comment Re:Population Control FUD (Score 1) 570
Interesting, thanks.
Comment Re:Population Control FUD (Score 1) 570
>>But I guess I am a fucktard for even worrying about it.
>Yeah, pretty much.
Well, that discloses you as a person with a somewhat vile and therefore irrational view of the world.
So how will the fertility rates decline, according to those models?
Comment Re:Population Control FUD (Score 1) 570
The population will peak, and then stabilize or decline.
I worry if it will be because of careful planning of fertility and resources, or by running out of resources.
Agriculture is fed by energy, mostly oil, and that's ever harder to extract from the ground.
But I guess I am a fucktard for even worrying about it.
'Terrorism', now there's scaremongering for you.
Comment Re:Population Control FUD (Score 1) 570
Burying your head in the sand.
Comment Missing option: I already did that. (Score 1) 1270
I left behind an anachronism.
Comment Why should we expect a worse sun spot maximum? (Score 4, Interesting) 464
Why should we expect a worse sun spot maximum than previous maxima?
Nowhere in the two linked articles does it say anything about why it would be worse than 2006.
They don't even talk about the unusually long sun spot miminum we've had.
I was hoping for some science about how that might affect the coming maximum...
Comment User agent switcher helps a bit (Score 1) 527
User agent switcher turns some things on in Firefox.
http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/
with following settings:
Safari
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; ja-jp)
Mozilla
Safari
4.0.5 Safari/531.22.7
MacIntel
[empty]
[empty]
A lot is broken though.
Comment ADHD (Score 1) 149
I think this book will do well with the young masses of the ADHD persuasion.
Open Source Developer Knighted 101
unixfan writes "Georg Greve, developer of Open Document Format and active FOSS developer, has received a knighthood in Germany for his work. From the article: 'Some weeks ago I received news that the embassy in Berne had unsuccessfully been trying to contact me under FSFE's old office address in Zurich. This was a bit odd and unexpected. So you can probably understand my surprise to be told by the embassy upon contacting them that on 18 December 2009 I had been awarded the Cross of Merit on ribbon (Verdienstkreuz am Bande) by the Federal Republic of Germany. As you might expect, my first reaction was one of disbelief. I was, in fact, rather shaken. You could also say shocked. Quick Wikipedia research revealed this to be part of the orders of knighthood, making this a Knight's Cross.'"
