Comment Intelligent? (Score 1) 107
Wow, I know a lot of AI researchers who are going to be pretty pissed off that these materials scientists scooped them.
Has it passed the Turing test yet?
Comment Re:Stallman who? (Score 2) 1452
Compare emacs with the shiny toys Jobs made and I think we see who comes out on top.
Way to cherry-pick facts to back up your bias. Compare GCC with the Lisa and see who comes out on top.
But now that I re-read your post, perhaps you were being ironic. Emacs was plainly more innovative than any of Apple's "shiny toys". Less popular, of course, but why would we nerds care about that?
Comment saying RMS is bad doesn't make Jobs somehow better (Score 1) 1452
For all of you logic-challenged commenters out there: saying bad things about RMS does not turn Jobs into a saint, no matter how much you wish it would.
Comment bugs and beetles (Score 0) 49
Slashdot's icon for a bug is a picture of a beetle? I thought this was news for NERDS.
Comment Yay for science! (Score 1) 614
I'm so glad that other states are doing this kind of experiment on their children. Future generations will thank them for the empirical evidence.
What I can't figure out is how they got this past the IRB.
Comment Groan (Score 1) 91
It isn't a robot, it's a waldo. It didn't wake, it was turned on.
I thought this was "news for nerds", not "puff for plebes".
Comment ugh (Score 1) 720
This got +5 insightful?? I see nothing but opinions based on two fundamental misconceptions:
1) Editing C# in a GUI editor means you are "programming in a GUI"
2) CLI == vt100
Comment Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri (Score 1) 518
Looking Glass's Terra Nova was a real diamond in the rough. Vast outdoor environments (in 1996!), weapon/armor/squadmate selections that actually mattered, jump jets, squadmate commands (that worked!), limited ammo, horrible acting. That game had it all. God, I still want to play it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova:_Strike_Force_Centauri
Comment not a robot (Score 4, Informative) 74
It's a Waldo, not a robot.
Comment waiting for the discussion to devolve (Score 0, Offtopic) 629
I'm just sitting here, waiting for this discussion to get sidetracked onto the question of "is AGW true?" like it did on the NPR site.
Comment I read that a bit wrong at first (Score 1) 269
"his main scientific ambition 'is to build an optimal scientist, then retire.' The Cognitive Robotics professor has worked ..."
Woo hoo! The Robotic Cognitive Professor worked! Oh, wait...
Comment The cool thing... (Score 1) 486
The cool thing about this discussion is how it highlights the brilliance of our slashdotty community.
How many people here think "memcpy(dest, src, src_size)" is safe?
How many people here think "memcpy(dest, src, dest_size)" is safe?
They're both unsafe. memcpy_s() isn't much of an improvement, but at least it will overrun neither the source nor the destination (unless used very stupidly indeed).
Nobody seems to have mentioned the other problem with memcpy(), which is that it only works on untyped data. This is always dangerous and rarely required.
Theora Ahead of H.264 In Objective PSNR Quality 313
bigmammoth writes "Xiph hackers have been hard at work improving the Theora codec over the past year, with the latest versions gaining on and passing h.264 in objective PSNR quality measurements. From the update: 'Amusingly, it also shows test versions of Thusnelda pulling ahead of h.264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases. It's important to note that PSNR is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. This is also data from a single clip. That said, it's clear that the gap in the fundamental infrastructure has closed substantially before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.'
Momentum is building with a major Open Video Conference in June, the impending launch of Firefox 3.5 and excitement about wider adoption in a top-4 web site. It's looking like free video codecs may pose a serious threat to the h.264 bait-and-switch plan to start charging millions for internet streaming of h.264 in 2010."
Rep. Jane Harman Focus In Yet Another Warrantless Wiretap Scandal 312
Many different sources are talking about the latest scandal surrounding the warrantless wiretapping program. Incriminating evidence against California rep. Jane Harman was apparently captured some time ago on a legal NSA wiretap. However, Attorney General Gonzales supposedly intervened to drop the case against her because (and this is where the irony meter explodes) Bush officials wanted her to be able to publicly defend the warrantless wiretap program. "Jane Harman, in the wake of the NSA scandal, became probably the most crucial defender of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, using her status as 'the ranking Democratic on the House intelligence committee' to repeatedly praise the NSA program as 'essential to US national security' and 'both necessary and legal.'"
Comment view != download?!? (Score 1) 590
NPR had some coverage of this story too (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102386952&ps=cprs). One lovely nugget from that: "It is not a crime to view the photos, [sheriff's spokesman Bill Maer] said, but it is illegal to download them".
