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Submission + - Slashdot Alum Samzenpus's Fractured Veil Hits Kickstarter

CmdrTaco writes: Long time Slashdot readers remember Samzenpus,who posted over 17,000 stories here, sadly crushing my record in the process! What you might NOT know is that he was frequently the Dungeon Master for D&D campaigns played by the original Slashdot crew, and for the last few years he has been applying these skills with fellow Slashdot editorial alum Chris DiBona to a Survival game called Fractured Veil. It's set in a post apocalyptic Hawaii with a huge world based on real map data to explore, as well as careful balance between PVP & PVE. I figured a lot of our old friends would love to help them meet their kickstarter goal and then help us build bases and murder monsters! The game is turning into something pretty great and I'm excited to see it in the wild!

Comment I want to eat meat/fish (Score 5, Interesting) 393

I want to eat meat. I will never become a vegan, because I need meat (my levels of B12 and iron constantly falling if I don't eat enough meat, and I rather get it from real food rather than vitamin pills). Find a way to make it sustainable then. It's not a solution to telling everyone to "stop eating meat". I rather have free range or wild, sustainable, organic meat, than industrialized meat. But to not have any at all, is not an option.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 312

I personally *despise* the episodic model. I'm all for the serialized one, and in fact, except Netflix's offerings, the serialized versions found on networked shows pale in comparison (in terms of serialization that is). I'm one of those people who really enjoyed the serializing nature of LOST (minus the disastrous 6th season). I absolutely never watch episodic television. I find it cheap, and non-artistic. In a perfect world, I'd like most TV shows (not all, but most) to end in 3 seasons: beginning-middle-end. And each season to comprise from 6-9 episodes: beginning-middle-end. Like a book.

Submission + - The end is reportedly near for RadioShack

mrspoonsi writes: Reports of RadioShack's demise are nothing new, but now it seems like the electronics retailer may be done for good. Bloomberg reports that company is in talks with Sprint to hand over around half of its remaining stores to the wireless company. The rest of RadioShack's locations will close, and those that are included in the deal will be painted yellow and black. This means the shops where most of us purchased parts for a project will cease to exist. Nothing's final, and until the ink is dry, another suitor could swipe up the company and allow it to keep on chuggin' along. RadioShack is facing bankruptcy after years of declining sales, so even if Sprint doesn't agree to buy those stores, a move of some kind is imminent for the company that's been selling tech since 1921.

Submission + - Is "Scorpion" really a genius? (irishtimes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: CBS's upcoming hacker show Scorpion is pitched as based on the real life of Irish 'eccentric genius' Walter O'Brien a.k.a. "Scorpion". Some of the claims made for the real Scorpion are extraordinary. A child prodigy with an IQ of 197, hacking Nasa at age 13, [supplying] Ireland with more Personal Computers than DELL and Gateway together. Searching online I wasn't able to find anything which, for me, clearly backed up any of these (or other) claims. For example, rather than being the sixth fastest programmer in the world in 1993, his team ranked 90th out of 250 teams. Curiously, his degree grade was an ok, but hardly stellar B+ (II-I). Does anyone know anything to back up the genius claims being made about Scorpion?

Comment Fly neurons? (Score 1) 39

Very interesting; is there a technical book (or chapter) or paper with a good overview of this comparative aspect of fly neurons?

I was just starting to look around to see what's available on comparative neuroscience in general, based on an interest in the most salient functional differences from human neurons, so anything related to that more general topic would also be welcome.

Comment Re:What SETI can pick up (Score 2) 453

In theory, if we can capture coherent pictures in the visible spectrum from many billions of light years away, we should be able to do the same with RF.

It's actually very easy to see why the opposite is true: stars famously broadcast a truly vast amount of power in the visible spectrum, which is what makes solar energy and photosynthesis effective.

Humans clearly do not have the power resources of the entire sun to use to power RF broadcasts. The total amount of power we have at our disposal from all sources is a tiny, tiny fraction of what the sun broadcasts.

And most of our power does not go into RF in the first place, it goes into transportation, manufacturing, etc.

So it's quite straightforward that there is no comparison between the brightness of stars in the visible spectrum versus the Earth in RF. Stars win hands down.

It isn't the technology, it's just the hardware.

Unfortunately, it is very much both. It's true that we can do better by building better listening arrays, and SETI has been continually doing that for many years, but there is also a problem of signal to noise ratio that gives a hard limit on sensitivity due to noise from terrestrial sources and from thermal and quantum noise in the receiving electronics.

Part of that could be improved by putting radio telescopes e.g. on the far side of the moon. The electronics issue simply needs better technology.

Comment What SETI can pick up (Score 4, Interesting) 453

Yet the sky is not saturated with their communications. So therefor those civilizations must be using some other technology.

That seems logical, but that turns out not to be the case. A SETI scientist said in a talk (and I've seen this in articles since) that our deployed SETI listening technology is still nowhere near sensitive enough to pick up signals even from as close as the nearest star (Proxima Centauri, 4 light years away), if a planet there was broadcasting RF at current Earth levels.

(That doesn't mean SETI to date is pointless, because there's always a chance of a highly directional signal beamed our way, or of just something unexpected, like signals far far brighter than Earth's.)

So no, we have no idea whether the sky is saturated with radio waves or not.

Comment emphasis of GUI efforts (Score 4, Insightful) 52

I think that you being modded down to -1 is a bit much, but there is a problem here. What you said is potentially well and good for contexts that are purely utilitarian to the degree that anything but pure pragmatic functionality is to be viewed as an active negative, such as industrial control, power plants, etc.

But for most people's desktops, people expect both functionality *and* some degree of modern aesthetics, and there is an extremely common rejection of interfaces that look 15 years old, even if they were considered close to ideally functional and aesthetic 15 years ago.

Since that is demonstrably what the market generally wants, that is therefore the general trend over time: "flashy graphics" are sometimes overdone, but the word "flashy" is in the eye of the beholder, and most improvements to GUIs over the decades have been about modernization to meet the moving target of whatever "modern" means in each era, with actual breakthroughs in usability being far less common.

Furthermore, the people who design and implement GUIs are (with the exception of 1-person development teams) rarely the same team members who would address software vulnerabilities, so maybe that's where your -1 came from.

Comment Re:why does a decoder need execheap? (Score 1) 212

There *is* such a thing as (write, execute), and this is what it is currently using, and people are complaining quite bitterly about it doing that, because it's a security weakness that is exploitable via buffer overflows etc.

Basically the fact that it allows for dynamic JIT compilation is exactly what people don't want the bad guys to be doing; potentially that turns a small bug into a complete take-over-the-machine exploit.

I'm afraid I was taking all that for granted in my original comment, which instead was about potential reasons why they might not have done something different as people are suggesting in hindsight.

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