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Comment renewed interest (Score 1) 98

Almost a year ago, Jim Jagielski, a member of the Apache OpenOffice Project Management Committee, insisted things were going well and claimed there was renewed interest in the project.

Sorry guys, that was just me looking to see whether it was still possible to convert 15 year old files from .SDW format to .ODT when I transferred old data to a new PC.

Submission + - One of the Milky Way's fastest stars is an invader from another galaxy (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: On 25 April, the European Space Agency released a data set gathered by the Gaia satellite containing the motions, and much more, of 1.3 billion stars. Astronomers have immediately sifted the data for fast-moving stars. They are prized as forensic tools: When rewound, their trajectories point back to the violent events that launched them. Last week, one team reported the discovery of three white dwarfs—the dying embers of sunlike stars—hurtling through the galaxy at thousands of kilometers per second, perhaps flung out from supernovae explosions. Another group reported more than two dozen fast-moving stars, some apparently kicked out by our galaxy’s central black hole. And a third has confirmed that a star blazing through the outskirts of the Milky Way actually hails from another galaxy altogether, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The flood of discoveries has sent astronomers racing to their telescopes to check and classify the swift objects, says Harvard University astronomer James Guillochon.

Comment touchy-feely HR people? (Score 1) 533

I hear you. Back when I was looking for a job I had similar problems.

I'm a chemist. I've spent years studying various types of chemistry. Chemistry is something I do--sometimes in the lab with actual chemicals, and other times on paper when I'm thinking about what to do in the lab. So naturally the word "chemistry" will be part of several phrases on my resume, and will be used in search engines to find matching jobs.

Now, you've had problems with touchy-feely HR people demanding that you be "enthusiastic" or even "in love with" you chosen work. But me? I got a crapload of irrelevant "matches" based on the word "chemistry".
Apparently this same school of touchy-feely HR thought gives me a 99% false positive rate on job searches, because everyone is looking for someone "with the right chemistry to join us."

Attention HR people: You expect a certain amount of professionalism from me if I'll be working for your company. I expect the same from you. Quit writing job descriptions like you're planning to use them as an OKCupid profile.

Comment Re:fair use (Score 1) 215

Of course they know, they don't work for Comcast because they're incompetent.

There's incompetent, and then there's just plain lazy.

Why do research or analysis when you can just Google "Comcast torrent"?

Why waste time filtering the results when most hosting providers will cave in to your demands without checking their validity?

Submission + - Version 2.0 Of 3D-Printed Rifle Successfully Fires 14 Rounds (ibtimes.com)

coolnumbr12 writes: The world’s first 3D-printed rifle, named “The Grizzly” after Canadian-built tanks used in World War II, was fired in June, but the first shot fractured the barrel receiver. The creator, a Canadian man who simply goes by “Matthew,” refined his design and posted a video Friday on YouTube of Grizzly 2.0 successfully firing 3 rounds of Winchester bullets. The video description says the Grizzly 2.0 fired 14 rounds before it cracked. The new rifle was also safe enough for Matthew to fire it by hand rather than the string system used in the first test.

Comment Re:I just say (Score 1) 385

I don't agree. People that read the NYT or other newspapers are not idiots. They have presumably attended school up to 12th grade and maybe even college. They should have as part of their general culture at least a "basic" understanding of maths.

People who edit and typically write for the NYT times on the other hand....

I take it you don't live in a state where anyone has tried to drag the "ID vs. evolution" issue into political debate recently. The problem is that for most people "true" means "I want to believe this", not "This can be independently verified".

Comment Re:I just say (Score 2) 385

It might be better to go find experts in the field, and have them write short articles for the general public that are about established but not widely known things.

I'm not convinced. In principle it sounds great, but in practice you'll have a lot of resistance coming from several different groups:

)1) Christian fundamentalists who have no room for uncertainty in their model of the universe. To them, you might as well be reading from the Necronomicon, because anything that's unknown can't be declared true, anything that isn't true must be a lie, and all lies come from Satan.

2) New age crystal wavers who are still convinced that quantum mechanics proves there are many celestial planes (many worlds interpretation), sympathetic magic really works (entanglement), and that reality is shaped by our consciousness (Copenhagen interpretation). Never mind that the associations they make are utterly baseless, and the interpretations they're based upon actually contradict one another to some extent...

3) All the people who got sold on poorly written work that was dumbed down "for the public" in the past, (Pretty much anyone who's convinced that entanglement means FTL communication and Star Trek-style teleportation are just around the corner)

What's in common here? These people think they already know, and your attempts to enlighten them will initially only reveal how confused they are. This works aqainst you, because for them certainty and truth are not objective (but abstract) measures of how well a theory does or doesn't work, but feelings... and you just made them feel uncertain/bad, so what you are telling them is "less true than what they already know", which makes you clearly a "Satanic deceiver" / "conspirator suppressing the truth" / "clueless idiot who didn't read the Quantum Physics for Complete Morons sidebar in their favorite gaming magazine last month".

Not to say this isn't worth doing, just that you need to set your expectations very low.

Comment Re:Too bad (Score 1) 139

I've been reading Slashdot for over a dozen years, and I don't even have a UID because I never bothered signing up for an account. If I signed up now it'd be a very large number, and so would have a low perceived "seniority", and yet I remember when the Columbine and Hellmouth stories were posted here.

See, now we know you're faking it. If you could actually remember when the Columbine and Hellmouth stories were posted here, your nostalgia would be tainted by the memories of JonKatz articles.

Comment Re:Hummm... (Score 1) 139

One of the reasons silicon is great for mass-produced anything: silicon simply happens to be one of the most common and easily refined elements on Earth.

The fact that pure silicon is an intrinsic semiconductor doesn't hurt, either. Just try making intrinsic GaAs...the amount of precision required to avoid making p-type or n-type material is ridiculous.

Comment Re:Those conspiracy wackos (Score 1) 112

Well, there are UFOs. They're probably not aliens though, just some advanced planes that are still classified, the way the SR-71 and F-117 were a few decades ago. And also, the NSA IS spying on all Americans. Snowden's being hung out to dry because he gave confirmation for that fact.

I've got no evidence to back it up, so you can take this as a conspiracy theory if you like:

My pet theory about the sudden popularity of UFOs from the middle of the 20th century onwards is that we actually had some foreign incursions into our airspace during the cold war. The cover-ups were real, but the whole "extraterrestrials are coming to earth" bit was just a second level of obfuscation--If you don't want people investigating how enemies slipped past our defenses, convince the general public that only crackpots are looking past the surface level explanation for sightings.

That said, there are UFO-like sightings dating back for centuries, and some people are highly susceptible to suggestion, so the second level of deception was wildly successful. In fact, a bit too successful, since it spawned another controversy that has persisted decades after the usefulness of the cover-up expired.

Comment Re: Those conspiracy wackos (Score 1) 112

Clinton was impeached because HE LIED UNDER OATH. It had absolutely nothing to do with having sex, as much as you liberals hate when one of your heroes is criticized.

And Al Capone was jailed for tax evasion. It had absolutely nothing to do with involvement in organized crime.

Rather missing the point.

The right-wingers weren't trying to smear Clinton by painting him as some kind of sex fiend, they were trying to paint him as a perjurer so they could reopen the Whitewater investigation.

They had a legitimate point, but it became a major case of "not seeing the forest for the trees", and they spent entirely too much of the public's time and money trying to pin down inconsequential details.

Comment First off, identify why are you having trouble (Score 1) 656

"I am currently pursuing a bachelor's in CompSci and I just spent three hours working on a few differential equations for homework. It is very frustrating because I just don't grok advanced math. I can sort of understand a little bit, but I really don't grok anything beyond long division."

Don't rush into judgement on this. There can be several reasons why you have difficulty with math.

First, it could be as you say, but consider the alternatives:

Second, it could be that you just need to review the background material, or even that you overlooked something early in a course. Whenever I reach the "I'm lost" stage, I try to back up to where I first became slightly confused...then back up one or two steps further.

It could be a motivation issue. Try looking ahead to see where you're trying to go--for instance, the seemingly pointless epsilon-delta definition of limits that most calculus textbooks starts off with is only there because they intend to use the concept of limits in explaining integrals, derivatives, and infinite series. Without seeing where you're going, half of the first semester of calculus will seem like pointless bullshit.

It can also be that the instructor isn't good at teaching large groups. First, I would try asking the instructor for help in class--it may be he needs a nudge to remind him he's skipped over something important. If that doesn't help, try contacting him outside of class--odds are good you'll get better communication when he's trying to help one or two students as opposed to 120. If that still doesn't work for you, see if another professor or even another student can explain what you're having trouble with.

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