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Comment: Bury all power lines? (Score 1) 171

by Kevin Fishburne (#46477871) Attached to: Power Cables' UV Flashes Apparently Frighten Animals
Probably prohibitively expensive, but it would be nice if, someday, all that shit was underground. It looks horrible and is susceptible to lightning strikes, airplanes, helicopters (and now drones), falling trees, hurricanes, tornadoes and terrorist sabotage. And again, it just looks horrible. We bury fiber, copper, natural gas and water lines, so why is all our electrical strung up like the crack baby of a Christmas tree and a giant spider?

Comment: My ingenious solution is to... (Score 1) 333

by Kevin Fishburne (#46340067) Attached to: How Mobile Apps Are Reinventing the Worst of the Software Industry
Install nothing on my phone except what I can 100% (well, close enough) verify as being from a legitimate company (Google Maps, Twitter, etc.). No random but interesting-sounding programs, no games, none of that shit. My device is a phone/GPS/camera/browser/calculator. That it's nothing else not only doesn't bother me, I think it's great. My neck is in good order as well, as it doesn't gravitate toward a near-permanent state of 67.5 degrees. Many others seem to suffer from this, leading me to believe they have too much crap installed on their phone. Get help now, people; it's not as hard as it seems.

Comment: Re:En Venezuela hay mucho PETROLEO... (Score 1) 152

by Kevin Fishburne (#46256617) Attached to: Venezuelan Regime Censoring Twitter
Last time I was there (a couple of years ago) you could fill your gas tank for about a dollar. There's also a guy standing there to fill your tank for you, who you generally give a tip larger than what it costs to fill it. Before going on a trip or vacation the common joke is who's going to pay for food and who's going to pay for gas.

Everything else however is damn hard to get and expensive. I wanted to get some blank DVDs to burn some movies and that was when I started to realize something really bad was going on there (other than the crazy pro/anti-government graffiti everywhere and steel bars over every window and door).

Comment: Re:without reading the TFA, as usual (Score 1) 46

by Kevin Fishburne (#46226593) Attached to: Tiny Motors Controlled Inside Human Cells
Awesome. Thought you were trolling for a second (that's how over-my-head your response was), but Wikipedia backs up the quantum dots reference. If civilization remains relatively cohesive for the next century the future will be pure ownage from our perspective. Someday we'll be at the cusp of extending life to near immortality. I think people will, in general, be calmer knowing they're not going to die of old age. A new renaissance for humans, and Earth.

Comment: So delicious! (Score 3, Funny) 274

by Kevin Fishburne (#46225097) Attached to: The Death Cap Mushroom Is Spreading Across the US

Clearly this is proof of Intelligent Design. If I were God I'd definitely place these things everywhere they'd fit just to keep my people on their toes. Nature's land mines.

Comment: Re:without reading the TFA, as usual (Score 2) 46

by Kevin Fishburne (#46224807) Attached to: Tiny Motors Controlled Inside Human Cells
Ask anyone whose life has been saved by chemotherapy, like my mom, and she can give you her doctor's name. It's a blunt instrument, but it has its uses. Seriously though, I did couch my conjecture with terms like "could", "eventual", "perhaps" and "eventually". My thinking was that nanotech and related fields could someday find a way to identify and modify or destroy cells we don't want floating around in us (cancer, viruses, etc.).

Your suggestion about basically creating a DNA checksum of the original then comparing that to newly created cells, I imagine, would be the ultimate solution. Might even help out with long term space travel and such.

Comment: without reading the TFA, as usual (Score 1) 46

by Kevin Fishburne (#46223317) Attached to: Tiny Motors Controlled Inside Human Cells
It sounds like this sort of research could be the eventual answer to "curing" cancer. As has been discussed extensively here on /., it's looking like there's really no cure but that it can perhaps eventually be treated so effectively that we'll think of it more as the common cold than the ultimate horror it is today.

Comment: Re:Straight-line acceleration (Score 1) 238

It wouldn't be straight, but it would be straighter. I was thinking of automobile racing as an analogy. The straighter your racing line the faster you accelerate and the greater your top speed because less energy is wasted on lateral correction. Similar rules should apply to moving particles through a vacuum by electromagnets (or however they move them). I wonder if that would be a compromise between the advantages and disadvantages of linear and ring accelerators. It'd be insanely expensive, though, so I don't think it'll happen soon.

Comment: Some day, but not soon (Score 1) 876

by Kevin Fishburne (#46193779) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Are We Still Writing Text-Based Code?
This will happen eventually, but there will be a lot of dirty genetic algorithms under the surface to make it efficient and it will still require seemingly endless tweaking with unexpected results. People will even call the software "stupid" and "unintuitive" as it crunches out insane iterations of what it thinks might meet your requests (based on non-scratched previous requests). Give computer science and AI another 100 years (shit; we'll all be dead), and you'll probably see some laymen programming away by giving directives to "Computer" like TNG.

Comment: Re:Is the source code included? (Score 1) 252

by Kevin Fishburne (#46190417) Attached to: North Korea's Home-Grown Operating System Mimics OS X
My bad; I thought they were all called Dear Leader. Sorta like Big Brother, where he wasn't an individual but more of an idea. I feel bad for the citizens there. Apparently not even being a high-ranking official keeps you safe, as they recently executed some old man "by dogs". When the government uses "execution by dogs" as a political tool, you know you have some serious fucking problems!
