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Comment: VEX Robotics Kit (Score 1) 166

by auntieNeo (#43898633) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Begin Simple Robotics As a Hobby?

Comment: Plan to move away from X11? (Score 1, Redundant) 124

by auntieNeo (#42316303) Attached to: Call for Questions: Rasterman, Founder of the Enlightenment Project

Comment: Re:tumours grown under the skin? (Score 1) 42

by auntieNeo (#39894161) Attached to: Nanoparticles Heated By Radio Waves Switch On Genes In Mice
Sounds like a quote from Portal 2...

"For this next test, we put nanoparticles in the gel. In layman's terms, that's a billion little gizmos that are gonna travel into your bloodstream and pump experimental genes and RNA molecules and so forth into your tumors. Now, maybe you don't have any tumors. Well, don't worry. If you sat on a folding chair in the lobby and weren't wearing lead underpants, we took care of that too." --Cave Johnson

Comment: Re:iPhone secret screenshots? (Score 4, Insightful) 193

by auntieNeo (#33550354) Attached to: Hacker Teaches iPhone Forensics To Police

"For example, every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it." - TFS What?

I'm guessing it does that because when it opens it wants to look just as spiffy as it looked when the user closed it, and it can't do that if it has to re-render the map from scratch.

Comment: Re:3000BC called... (Score 0) 195

by auntieNeo (#32315160) Attached to: New iConji Language For the Symbol-Minded Texter

I'm not a linguist, as I'm probably about to demonstrate, but the development of written language went (very) roughly like: pictograms -> consonants -> vowels -> punctuation

What?! Practically every language in existence, new or old, uses vowels. You can hardly make grunts without using vowels. Unless there are some highly advanced languages that I'm not aware of that write things like "aaaaaaoo ooaaaa iiieeey eeeuuueoo" and somehow understand what that means.

It seems the dumber things one says, the more likely one is to get +5 interesting on slashdot. If that's the case...


I for one am against the current trend of using more vowels and punctuation. I enjoy eating consonants for breakfast; they aid in my digestion. With less demand for consonants, the only breakfast cereals I can find on the shelves are O's shaped. I suspect this recent language paradigm shift was brought about by recent popular phrases such as "SPARTAAAAAAA" and "LOOOOOOOOL", but I don't know why the kids enjoy punctuation so much. I guess I'm out of the loop. :(

Comment: Re:Priorities! (Score 2, Informative) 132

by auntieNeo (#32120500) Attached to: Robot With Knives Used In Robotics Injury Study

Could we first work on robots that DON'T stab people, before we put a lot of effort into developing robots that DO stab people?

Once again, the /. summary is misleading. TFA says that the researchers are developing a system that's used to detect and prevent such robot stabings. Whether or not this postpones the inevitable robot uprising is yet to be seen.

Memory fault -- brain fried