Med-trump - Slashdot User

Submission + - Siri - is the world ready for voice input? (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk on Thursday October 06, 2011 @09:15AM

mikejuk writes: One of the highlights of the recent Apple launch of the iPhone 4S was Siri — your personal assistant which brings AI and voice input to your phone. You can ask it questions and it will attempt to answer them — so no more typing and no more Google.
The big problem is that the technology has been around for a while and this still might not be the right time to adopt it. Apple has been wrong before — remember the Newton with its handwriting based input. We all gasped with wonder when it was first introduced and then started to laugh as it made big and occationally embarassing mistakes. Perhaps Siri's future depends on not making any high profile and laughable errors. Any suggestions for the first Siri joke?

Submission + - Stem cells from cloned human embryo (nature.com)

Submitted by Med-trump on Wednesday October 05, 2011 @06:09PM

Med-trump writes: Scientists at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory have reprogrammed an adult human egg cell to an embryonic state using cloning technology and created a self-reproducing line of embryonic stem cells from the developing embryo.

Submission + - Facebook caught lying? (arunbalan.in)

Submitted by asto21 on Sunday October 02, 2011 @03:23PM

asto21 writes: Facebook execs seem to make conflicting statements/moves in the span of a few days. This, before news broke of Facebook's user profiling patent.

HN discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3063273

Michael Arrington's post on the patent http://uncrunched.com/2011/10/01/brutal-dishonesty/

Submission + - Massive Security Issue in HTC Android Phones (androidpolice.com)

Submitted by Kompressor on Sunday October 02, 2011 @02:41PM

Kompressor writes: Trevor Eckhart, Justin Case, and Artem Russakovskii have found and analyzed a frightening array of vulnerabilities related to HTC's customization of Android. From the article:
Any app on affected devices that requests a single android.permission.INTERNET (which is normal for any app that connects to the web or shows ads) can get its hands on:

the list of user accounts, including email addresses and sync status for each last known network and GPS locations and a limited previous history of locations

phone numbers from the phone log SMS data, including phone numbers and encoded text (not sure yet if it's possible to decode it, but very likely)

system logs (both kernel/dmesg and app/logcat), which includes everything your running apps do and is likely to include email addresses, phone numbers, and other private info

Comment Reposting every few months (Score 1) 158

by Med-trump on Friday September 30, 2011 @02:13PM (#37570136) Attached to: MIT's 'Artificial Leaf' Makes Fuel From Sunlight

This story is running over and over for quite some time. Each instance it is publicized as a new story. I have seen in in the past year at least two other times.

Submission + - HP Hires Goldman to Defend Against Activists/Oracl (nytimes.com)

Submitted by N!NJA on Friday September 30, 2011 @12:52AM

N!NJA writes: Hewlett-Packard has hired Goldman Sachs as an adviser to help defend against potential activist investors or hostile bidders seeking a break-up of the troubled technology giant, people briefed on the matter told DealBook on Wednesday. The hiring of Goldman is not surprising. Analysts and investors have mused for months that H.P. is ripe for an activist investor to arise, demanding even bolder steps to try to bolster shareholder value. Shares of H.P. have fallen more than 44 percent over the last 12 months, closing on Wednesday at $23.19. With the company's stock price hovering near 52-week lows, HP's management and directors have become concerned that agitators may begin amassing sizable holdings, these people said.

On the same topic:

HP Said to Have Been Concerned Over Oracle When Switching CEOs

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-09-29/hp-said-to-have-been-concerned-over-oracle-when-switching-ceos.html

Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) — Hewlett-Packard Co. directors were concerned that plummeting shares would make the company vulnerable to a bid from Oracle Corp. when they replaced Leo Apotheker with Meg Whitman, two people close to the board said. While Oracle has considered informally whether to approach Hewlett-Packard, it's unlikely to make a bid any time soon, three people close to the software company said. After speaking with several financial advisers, Hewlett-Packard has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to help it prepare for any possible moves by activist investors, one person said.

Submission + - Tevatron has come to the end of its run (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Med-trump on Thursday September 29, 2011 @10:20AM

Med-trump writes: The US government's Chicago-area Fermilab has been at the forefront of high-energy physics. That's in large part thanks to the Tevatron, the machine that first reached the energies needed to discover the last quark in the Standard Model. But the Tevatron has come to the end of its run; at 2pm on Friday, it will be shut down for the last time.

Submission + - The Toughest Little Bird (npr.org)

Submitted by Med-trump on Wednesday September 28, 2011 @05:04PM

Med-trump writes: They are the only birds known to fly more than 7,000 miles nonstop, that means no food breaks, no water breaks, no sleep breaks, no pausing, just pushing through cyclones, storms, headwinds, flappity flap, flap for days and nights — and this is their championship season. In September and October, they leave Alaska, head straight for the ocean.

Submission + - Where Will Nuclear Medicine Get Its Critical Tool? (txchnologist.com)

Submitted by ambermichelle on Wednesday September 28, 2011 @11:28AM

ambermichelle writes: n 2009, the unexpected shutdown of the Chalk River nuclear reactor in Ontario, Canada meant that the global medical community was suffering from shortages of a critical diagnostic tool — radioactive isotopes used by clinicians to diagnose everything from heart attacks to thyroid cancer. Then doctors found out the situation would go from bad to worse. An aging nuclear reactor in the Dutch town of Petten, source of a third of the world’s supply of the most important medical isotope, Technetium 99m, was going off line in February for critical maintenance.

Until summer of last year, the world’s doctors watched waiting lists for diagnostic procedures grow, and in some cases did without otherwise routine medical tests, because the two reactors that each produce a third of the world’s supply of medically important radioactive isotopes were both off-line. It was an outage for which no one was prepared.

Journal Journal: Don't you just hate it when ... 3

Journal by tomhudson on Tuesday September 27, 2011 @09:36PM

... when you have a prototype that "almost" works (and does more than you initially wanted it to), but that you really should rethink a few things on so that you're not locked into a few sub-optimal decisions that you made to "get from point A to point B"?

Real Artists Ship

Submission + - Google Drops Cloud Lawsuit Against US Gov't (itworld.com)

Submitted by

jfruhlinger

on Tuesday September 27, 2011 @06:29PM

jfruhlinger writes: "A year ago, Google sued the U.S. government because the government's request for proposals for a cloud project mandated Microsoft Office; Google felt, for obvious reasons, that this was discriminatory. Google has now withdrawn the suit, claiming that the Feds promised to update their policies to allow Google to compete. The only problem is that the government claims it did no such thing."

Submission + - "Scrolls" lawsuit going ahead (1up.com)

Submitted by person46 on Tuesday September 27, 2011 @06:29PM

person46 writes: Bethesda's lawsuit against Mojang, developers of Minecraft, is going to court. Bethesda is claiming copyright infringement over the title of Mojang's upcoming CCG/board game Scrolls. Bethesda claims that the name and game concept are too similar to their well-known RPG franchise The Elder Scrolls. Mojang founder Notch had offered to settle the dispute with a friendly game of Quake 3, but perhaps Bethesda also took issue with Quake's use of the number three.

Submission + - Libraries Release Most-Censored Books List (ala.org)

Submitted by destinyland on Tuesday September 27, 2011 @03:41PM

destinyland writes: The American Library Association released this year's list of the most-frequently censored books. (Included in the top 10 are two best-selling novels — Twilight and The Hunger Games — as well as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.) The annual list celebrates "the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment," according to the library association, highlighting "the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship..." And interestingly, 7 of the 10 most-censored books are now available on Amazon's Kindle — more than twice as many as last year.

Submission + - ACTA to be signed this Weekend (activepolitic.com) 1

Submitted by bs0d3 on Tuesday September 27, 2011 @03:30PM

bs0d3 writes: Since US negotiators on ACTA were pushing for some of the toughest language on DRM, Internet disconnections, and more, they had to climb down in the face of international resistance and public pressure. The new ACTA light will be signed in Japan this comming weekend. The milder ACTA won't be treated like a treaty—which requires Senate ratification in the US—but like an "executive agreement" that cannot alter US law. The US is sending Ambassador Miriam Sapiro, the deputy US Trade Representative, to Tokyo this weekend to sign the final document

Submission + - Newb-friendly Linux flavor for LAMP server? 2

Submitted by bhcompy on Saturday September 24, 2011 @10:42PM

bhcompy writes: I need to setup a system to serve 2500 users and I've been looking at a LAMP setup. This is not commercial, more of a personal side project for some friends. I've no experience configuring or administering a Linux server having worked with MS and PICK based solutions my whole life, so I'm looking for something that will be relatively straightforward to implement and not a chore to manage and preferably not completely CLI. I will be serving a forum(phpBB 3 suits my needs and seems adequate) and a variety of PHP driven content with a MySQL backend. Requirements are PHP 5.3.0+ and MySQL 5+. Suggestions?

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