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Submission + - Dmail: Chrome Extension For Gmail , Destroy sent Emails anytime (main-hosting.eu)

Amarjeet Singh writes: Dmail is an chrome extension developed by people who also developed Delicious the social bookmarking app/extension . This little chrome extension allows you to set an self destruct timer on your emails . You can send emails from Gmail as usual , there will be a button just above the send button which if turned on can set an self destruct timer of an hour , a day or a week .

Submission + - AMD clocks 500x spreadsheet speed boost via hardware acceleration in LibreOffice (amd.com)

samtuke writes: AMD processors get rated and reviewed based on performance. It is in our self-interest to make things work really, really fast on AMD hardware. AMD engineers contribute to LibreOffice, for good reason. Think about what happens behind a spreadsheet calculation. There can be a huge amount of math. Writing software to take advantage of a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for general purpose computing is non-trivial. We know how to do it. AMD engineers wrote OpenCL kernels, and contributed them to the open source code base. Turning on the OpenCL option to enable GPU Compute resulted in a 500X+ speedup, about ¼ second vs. 2minutes, 21 seconds.

Submission + - Chinese tourist crashes drone into Taipei 101 skyscrapper (yibada.com)

Taco Cowboy writes: A Chinese tourist is under remand for crashing his drone into the Taipei 101 sky scrapper, and ordered to pay a fine of $48,000 (NT $1.5 Million)

Yan Yungfan, a 30-year-old man from eastern China's Fujian Province, was supposedly attempting to film Taipei's cityscape on Tuesday morning with a remotely controlled Phantom 3 UAV when he lost control of the drone, causing it to hit the side of Taipei 101 at around the 30th floor

No one was injured in the incident and only minor damage was sustained by the building's glass windows, but the video immediately became a viral sensation after it was uploaded online

Taipei 101 said in a statement that there have been three incidents of drones crashing around the building since mid-June, with the first two cases taking place on June 15 and June 20. No injuries were reported for both incidents, although the UAV that crashed on June 15 fell less than two meters from pedestrians

Submission + - Eye drops could dissolve cataracts

An anonymous reader writes: As Slashdot readers age, more and more will be facing surgery for cataracts. The lack of cataract surgery in much of the world, is a major cause of blindness. Researchers at University of California San Diego have identified lanosterol as a key molecule in the prevention of cataract formation that points to a novel strategy for cataract prevention and non-surgical treatment.
The abstract is freely available from Nature. If you have cataracts, you might want to purchase a full reprint while you can still read it.

Comment Re:There's Very Few Things (Score 3, Insightful) 80

You are conflating a world that is becoming warmer with a world that just *is* warmer. It may be true (I take no position) that a world that is 4-5 C warmer is better for certain classes of poor people (e.g., subsistence farmers). But a world that is changing rapidly is a calimity to poor people tied to the land, especially in a modern world with national boundaries and private property where you just can't pick up and move like our paleolithic ancestors would have.

Comment Re:If it's not _real_ bacon? (Score 1) 174

This guy is entitled to use the word "plant" as he will, but it doesn't agree with modern systematics. For example he calls "kelp" a plant, but it is taxonomically closer to the parasite that causes malaria than it is to land plants.

"Macroalgae" is a multi-phyletic category, including eukaryotes of the Archaeplastida group that includes red algae and green algae and the land plants that evolved from green algae, and of the super-group Chromalveolata that includes red tides, brown algae (such as kelp or Plasmodium). Green algae and land plants are grouped together under the kingdom "Plantae" in modern taxonomies.

So "seaweed" as a category includes organisms which are (cladistically speaking) closely related to land plants (green algae like sea grapes or sea lettuce), middling-related (red algae like nori or carageenan) and not very closely related at all (brown algae like kombu/kelp). Of course all organisms are presumably related to some degree.

The seaweed in question is a kind of dulse, a red algae. It's more closely related to land plants than a brown algae like kelp would be, but less related than sea lettuce. Red algae are specifically not included in the Kingdom Plantae. However, layman are free to call whatever they want a plant, even if it's in fact something else entirely, the way they call any small arthropod a "bug", even through true bugs are one of the 75,000 species in the order Hemiptera (out of over a million insect species).

Comment Re:If it's not _real_ bacon? (Score 1) 174

Technically it's not a plant. Its a macroalgae and thus belongs to an entirely distinct taxonomic kingdom from plants and animals. Of course halakhically it probably counts as a plant because Jewish law isn't based on modern scientific concepts.

Many years ago some of my wife's friends inhabited a kosher apartment near her engineering school that had been passed down through generations of orthodox students. A dispute arose over whether a particular bowl was glass or pottery. Finally they called in their buddy the material science major for a scientific ruling. "It's neither," he said. "It's ceramic." Which was technically accurate, but irrelevant to the question of whether it could be kashered.

Comment Liquefaction (Score 3, Interesting) 265

There's also a problem with liquefaction. Most of Victoria and Vancouver (in BC) are built on soft earth which will become mud and will stop supporting the stuff we've built. All those foundations, bridges, streets, they'll all become impassable. There's a liquefaction map I saw at an engineering presentation and the whole thing was red and black. Victoria is literally built on landfill garbage right next to the ocean. One of its landmark buildings, the Empress Hotel, was slowly sinking until it had a major refurb to drive piles down as far as they could reach.

Vancouver is the biggest port for exporting all of Canada's wheat, lumber, ore, etc. If it shuts down, people could be starving for work and food all over the world. It's not all bad though, because EA North would cease to exist. However, greater Vancouver is where most of BC's engineers live and work. We're your experts in fixing up after an earthquake, and most of us would probably be gone.

It's going to be bad when it hits. The upside is that most people here have earthquake kits, emergency supplies, ninja reflexes (we do earthquake drills) and have some idea that it will in fact happen.

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