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Comment Re:DOA (Score 1) 314

I forgot to mention that Opera didn't really put a lot of effort into the iPhone ap. They already had the Opera Mini browser for other cellphones, so all they needed to do was copy it over.

Opera Mini for other phones is a Java (J2ME) application. The one for the iPhone is Obj-C. There is no way to go from one to the other without a lot of effort.

Comment Re:He only took away the sit-down money (Score 4, Insightful) 344

The US nuclear industry has lagged behind because for the past 50 years, the regulatory and political environment allowed anti-nuclear activists to delay the completion of plants indefinitely.

Oh the hyperbole. 50 years ago (53 for you nitpickers) Shippingport came online. You know, "the first fully civilian nuclear reactor." Nuclear power industry was just starting to appear, and the "regulatory and political environment" was anything but inimical to it. Rather gung-ho, in fact.

The past 30 years instead of 50? Probably. But not without good reason. An industry mired in secrecy and obfuscation stemming from its military origins, where screw-ups can happen and are serious -- potentially disastrous -- if they do, does not inspire confidence. Neither does pooh-poohing genuine concerns. "Waste? Oh, that's easy, we'll just reprocess it!" Sure. Hanford did that for years. Recovered tons of weapons fuel, ended up with additional megatons of extremely nasty waste. (Ditto Sellafield in the UK and La Hague in France.) There are better ways to do it for civilian use, and actinide burners may be one of them, which is why they should be built and studied; but they -- and all other things nuclear -- should not be presented as a silver bullet, in an arrogant and condescending tone.

Some may get an impression that I am too opposed to nuclear power. Not in the least. IMO, nuclear is the only sufficiently plentiful energy supply which we can comfortably use for the next thousand years, and is not geographically or otherwise limited like solar or wind. But it is not without risks, and while those risks should not be overstated (like the shrillest environmentalists do), they should not be swept under the carpet, either.

Comment Re:hp48 (Score 1) 289

You dummy, use the right cursor key to swap the two most recent entries in the stack.

That works only if you have already entered the number (expression, &c) on the stack (i.e., the command line is not active.) True x<>y works even if you're still in the command line, and it's unambiguously labeled on the keyboard. I dearly love my 48SX, but for pure number crunching any old RPN calculator (like the 11C mentioned above) is faster to use. Btw, "right cursor for swap" started with the 48SX, and on its keyboard it's quite obvious why: SWAP is right above the right arrow, left-shifted.

Comment Re:From an Industrial Psychologist... (Score 1) 581

Well, of course, they perform better on the actual job. These are people who are fairly adaptable to any corporate culture. In fact, most people are adaptable enough that they can fit into your corporate culture. You would easily find the outliers just by talking face to face with them for about 15 minutes rather than putting them through a humiliating test.

Comment Re:stupid question but..... (Score 1) 563

It's pretty easy to get your records now.

Now, I know I'm just an anecdote, but I have been witness to many ways that hospitals make this quite difficult, HIPAA or otherwise. My wife and I have moved a number of times in the past few years, and we've seen all sorts of tricks.

One hospital would not give us her records until we showed up in person and paid a number of random fees. They refused to simply send on her records to our new hospital. When we later wanted to have a specialty procedure done in Boston, the new hospital only sent insufficient fragments of the records to Boston.

We've even had such extremes as a doctor personally taking certain records and storing them at his home as he wanted to do some "extra research". It came as a surprise to us when these records were "unavailable" when it came time for us to move.

We're both privacy advocates, but we also agree that this is a change that is essential to the healthcare industry (and was one of our major reasons for supporting Obama). It's certainly about time.

Databases

David Axmark Resigns From Sun 229

An anonymous reader writes "From Kay Arno's blog we see that David Axmark, MySQL's Co-Founder, has resigned. This comes on top of the maybe, maybe not, resignation of Monty. We saw earlier this year that Brian Aker, the Director of Architecture, has forked the server to create a web-focused database from MySQL called Drizzle. The MySQL server has been 'RC' now for a year with hundreds of bugs still listed as being active in the 5.1 version. What is going on with MySQL?"
Space

Space Debris Narrowly Misses Airliner 297

An anonymous reader writes "An airliner jet traveling from Chile to New Zealand early today was in for an interesting ride. Flaming space debris — the remains of a Russian satellite — came hurtling back to Earth not far from a commercial jet on its way to Auckland, New Zealand. Here's further justification for the growing concern of the increasing amounts of space garbage orbiting our planet. From the article: 'The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340 ... notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Centre after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane...'"
Science

Space Plane to Offer 2 Hour Flight around the World 214

secretsather writes "Two hour flights to the other side of the world may seem like a scene from a science fiction movie; but the technology is in place, and a plane that can do just that is currently in development. While it looks like a scene from a flight simulator, the Astrox space plane is the real deal, and the Astrox Corporation says it could revolutionize the transportation industry. Traveling as fast as Mach 25 with at least 30 minutes of space shuttle-like views while in orbit is the highlight of this plane, and The Astrox Corporation, along with their partners, are claiming to have finally overcome their largest problem, mixing fuel."

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