Comment Re:Call Hot Topic! (Re:From the old Spiderman Cart (Score 1) 53
It would most likely be bright white, like titanium dioxide.
Star Wars makes so much more sense now.
Comment Re:Leap Forward? (Score 2, Insightful) 213
When Deep Blue went up against Kasperov, who could it practice against? Nobody.
That this got modded Insightful is the best argument yet for adding tags to
Comment Does it take more than eleventy billion... (Score 1) 213
...calculations to come up with "Oh, I'll bet you do, you Canadian ponch."?
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stupid subject character limit
Comment Isn't that illegal? (Score 1) 830
I mean MLB even outlawed aluminum bats. So now they are going to allow Seattle to use lasers and stuff? And why only against Pittsburgh? They aren't even in the same league.
Comment On behalf of the Bay Area, I would like to say (Score 1) 500
AWESOME!!!!
Comment Re:Floating base! (Score 1) 165
step 4: add a wireless satellite uplink
Comment Re:Good idea, but... (Score 1) 299
Apart from the abysmal track record of the BAA, here are a number of reasons why it won't work.
-Demand at airports is not smooth. Imagine two 747 and one 380 arriving simultaneously. There is no way to get 1200 passengers smoothly into individual pods. And if you want them to use credit cards, walking out a fire door, getting arrested by airport police, 3 hours of interrogation and getting taken to your departure gate in handcuffs will get you on your next plane faster. For added hilarity, add a few wheelchairs to the mix.
-Ripple effects...if any of the pods breaks down, traffic stops. Even if they had the same MTBF as trains, the system will break 500 times more often. By the way, trains are a well understood technology after 150 years, this isn't.
-Goofing off. It doesn't have to be vandalism, but will the pods work with 25 college students packed into one?
Comment Heathrow (Score 4, Funny) 299
Oh the delicious irony of using "Heathrow" and "rapid transit" in the same sentence.
FDA Testing Artificial Liver 146
NIckGorton writes "Research is now underway in the US to seek FDA approval for an artificial liver. The Extracorporeal Liver Assist Device (ELAD) filters blood through a cartridge containing immortalized human liver cells with fiber tubes running through that allow the patients blood to interact with them. This allows the matrix of liver cells to perform both the metabolic (cleansing the blood of toxins/waste) and synthetic (producing albumin, clotting factors, etc) functions of the patient's failing liver. A small trial in China showed a statistically and clinically significant difference in 30 day survival with ELAD."
DivX 7 Adds Support For Blu-ray Rips (H.264/MKV) 294
mrspin writes "DivX looks set to continue to be the video format of choice for 'grey' content, with the company announcing that version 7 adds support for H.264 video and, more significantly, the Matroska (MKV) container. Anybody familiar with Blu-ray rips found on BitTorrent sites or other filesharing networks will instantly recognize the MKV file format in combination with the H.264 codec as a popular way to deliver High Definition video on a PC. And now that DivX is throwing its weight behind the Matroska container, MKV support should increasingly find its way on a range of non-PC devices, such as Blu-ray players, HD digital televisions and set-top boxes."
Comment Re:features myth (Score 1) 652
Well, I am waiting for some consumer features, and I don't see many things OS X does wrong--or XP for that matter. Obviously Office 2007 is a different story, because it took a few big steps back in usability.
OK, here are some wishes:
-right click on any text in any application for Google search. (on OS X, you can drag to the Safari icon, but that's disruptive)
-Full sized cover flow
-RAW support at the OS level
-Smart text parsing. The OS should know that xxxx@yyyy.zzz is an email. Mail does something like this, but I don't use it for other reasons.
-Real transparent server file systems. No, XP/Vista/OS X/Linux do not have this.
-And specifically for the Mac, although this can be considered user experience: Someone please let me lock the wireless to a network instead of scanning all 55 open networks in my building every single time it gets out of standby.
And there are features like Time Machine that I didn't know I needed until I started using them.
Submission + - 7 years of "Less space than a Nomad"
lelitsch writes: Hey, you probably get this submitted a lot today, but 174 million iPods later, we should take a minute to reflect on the 7th anniversary of the biggest blown call on Slashdot.
Submission + - Virtual Border fence doesn't work
lelitsch writes: The Washington Post reports that the initial pilot of the Virtual Border Fence planned by the DHS and subcontracted to Boeing has been a miserable failure.
A lot of things sound like death march software development projects. Some choice quotes include "did not work as planned or meet the needs of the U.S. Border Patrol", "DHS officials do not yet know the type of terrain where the fencing is to be constructed", and "the design will not be used as the basis for future . . . development".
Submission + - One down, two to go.
lelitsch writes: The WSJ, Reuters and other news agencies report that CompUSA has been sold and is going to be liquidated. While this will give a short term boost to CircuitCity and Best Buy, I wonder if their combination or high prices, high pressure sales techniques (not to use a nastier word), unfriendly staff and lack of technical savvy might drive all of them out of business eventually. Are we headed for a WalMart and web world for tech toys?
Submission + - Ohio has a newmaster plan to fix electronic voting 1
lelitsch writes: Ars reports that after all the problems with voting machines in Ohio, the secretary of state has finally come up with a bullet proof solution: printing paper ballots from the memory cards in their Diebold touchscreen voting machines, so that they can tabulate paper copies.
Does this set a new benchmark for not getting it?
