Comment What a lovely high-glare screen it has. (Score 1) 44
Really? Why do they even make those?
Comment Not that version (Score 1) 45
The Android Market is offering 1.6.0.13 this morning.
Comment No! (Score 1) 742
If they did they wouldn't have changed their name (or, for that matter, air ghost hunting crap).
Comment But the default.... (Score 1) 87
"The user can set a time for how long the drop will exist, decide who can view the content, set permissions for who can alter the content and share content in a variety of ways" But the default for access is world-readable forever. Setting permissions more restrictively requires navigating three intermediate pages and viewing an on-line video ad.
Submission + - Robot acceptance and religious culture (theatlantic.com)
Chris.Nelson writes: '[The] difference between Japanese and American attitudes toward robots is rooted in something much older than even the idea of robots: religion.
"In Japan... they're culturally open to robots, on account of animism. They don't make a distinction between inanimate objects and humans."
Animism is a component of the Shinto faith, the religion that preceded the introduction of Buddhism to Japan and remains an influential part of the country's culture. Animism is the notion that all objects have a spirit — even man-made objects.
In the West, in contrast, creating life inevitably leads to destruction of the creator — a notion that is hardly original to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein'
The original article contains a video of a Japanese singing robot and an interview with one of its (her?) creators.
"In Japan... they're culturally open to robots, on account of animism. They don't make a distinction between inanimate objects and humans."
Animism is a component of the Shinto faith, the religion that preceded the introduction of Buddhism to Japan and remains an influential part of the country's culture. Animism is the notion that all objects have a spirit — even man-made objects.
In the West, in contrast, creating life inevitably leads to destruction of the creator — a notion that is hardly original to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein'
The original article contains a video of a Japanese singing robot and an interview with one of its (her?) creators.
Comment Re:True for ChemE's, maybe not for mathematicians (Score 1) 1260
Duh! Even more true, then.
Comment True for ChemE's, maybe not for mathematicians (Score 1) 1260
When studying EE way back when, we generally worked with +/-10% in our circuit equations but a chemical engineering student friend of mine pointed out that chemistry was somewhat less precise than electronics and they used +/-30%. Thus 2.3 + 2.3 = 4.6 which rounds to 5 so 2+2=5 for sufficiently large values of 2.
Comment There's a word for that (Score 1) 709
The word for people who text while driving is "dead." ("Stupid" comes close but fails to capture the true insanity of such an attempt at multitasking two visually-intensive tasks.)
Comment Re:Google Maps fixes errors (Score 1) 312
I've had the same experience.
Comment Really? That many? (Score 1) 284
Apple suckered 114,067 people into buying iPads?!
Comment I agree... (Score 1) 660
I've also heard (I can't remember where), "If the code and the comments disagree, they are both wrong."
Comment Re:Any have a decent Camera? (Score 1) 378
It'd be nice if the camera optics were in a removable little bit that you could leave in your car or with the guard. I imagine something about the size of a 2x2 Lego brick that snaps in and out easily.
Comment There's a word for that (Score 3, Informative) 304
I was excited recently (OK, I'm a language geek) to learn that there's a "real" word for patent trolling: champerty (http://wordsmith.org/words/champerty.html)
Comment I gotta ask... (Score 1) 326
Will they hire Al Gore to help (re)invent the internet?
Submission + - On a (Fly)Clear disk you can seek forever
Chris.Nelson writes: While dropping my daughter off at the airport this morning, I noticed the FlyClear kiosk screen indicated that the disks had been wiped and a log written to removable media on the A: drive. I tried to get a picture but couldn't get close enough. I don't know what'll happen to their servers but at least the field systems seem to have been handled responsibly.
