Comment Re:!bionic (Score 1) 27
Sorry crowdsource, but I am more inclined to trust the American Oxford Dictionary than the Wikipedia entry.
"bionic |biänik|
adjective
having artificial body parts, esp. electromechanical ones."
Comment Re:!bionic (Score 1) 27
... and before stickler #2 gets to me, allow me to correct myself: "cybernetic organism", not "cybernetic".
Comment !bionic (Score 2) 27
Sorry to be the stickler, but someone needs to look at their dictionary. "Bionic" (a portmanteau of "bio" and "electronic") is a pretty much a synonym for cybernetic. This story is about biomimicry, not bionics.
Carry on.
Is Google Polluting the Internet? 378
Pickens writes "In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a promise: 'We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.' Now, Micah White writes in the Guardian that the vast library that is the internet is flooded with so many advertisements that this commercial barrage is having a cultural impact, where users can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising, and the omnipresence of internet advertising constrains the horizon of our thought. And at the center of it all, with ad space on 85% of all internet sites, is Google. In the gleeful words of CEO Eric Schmidt, 'We are an advertising company.' The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore, writes White. 'The universal index is the shared heritage of humanity. It ought to be owned by us all. No corporation or nation has the right to privatize the index, commercialize the index, censor what they do not like or auction search ranking to the highest bidder.' Google currently makes nearly all its money from practices its founders once rightly abhorred. 'Now it is up to us to realize the dream of a non-commercial paradigm for organizing the internet. ... We have public libraries. We need a public search engine.'"
Comment Ah, communist China! (Score 1) 260
The workers' paradise!
Submission + - Boingboing hacked
filekutter writes: "Boingboing.net has been hacked. A ridiculous photo of a guy with a many-penises costume and this "CORY COCKOROW.. I MEAN DOCTOROW.. SUCKS MANY DICKS. STOP POSTING ABOUT OTHER HACKS AND SECURITY CONCERNS WHEN YOU LACK THE KNOWLEDGE YOURSELF." I won't post the name of the supposed "genius". Its so nice to see the smart people of the Haxxoring community showing their knowledge in equitable ways."
Genetically Engineered Silkworms Spin Spider Silk 188
disco_tracy writes "Silkworms have been modified to produce spider silk, creating a fabric that could be used in everything from bulletproof clothing to artificial tendons." For some reason, this is far less revolting to me than the idea of spider silk being milked out of goats.
Pope Says Technology Causes Confusion Between Reality and Fiction 779
Pope Benedict XVI has warned that people are in danger of being unable to discern reality from fiction because of new technologies, and not old books. "New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality. The image can also become independent from reality, it can give birth to a virtual world, with various consequences -- above all the risk of indifference towards real life," he said.
Comment Re:Proper link (Score 5, Insightful) 382
So we can see the thought process here:
Developing Linux Kernel = Valuable
Getting Linux into users hands with convenient, easy-to-use installers, providing support, etc. = Not Valuable
To borrow one of Shuttleworth's analogies, a brain can't function without a body to house it.
Comment JetBlue 2.0 (Score 1) 178
Looks like "deploying the slide" will be a thing after all. Employers everywhere, beware!
Comment Honesty (Score 1) 454
Where did this allegation come from, really? Sweden's justice system ought to come clean and let us know what source precipated these charges. The timing is so incredibly suspicious, if government authorities really are using such incredibly dirty tricks to silence a whistleblower, then they need to be exposed. That's what Wikileaks is all about.
The Fuel Cost of Obesity 285
thecarchik writes "America loves to complain about gas mileage and the cost of gasoline. As it turns out, part of the problem is us. How much does it really matter? A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a 1.1 percent increase in self-reported obesity, which translates into extra weight that your vehicle has to haul around. The study estimates that 1 billion extra gallons of fuel were needed to compensate for passenger weight gained between 1960 and 2002."
Comment Re:Choices (Score 3, Insightful) 702
Parent is exactly right. The author's argument is based on the fallacy that "the free market will sort things out". In fact we all know that even competing corporations will refuse to do battle on certain turf, thus resulting in maladies such as price-fixing and/or a lack of competitive choice.
De-facto net neutrality has worked well enough for everyone up until now. Let's legislate and make sure it stays that way.
How Star Trek Artists Imagined the iPad... 23 Years Later 324
MorderVonAllem submitted an incredibly cool article about the computers and set design of Star Trek. If you are into that sort of thing, you're going to really like this one. It says "There are a lot of similarities between Apple's iPad and the mobile computing devices—known as PADDs—used in the Star Trek universe. Ars spoke to designers Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler to find out the thinking and inspiration behind the PADD and how closely the iPad represents a real-life incarnation of that dream."
Buried By The Brigade At Digg 624
Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton writes in with an essay on a subject we've dealt with internally at Slashdot for years: user abuses of social news... this time at Digg. He starts
"Alternet uncovers evidence of a 'bury brigade' coordinating efforts to 'bury' left-leaning stories on Digg. Digg had previously announced that the 'bury' button will be removed from the next version of their site, to prevent these types of abuses, but that won't fix the real underlying issue — you can show mathematically that artificially promoting stories is just as harmful in the long run. Here's a simple fix that would address the real problem."
