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Comment Re:A taste of things to come? (Score 1) 138

by PolygamousRanchKid (#47253025) Attached to: France Cries Foul At World Cup "Spy Drone"

If the drone gets damaged during the capture...well...C'est la vie!

C'est la guerre would be much more appropriate. Celebrity security bodyguards will be soon be toting long range bird guns to ensure their customers' privacy.

I'd personally recommend a Browning BPS 10 gauge with Tungsten Super Shot loads.

Submission + - Zuckerberg PAC Declares Hunting Season on Republican Voters

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "We are excited to announce that FWD.us and Hackers/Founders are joining forces to host the 'DEBUG DC' Growthathon on June 21st & June 22nd," reads the blog over at FWD.us [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's PAC]. "This is a unique opportunity to push the envelope in online advocacy for immigration reform." The blog entry explains, "The machine of government is wedged, and is in desperate need of debugging. How do we DEBUG DC? Step One: Target critical legislative districts. Step Two: Data mine these districts to find registered voters who are registered Republicans who we think are likely to support immigration reform. Step Three: Growth hack ways to motivate these people to effectively engage their legislators to tell them they want them to call for a vote on immigration reform. Step Four: Measure results. Step Five: Iterate." The Eventbrite invitation for the event includes a call for Data Scientists who are "pissed off about immigration and want to fix it," are "well versed in statistics and data analysis," and can "infer voter sentiment from sparse data." "To keep things interesting," the invite explains, "we've lined up a few really cool prizes," i.e., one hour meetings with VC Vinod Khosla, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Technology and Civic Engagement (Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith are all FWD.us supporters). So, with speculation that Mark Zuckerberg was the kiss of death for [House Majority Leader] Eric Cantor, who went down to defeat in spectacular fashion in Tuesday's primary, could the planned data mining of Republican voters backfire and put off politicians?

Comment Re:Inspiring (Score 0, Redundant) 257

by PolygamousRanchKid (#47215913) Attached to: HP Unveils 'The Machine,' a New Computer Architecture

three quarters of the lab

So that makes 3 people, given HP's serial job cuts.

Actually, committing 3/4 of your research lab on one project is bet that should raise a few eyebrows. Sure, IBM pulled it off with the "bet the company" System/360, and that turned out to be quite profitable for them in the long run.

But today . . . ? It seems more like a desperate move. If the project fails, what will happen? Will HP just shit-can research all together, for ever . . . ?

Wall Street will demand action, and it seems that most companies are slaves to Wall Street opinion now.

Submission + - Teacher Tenure Laws Ruled Unconstitutional In California (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tenure laws one of the most controversial aspects of education reform, and now the tide seems to be turning against them. A California judge has handed down a ruling that such laws are unconstitutional, depriving students of an education by sometimes secure positions for bad teachers. The judge said, "Substantial evidence presented makes it clear to this court that the challenged statutes disproportionately affect poor and/or minority students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience." The plaintiff's case was that "California’s current laws make it impossible to get rid of the system’s numerous low-performing and incompetent teachers; that seniority rules requiring the newest teachers to be laid off first were harmful; and that granting tenure to teachers after only two years on the job was farcical, offering far too little time for a fair assessment of their skills." This is a precedent-setting case, and there will likely be many similar cases around the country as tenure is challenged with this new ammunition.

Comment Re:Somebody should tell NASA (Score 1) 155

Fruit flies don't live for "months".

Normal Earth fruit flies, yes. But on the Space Station, their Space Station fruit flies apparently live much longer. It looks like they have slipped up, and lets us know what they are *really* experimenting on up there. Obviously, a secret space station longevity serum.

Because they are doing the experimenting up in the Space Station, it probably means that there are still some bothersome side effects, like turning folks into zombies and stuff like that.

Submission + - Eating Breakfast Won't Help You Lose Weight (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Dieters are often urged to eat breakfast as a way to lose weight, so they don’t binge later in the day. But two new studies suggest this conventional wisdom is wrong. The authors speculate that the volunteers compensated for any changes in food intake at other times of the day. A second, smaller report in the same journal assigned lean adults to breakfast or no breakfast and found little impact on metabolism and heart health.

Submission + - Why does light stretch as the Universe expands?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: On the one hand, galaxies are definitely redshifted, and they're redshifted more severely the farther they are; that's been indisputable since Hubble's data from the 1920s. But spacetime's expansion — the idea that photons get redshfited because expanding space stretches their wavelength — is just one possibility. Sure, it's the possibility predicted by General Relativity, but a fast-moving, receding galaxy could cause a redshift, too. How do we know what the cause is? Here's how.

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