No wonder Open Tech is closing in Microsoft. It is the brilliant minds of Microsoft that conceived of putting " shut down " in the "start" menu. It was so bad it became good, and now even Microsoft is not able to get rid of the start button. Same way they might find it impossible to close their open tech.

I mean they have been repeatedly asking who let the dogs out. But I thought no one cared. Looks like there is a scientist who cared. Good for him or her.

NPR had a Ken Burns documentary on cancer, the emperor of maladies (or mother of all diseases or something similar).

It was a typical Ken Burns documentary, history etc. One salient part of the documentary was that cancer is not a single disease. It is a huge variety of diseases causing uncontrolled cell divisions. Further the cancer a patient has changes, evolves over time. Many promising drugs work very well initially but the cancer adapts to the drug.

Another salient part of it is the exponential increase in the cost of treatment. It has gone upwards of 100,000$ per patient per year in drugs. I am sure the researchers in Caltech know more about it than I do, but still, one wonders are they raising hopes needlessly and prematurely.

The call for papers have always been difficult to read pieces of work. You quickly glance at the deadlines to see if you can get one in, then the location to see if it is worth going there and pass on. Except for the more aged members of the academia who sit in panels and act as editors to pad up an useless CV no one cares about all these names in these calls.

So it is not as difficult to create spurious call for papers.

The word "selfie" has been pre empted in the digital camera world to mean a different thing.

Well, it should just follow the software industry's path breaking achievements in shaping user expectations and user behavior.

First there should be an EULA claiming the body and soul of the user, with added clauses to add more demands later any time.

Then user should be made to accept, "it is going to crash and burn. Can I get get something done in the mean time?".

If it builds we ship. Then the customer feedback is how we know whether what we built works. This is the software industry standard.

If you don't want to be evil, you will very generously call your product "in beta".

That is not the game played by lottery. To keep the pot at 200 million, and nplayers=20, we need to raise the price of the ticket to 10million + house margin. Something like 22 million. (Yes, the pot is less than 50% of the collection) So would you pay 22 million bucks for 1/20 chance of winning 200 million dollars?

Looks there was an Indian boy who was using a blue tooth device sewn into his cap and an accomplice. It went undetected for a long time, and he qualified for the nationals as the top seed. Even he shows more "thinking" than "run-to-the-toilet-and-look-at-iPhone" grand master.

How can such a simpleton become the grandmaster? It belies imagination. Everyone knows the way to cheat at that level of chess tournament is to have a team analyze the game in the audience and have them send color coded yogurt to the player in the middle.

Yes, lottery is a tax on mathematically challenged.

But such people exist, and if the government does not provide it, more unscrupulous operators will fill the vacuum and skin them alive even more. Ideally we should educate the people so that they slowly stop gambling. In the mean time, provide slightly better alternatives than criminal gangs.

That is why we have sent Doc Brown in a heavily modded De Lorean into the future to bring back the technology of crystallic fusion to reboot us, once we get rid of Big Oil and the Big Banks. Destruction of Morgan-Stanley and Goldman-Sachs alone is incentive enough to trigger a nuclear war.

Around the time Dubya took office, we had a surplus and the debt was being repaid and was going down. Then he cut taxes, income taxes, inheritance taxes, all kinds of taxes and promised millions of jobs and prosperity for all. All the money ended up with his cronies, and the economy lost millions of jobs and we came to the brink of total financial collapse. In fact all the trickle down economics and tax-cut politics are simply means to transfer wealth to the rich, keep the middle class despo enough to accept abysmal wages and working conditions. All in the names of "jobs jobs jobs" and "job creators".

All the tax-cuts since the Reagan administration actually creation millions of jobs and explosive economic growth, in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, Indonesia... The rich took all the tax cuts, shafted America and invested them all abroad. All our economic woes can be traced to middle class naively believing the Republicans promises of wealth and prosperity by giving tax cuts to the rich.

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...

Nestle has been bottling the California water, which it takes at some abysmally low cost and ships it out. May be it would be cheaper for California to just buy the entire output of Nestle at market prices than to embark on this desalination process.

The article is written looking at the situation from the POV of an average American. The "grid" is practically non existent in large parts of Africa and South America and lots Asian countries. Even where it exists it is quite unreliable. But in almost all these countries the grid is often a state owned inefficient monopoly. The demand for electricity is high and there are lots of people willing to pay way over what the American utilities charge for power. There was an journalist who recounted rich folks in Karachi, Pakistan, driving around in their air conditioned luxury cars when the grid goes blackout. The counties might be poor, but these rich folks collectively far outnumber the middle class in America. They will provide the market, and the invisible hand will find providers. These folks will underwrite the R&D costs of moving off grid.

Think about it: Half of India does not know when their next meal is going to be. Which means the other half has food security. Still they live in a hand to mouth existence. Half the rest are better off than hand to mouth. Half of the better than hand-to-mouth have decent disposable income. This 1/8 of the population of India is 125 million strong, as big an economy as Japan and bigger than many European countries. Living in a sea of dirt cheap labor, none of the labor saving devices would sell there. But anything not doable by throwing more people in, electric power or cell phone etc will have big markets there. Add Africa and South America, you can bet they will leap frog over the developed countries in off grid power, like India did with cell phones a decade ago.