It's a Fire Quadrangle. The fourth point is Chemical Reaction. Halon systems work from this angle. It doesn't deprive the fire of oxygen, it disrupts the oxidation process itself. Sounds like this magnetic beam does this also, in a different way.

Hell, yes. Money isn't real. It's a symbol; a cognitive tool. If it isn't serving our purposes, we should change it.

Being a slave to our own symbols always reminds me of this passage:

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'

I don't get it. I'm a "media-luddite" because I've consumed the same media as you have, but delete it instead of hoarding it?

My modpoints expired, otherwise you'd have one. This is exactly my solution to the filing/sorting problem: I delete stuff.

University Park, PA is listed as "University."

Apparently a "park" is too play-mongering for these researchers so they renamed it.

[/sarcasm] seriously now, why would you jump to the conclusion anti-war political correctness was why the name was truncated?

Tobii's devices have a really quick calibration process. If you find your eye convergence changes as you fatigue, it's easy to just recalibrate once in a while to adjust.

Yeah. Tobii has been shipping some really sweet tablet communication devices for people with disabilities with eye tracking for a couple years now. I've played with a few of them and they work pretty well (though operating Windows with it is tiring).
The price tag on that eye-tracker add-on is jaw-dropping. I'm hoping that this tech can go mainstream, making it come down in price to make it more available to people with special needs who need it.

"My son should have been buried with dignity, not with a bunch of clowns outside."

Adding more clowns does not improve things in any way at all.

Yes. The counter-protests at funerals need to be handled more respectfully.

However, WBC are going to be at Portsmouth New Hampshire's Seacoast Repertory Theater picketing their production of The Laramie Project later this week. Some street theater to accompany the theater happening inside would be great lulz. Portsmouth loves street theater.

I heard rumblings of a God Hates Shrimp counter-protest. I don't know however, if there will be too big of a showing as Seacoast Rep's response was to half their ticket price for this show, with the rationale that getting everybody inside to actually watch the play is the action most contrary to what WBC wants.

It was probably intentional that they did not give it a realistic, human-sounding voice. Research has shown that people do not want machines to appear too human. They react negatively.

Watson's speech synthesis sounded pretty comparable to the stuff I deal with every day (I work with speech generating devices for people with communication disabilities). Given that IBM already owns voice software, they probably used an off-the-shelf product from one of the other divisions of the company. I doubt that adding a custom voice was part of the mission of the Watson project.
I'm not sure, regardless of the voice, that Watson would fall into the Uncanny Valley anyway. It wasn't even slightly human-like. And I've not seen any research that talks about an auditory-only Uncanny Valley. (If such a phenomenon existed, I'm pretty sure I'd have heard of it).

"They don't need charged daily."

To be charged. Please tell me that English isn't your first language.

Dropping the "to be" after "needs" is quite common in the dialect spoken in central Pennsylvania.

I agree with your entire post and would add something else--not that long ago, the only reason we were able to get qualified people at all is because teaching was one of the only jobs women could get after getting a degree. While it hasn't been like that for a few decades, a lot of teachers (my mother among them) who went into teaching because they couldn't have a career as a scientist after getting a degree in science, are at retirement age and we as a society are having trouble replacing them because teaching pays so poorly compared to other options.

This has been my question. You can't run a country like a business, because in a business you can lay off redundant people and they go away. Because of productivity gains, GDP is back where is was before the crash, but we still have 9% (really more like 17%) unemployment. We just don't need those millions of people we laid off back in 2008 for anything, but they stubbornly continue to exist.

My brother is a professional farmer for a big corporate-owned outfit. They just had their entire property (thousands of acres) set up with wireless broadband. He controls and monitors all the irrigation pumps for all the crops and sends/receives GPS map updates to and from their server from a laptop in his pickup. Yeah, I realize that's an intranet, but I know he checks and sends email over that network, so it has to be connected to the outside world, too. Not to mention incorporating the real-time weather into their irrigation planning. Farmers are certainly using the Internet!

I thought the same thing. I wouldn't recommend starting here to anyone.

Like nothing I've ever seen. The quality shot up like a rocket. I would love to hear the inside story of how they turned it around.

I didn't see the "souls" episode of V, but I saw an episode with some bullshit "the aliens can't understand human love" theme. I gave them a chance to get me back for a new season, but there is just no way I'm going to sit through that. At least Fringe got better in season 2 and better still in the 3rd. V was awful in its first season and what I saw there was even worse.

No, Rep. Gifford is not very liberal.

No, it isn't. Politics is the process by which large organizations make decisions between various options. It's not fucking war!

I doubt this, but I have no way to prove it one way or the other.
 

What the hell is wrong with you?