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Robotics

Submission + - Solar Powered UAV to set the World's Endurance Rec

Iddo Genuth writes: "A team of students from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa is working on a new solar powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which they hope will soon break a 17 year old world aviation record. Although solar aviation is nothing new, it is still considered to be in its infancy. The work done at the Technion as well as elsewhere around the world is starting to attract the attention of the aviation industry with the hope of creating green aircrafts with a much higher endurance threshold."
AMD

Submission + - AMD running dry?

SoTuA writes: Analysts report that AMD is in financial problems. The fierce battles with Intel in the past years have taken its toll, with AMD showing a important stock price drop during the last 12 months, while Intel remains steady. Reportedly AMD is cash-strapped after buying out ATi and upgrading their factories. Will AMD turn this trend around with the launch of Barcelona, or will Intel regain the ground recently lost in the CPU market?
Wii

Submission + - New Wii Dev Tools in the Making

Ambrose writes: "Looks like Nintendo are finally supporting Third-Party developers. From an article at The Wii Gamers, a new development application called NintendoWare is being developed for Wii Developers. NintendoWare emulates Wii hardware on a PC so that developers can sample parts of their games without having to load it to a Wii dev machine. The motion recognition could also see an upgrade, with a new predictive input tool that uses prior movement to predict your next motion, and a text-to-speech tool is also in the works."
Wii

Submission + - New Wii Dev Tools in the Making

frenchy64 writes: "Looks like Nintendo are finally supporting Third-Party developers. From an article at The Wii Gamers, a new development application called NintendoWare is being developed for Wii Developers. NintendoWare emulates Wii hardware on a PC so that developers can sample parts of their games without having to load it to a Wii dev machine. The motion recognition could also see an upgrade, with a new predictive input tool that uses prior movement to predict your next motion, and a text-to-speech tool is also in the works."
Businesses

Submission + - Open-source Time and Attendance, Payroll Is Here

passion4 writes: A recent press release from an open source company states: " TimeTrex, unique new open-source software moves web-based time and attendance and payroll into the 21st century. It's time to toss those punch cards out. TimeTrex's unique, open-source time and attendance and payroll system integrates a number of crucial features into one easy-to-use, web-based package." I recently switched my business from a large payroll outsourcing company to TimeTrex and it has been working great so far.
Education

Submission + - Lasic Revisited

An anonymous reader writes: Dear slashdotters,

My sister-in-law is considering Lasic eye surgery. Since it's been quite a while since Slashdot covered this topic I thought I'd re-check and see if the field had changed much in the last few years. Specifically I'm interested in how much improvement was experienced and obviously any other experiences. Lasic used to increase the count of some artefacts during the night — is this still so?

In this case the person;
  • Does quite a bit of driving for her job (usually during the day).
  • Has the required eye defect that will respond to Lasic.
  • Is fortunate to have access to an excellent medical service (as good as anywhere I expect).
  • Is a moderate/heavy user of a laptop.
How has Lasic affected your life? What worked/didn't work as expected.

Based upon your personal experience, would you recommend a Lasic operation?

And because every story should have a link — I've advised her against this old favourite. :-)
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - America in debt

HomelessInLaJolla writes: "
Create debt. Maintain debt. Keep people in debt. Work them until they die of debt.

Courtesy of the "This day in history" service part of the NYTimes daily e-mail delivery.

In 1941, President Roosevelt chose to saddle the American population with an increased debt that, as a nation, they had not truly acquiesced to. The 14th Amendment (specifically section 4), conveniently for those brokering power and money to the rest of us, stops citizens, or even states, from contesting the validity of that debt.

Some politicians (in particular, then Senator Wheeler of Montana) attempted to point out the ulterior motivation behind the Lend-Lease bill:

"The American taxpayer must make up his mind now that we have given the President power to carry on undeclared wars all over the world. He is probably going to have his taxes doubled and the national debt will be $100,000,000,000 instead of $65,000,000,000 if the war lasts for any length of time.

"This is what the Morgans and the other international bankers asked for and I hope they like it.

"As far as I am concerned I will make no effort to tie the hands of the President regarding the appropriations. It is up to the conservative majority in the Senate to the money. They supported the bill."
And it continues today. Inescapable debt is slavery.
"
Announcements

Submission + - What's new in study of human evolution?

je ne sais quoi writes: MSNBC/Newsweek has an informative article summarizing a lot of the recent advancements in tracing the evolution of modern humans. From the article:

Unlike the earlier wave of Homo erectus into Asia a million years ago, the first modern humans, the ancestors of everyone today, departed Africa about 66,000 years ago... These pilgrims were strikingly few. From the amount of variation in Y chromosomes today, population geneticists infer how many individuals were in this "founder" population. The best estimate: 2,000 men. Assuming an equal number of women, only 4,000 brave souls ventured forth from Africa. We are their descendants.
The article emphasizes that evolution is not necessarily linear, in that a given trait might show up multiple times before being used by a successful species. We've come a long way from the old story of humanoid evolution that goes in a more or less linear chain from Australopithicus to Homo Sapiens.
Linux Business

Submission + - Why Dell won't offer Linux on its PCs.

derrida writes: "Jack Schofield explains in his article why Dell won't offer Linux on its PCs. Quoting from there: "The most obvious is deciding which version of Linux to offer. There are more than 100 distros, and everybody seems to want a different one — or the same one with a different desktop, or whatever. It costs Dell a small fortune to offer an operating system (it involves thousands of driver compatibility, peripheral testing, certification, staff training, administration, advertising and support issues) so the lack of a standard is a real killer. The less obvious problem is the very high cost of Linux support, especially when selling cheap PCs to naïve users who don't RTFM (read the friendly manual) and wouldn't understand a Linux manual if they tried. And there's so much of it! Saying "Linux is just a kernel, so that's all we support" isn't going to work, but where in the great sprawling heap of GNU/Linux code do you draw the line?""
Power

Submission + - Peak Oil is Alive: More Evidence of Saudi Decline

Prof. Goose writes: "http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2331

In this post, I extend my analysis of Saudi Arabian production backwards four years earlier than my post of last week. I explain in detail how the evidence strongly suggests that since late 2004, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has entered rapid decline of their oil production, at least for the time being.
This should be required reading for everyone."

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