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Comment Re:Instant! (Score 1) 584

You know the worse thing about coffee? you fucking snobs.

I did not know I was a coffee snob, or such a bad coffee snob till I travelled to Vancouver recently. Awful, weak, drip coffee everywhere. Come to New Zealand where down the end of the most isolated road in the littlest community there will be a cafe with an espresso machine and a trained barrista. I got a decent long black in Sidney from a cafe worker who had spent time in Sydney.

The Military

Military Personnel Weigh In On Being Taliban In Medal of Honor 171

SSDNINJA writes "This is a feature from gamrFeed that interviews nine US service members about playing as the Taliban in the upcoming Medal of Honor. One soldier states that games like MoH and Call of Duty are 'profiteering from war.' Another says, 'Honestly, I don't really see what the whole fuss is about. It's a game, and just like in Call of Duty, you don't really care about what side you're taking, just as long as you win. I don't think anyone cares if you're part of the Rangers or Spetznaz, as long as you win.' An excellent and interesting read."
United States

One Year Later, USPS Looks Into Gamefly Complaint 183

Last April, we discussed news that video game rental service GameFly had complained to the USPS that a large quantity of their game discs were broken in transit, accusing the postal service of giving preferential treatment to more traditional DVD rental companies like Netflix. Now, just over a year later, an anonymous reader sends word that the USPS has responded with a detailed inquiry into GameFly's situation (PDF). The inquiry's 46 questions (many of which are multi-part) cover just about everything you could imagine concerning GameFly's distribution methods. Most of them are simple, yet painstaking, in a way only government agencies can manage. Here are a few of them: "What threshold does GameFly consider to be an acceptable loss/theft rate? Please provide the research that determined this rate. ... What is the transportation cost incurred by GameFly to transport its mail from each GameFly distribution center to the postal facility used by that distribution center? ... Please describe the total cost that GameFly would incur if it expanded its distribution network to sixty or one hundred twenty locations. In your answer, please itemize costs separately. ... Does the age of a gaming DVD or the number of times played have more effect on the average life cycle of a gaming DVD?"
Image

The Virtual Choir Project 58

An anonymous reader writes "Conductor and composer Eric Whitacre has successfully created a virtual choir using the voices of 185 people who posted their performance on YouTube. The piece that's performed is called 'Sleep,' composed by the conductor himself in 2000. Anyone can join in — all you need is a webcam and a microphone."
Biotech

Wake Forest Researchers Swap Skin Grafts For Cell Spraying 123

TigerWolf2 writes with this excerpt from a Reuters story carried by Yahoo: "Inspired by a standard office inkjet printer, US researchers have rigged up a device that can spray skin cells directly onto burn victims, quickly protecting and healing their wounds as an alternative to skin grafts. ... Tests on mice showed the spray system, called bioprinting, could heal wounds quickly and safely, the researchers reported at the Translational Regenerative Medicine Forum."
Bug

Outlook 2010 Bug Creates Monster Email Files 126

Julie188 writes with this snippet from Network World "Office 2010 is still in beta and a patch is already out. Microsoft is trying to fix a bug in the email program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space. The Outlook product team has offered a bug fix for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems that fixes the problem going forward, although previous emails will remain super-sized. This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes, such as Gmail or BlackBerry."
Software

Submission + - NZ Pharmaceutical Agency Finds Free Software best

worik writes: "http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/25F72F231ABF8F5ACC2573630083A579?Opendocument

The Pharmaceutical Management Agency of New Zealand (Pharmac) has developed an open source solution for publishing the Pharmaceutical Schedule online.

After initially being told by local typesetters that automatic typesetting was not possible, he managed to find a proprietary solution. After spending lots of money and traveling to the otherside of the globe for a traing course the company was sold and the customer abandoned.

The IT manager's son, a programmer still in school at the time, said that he could build a better solution using TeX.

Which is what they did.

A 200-staff centre manually keyed in every claim. In 2000, the process was automated and Pharmac's IT team provided a database, but the problem was there were no links between the database and the printed schedule.

Users can now enter data into the database, and basically press a button and publish the schedule within a minute."

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