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Comment Re:Edison to Deforest ... ALMOST! (Score 5, Insightful) 386

“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” Nikola Tesla

Comment Re:and thus goes the transfer... (Score 1) 222

"We the people of the US" funded the inception and development of the Net thru the use of "our" tax dollars which DARPA invested into cutting edge communications research. Here's a quarter ($.25)to go buy a clue. All content is regulated even if you think otherwise. In fact... I'm sure you're doing it yourself at the moment. Self regulation is still regulation!

Comment Impactor Ballistic Missle? (Score 1) 149

Launch a simple rocket on a ballistic trajectory that impacts the item you want to de-orbit. Only aim it to hit the target on the way back down so that the added momentum pushes them into a lower orbit... Another thought would be to use a gravity tractor concept like the one being proposed for moving asteroids. In this instance the goal would be to send a simple thruster device on a path to "not impact" the object you want to move... only use it as a gravity sling which alters the path of both objects in proportion to their mass. If you choose the path correctly, the target heads into the atmosphere and you have the thruster heading for another target. Work it out to do a grand tour style path so you get the most bang for your thruster fuel buck.

Comment Re:There is a good reason for that (Score 1) 511

There in no differentiation between the "News Media" and the "Entertainment Media"... It's all for show. No one from the "Media" can be trusted to be presenting information in an objective manner. Throughout history the news "As presented by the media of the time" has been slanted by the views of the presenter. In ancient days in the western world, the news was presented by the story teller "bard" who told the tales he had heard to the gathered croud in a village. Then came the crier who read from the scroll provided him by the scribes. Move on the the pamphlet and print media and the newspapers. All skewed to the views of the publishers whim. It's no different today except that the ease of content creation and the transitory nature of the "News". This has created a world where the infomation provided is so abundant and at times contradictory that no one can determine the truth about anything...

Comment And yet there's money to be made... (Score 4, Informative) 431

The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on May 31st that http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20100531/NEWS01/6010323/Forger-s-company-got-562K-stimulus-contract/ a local company, Tekreation Center LLC, recieved $562K in federal stimulus money to provide installation demonstration services to those who needed help getting the converter boxes to work. Demonstrations! Not actual installations. Tekreation reportedly performed 1,453 demonstrations for installing a digital-to-analog converter. $562,000/1453=$386.79 per demo. The could have bought a decent digital TV for that price. Another massive waste of your tax dollars.

Submission + - Data Mining errors can hurt people.

lurking_giant writes: Although I've seen few other reports of this happening, I personally witnessed the emotional distress it causes. My sister and brother-in-law had been receiving phone calls and mailings offering college placement test classes to help improve their daughter's test scores. The callers assume my niece to be a high school junior.

It's apparent they were working from data derived only from birth records, not cross referenced against any other data. It seems to me that competent data mining and cross checking of simple public records could have avoided this situation.

My niece is autistic and although she is of the appropriate age, given her developmental conditions, she will never attend college or even high school.

Instead of celebrating the marginal improvements in my niece's abilities as she grows, my family gets "innocent" calls from people that remind them of just how far behind her peers she really is.

If you work in the data mining field you need to remember how even simple failures or sin's of omission can effect others.

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