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Comment Re:I stopped reading the responses after... (Score 1) 920

by Nocturna81 (#37896108) Attached to: The White House Responds To We the People Petition
As others have pointed out: addiction is way to vague. Are we talking physiological or psychological addiction? And addicted to what degree? Several medical studies have also pointed out that it's no more physiologically addictive then a pack of cookies. Now, I'll grant you that psychological addiction may occur with marijuana, but the same thing can be said of any one thing in the world. Your hand waving about how it's addictive has just about as many facts in it as people who claim it's not addictive (without the sources to back it up). So, what are your sources for your claims that "Find me a meth or Heroin user that did not smoke pot first" and "It's about getting "high", and that eventually ends up into finding alternative highs."? I'm genuinely curious about this "gateway theory". Also, where I'm from smoking pot is legalized here, oddly enough, we don't really have a problem withe heroine usage skyrocketting., in fact, if this site is to be believed we actually had a decline! (http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/67)
The Internet

Submission + - Finally, porn is coming to the internet (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: If you’ve ever sat around staring at the ol’ webs thinking, damn, this would be a great place to distribute porn, you’ve been vindicated: the .xxx domain is live as of Friday. Despite costing way more than a .com domain and having really no point aside from allowing conservative governments an easy censorship target, there’s currently 600,000 reservations for URLs under .xxx.
Open Source

Submission + - Can Open Source Hardware Feed The World? (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "When it comes to food scarcity in the developing world, one of the major problems is production capacity: land that could be arable using modern techniques goes underutilized because locals don't have the abbility to build or buy equipment. A group calling itself Open Source Eclology is trying to solve that problem. They've developed a set of open source hardware specs for 50 different industrial machines, which they're calling the Global Village Construction Set."

Submission + - Titan May Have Ocean (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by olsmeister
olsmeister writes: In the seven years Cassini has spent orbiting Saturn, the spacecraft has sent back mountains of data that has changed our view of the ringed planet and its moons. Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has been a particular focus of attention because of its dense, complex atmosphere, its weather and its lakes and oceans.

Now it looks as if Titan is even stranger still. The evidence comes from careful observations of Titan's orbit and rotation. This indicates that Titan has an orbit similar to our Moon's: it always presents the same face towards Saturn and its axis of rotation tilts by about 0.3 degrees.

Together, these data allow astronomers to work out Titan's moment of inertia and this throws up something interesting. The numbers indicate that Titan's moment of inertia can only be explained if it is a solid body that is denser near the surface than it is at its centre.

Submission + - Is Sitting a Lethal Activity (nytimes.com)

Submitted by AgentSmith
AgentSmith writes: We all know daily sitting in the cube farm (or other sedentary activity) isn't always healthy, but James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn studied the less than obvious results of inactive sitting .
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft releases bugged Powerpoint Patch (technet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Don't know how many are affected by this but last week's Powerpoint patch makes it impossible to open existing presentations. While some might consider disabling Powerpoint to be some sort of divine providence, you may want to avoid the patch until Microsoft has a fixed version.
Robotics

Submission + - Walking HECTOR Robot Inspired by Stick Insect (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: In an effort to understand how animals move elegantly and in turn provide robots with the same ability, researchers at the University of Bielefeld's Center of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' (CITEC) have developed the hexapod walking robot called HECTOR (Hexapod Cognitive autonomously Operating Robot). Designed within CITEC's multi-disciplinary Mulero project, the robot possesses the scaled up morphology of a stick insect and will be used as a test bed in various departments and projects at the University.
Japan

Submission + - TEPCO Unveils Plan To Deal With Fuksuhima Crisis (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Tokyo Electric Power Co. unveiled its plan for dealing with the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

TEPCO said the radiation levels should drop over the next three months. It will take about six months for the reactors to achieve "cold shutdown" in which the temperature of the water inside the reactor is less than 100 degrees Celsius (212 F).

The current plan for cooling the reactors will mean injecting nitrogen into the reactor pressure vessel. All four damaged reactors experienced hydrogen explosions when water, heated by nuclear fuel, turned to steam and reacted with the zirconium alloy cladding of the fuel rods. Hydrogen, when exposed to oxygen, combusts. Nitrogen is an inert gas, so TEPCO hopes that it will prevent further explosions.
Programming

Submission + - Asus Xtion Kinect clone available (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Asus has launched Xtion Pro — $189 — which uses the same hardware as its full body sensor the Wavi Xtion but doesn't have any software other than an SDK for Windows and Linux. This, of course makes it useful only if you are going to develop applications using it.
It comes with PrimeSense's drivers and the NITE body tracking software. Asus has also announced a $20,000 competition for the best game using it. This is just a way to get some software to go with the full product launch later in the year but it is also going to set up an app store to help developers market their creations.
Microsoft's own Kinect SDK is technically better but it isn't available just yet and it could well have a restrictive license. At the moment only Asus is saying to developers — "use our hardware to make commercial apps, we'll even help you to sell them and here's a competition to sweeten the deal"
Linux

Submission + - F1 computing kit: 1,500 cores, Linux & SSDs (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "PC Pro has taken a peek behind the scenes at the Lotus Formula 1 garage — and the computing technology used to power the team. It's server farm comprises of 1,500 cores in a room full of blade servers, connected to 96TB of iSCSI storage. Currently, the farm is running on Linux, because that OS is apparently what best supports the number-crunching engine for the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. Meanwhile, all the laptops in the pit are now running on SSDs, because of the increased risk of disk failure caused by the high vibration levels experienced near a running F1 car."

Comment Re:Motto: "Don't Be Evil" (Score 1) 391

by Nocturna81 (#35301316) Attached to: Why Google Wants Your Kid's SSN

Personally, I think corporations are often evil regardless of the "direct" actions of their leaders or employees. Sometimes all it takes is for individuals to simply do their job well.

In large groups of highly specialized workers, it can be very difficult for individuals to see beyond their specific role in an organization, meaning that the problem of evil is inherent in the byzantine hierarchy itself and not in the specific actions of its individual constituents.

I'm very tired right now and I'm not sured I explained that well, but hopefully someone will understand what I mean...

I think of corporations as amoral: not necessarily evil, just not caring.

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