Comment Re:Honor system (Score 2) 300
Even the honor system won't work. Now that the on-line retailers like Amazon and iTunes have a cloud service that stores your purchases, the concept of deleting local copies doesn't work.
Comment Lawyer (Score 1) 496
Anyone who works regularly with lawyers (as I do, (and I'm a geek (as demonstrated by these nested parens))) will know that it will take nothing short of full strength AI to replace them, lawyer jokes aside. There is so much nuance, subtlety, and tweaking of agreements that a using a simple computerized approach won't work for a substantial portion of what (say) normal corporate law firms do. If we magically move to a machine readable contract language, portions of contract verification might be automated, but certainly not the writing. And good luck getting lawyers to move to such a thing any time soon.
Comment Re:So what is it? (Score 1) 79
My interpretation is that it's freebase.com but with a different (easier?) API, loose (or absent) semantics, and no starting data.
Comment Lowepro Fastpack (Score 2) 282
I have & like the Lowepro Fastpack 350, and I think it will meet your needs. There's a full sized laptop sleeve along the back. The bottom part of the compartment will hold a DSLR+lens and 4 other lenses or 2 lenses+flashes. The camera compartment can be opened from the side, so you can get your camera out without taking the backpack off. There's a side pouch that can be used to carry a tripod (be careful with the mesh) if you add a strap at the top, or you can strap it to the bottom/back. The top compartment is large enough to hold a light jacket + other random stuff (MP3 player, chargers, mouse, grad filters, cleaning gear, filters, etc). Take a look at the pictures on Amazon to get a better sense of the layout.
I visited a local photo store to check out options before ordering this one, which met my needs and was reasonably priced relative to the alternatives.
Comment He's been saying this for 20 years (Score 1) 729
See his book Emperor's New Mind. Most AI people viewed this skeptically back then, too.
Comment Ideal for commercial applications? (Score 1) 118
Arduino is great, I've got my own, but it seems like the choice you'd make if you were pursuing hobbyists instead of commercial device manufacturers. Am I wrong?
Comment Re:This can only mean one thing (Score 1) 406
"This can only mean..."
Spoken like someone with no knowledge of the actual negotiation. Why does Google need the labels to do a dropbox style locker in the first place? They've had Google Docs for a while now. Maybe what it means is they got caught with their pants down due to the Amazon launch, and felt pressure to get something out at I/O faster than they had expected, and when the labels didn't accept every term they offered, they just went without.
Of course a lawsuit may be coming, but the evidence suggests not. Other "dumb" lockers have been around for years. If Google starts using a single copy of a given track to serve everyone (as opposed to uploading each person's file) or does any number of other things that clearly require a license, then they'll be exposed.
Comment The internet is full of it... (Score 1) 370
Too much hot CO2, right?
Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed
1352
A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!
Submission + - Neuralstem gets ok from FDA (spinalcordresources.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Neuralstem, a company that has a stem cell procedure to use on ALS has been given the green light for stage 1 testing on humans. The trial has 12 patients that will each get injections in the lumbar portion of their spine. This test is primarily to guarantee the safety of the drug over a known amount of time. Each patient will be watched for signs of problems or rejection of the genetic material. Depending on how the 12 subjects do on this first test 9 on human subjects will determine if the FDA moves ahead to stage 2 testing, which is a larger group that tries to verify that the drug actually performs as advertised. This testing bodes well for Neuralstem as they are the first out the gate with a stem cell treatment to a form of spinal cord injury. If it makes it through all stages of testing, we will see if doctors are willing to se it on subjects that have injuries coming from physical injuries like diving accidents.
Comment Automatic claiming? (Score 3, Interesting) 196
There's a really good chance this resulted from automatic claiming tools that make use of things like acoustic fingerprints. YouTube or a filtering partner will have a catalog of Warner tracks that new uploads are checked against. Warner may not even have known about this until it blew up. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.
Comment Re:Let me be the first one to say it ... (Score 1) 1870
Explain this right to take someone else's work, which you have not paid for and have no rights to under the law, regardless of whether they want you to or not? Do you think that we can have a healthy society if the people bringing new creations into the world are forced to share their works at your whim and under your terms? Sure, some of us want to share what we do, because we know it will be reciprocated. But this has to be voluntary under the guidelines of the law.
Just because you can take something does not mean your are entitled to it.
Should Google Be Forced To Pay For News? 322
Barence writes "The Guardian Media group is asking the British government to investigate Google News and other aggregators, claiming they reap the benefit of content from news sites without contributing anything towards their costs. The Guardian claims the old argument that 'search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content' doesn't hold water any more, and that it's 'heavily skewed' in Google's favour. It wants the government to explore new models that 'require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site (through advertising) and "at the edges" in the world of search and aggregation.'"
Comment How about spending some time on the education part (Score 3, Insightful) 286
New hardware is nice and all, but it's really of minor importance compared to the elements of the platform that should be there to help kids learn. I think there's a reason that the press never covers how fantastic and ground breaking the educational aspect is. The technology is interesting, but as far as I can tell, the educational aspect is an afterthought.
Submission + - Crime Reduction linked to Lead Free Gasoline
Hugh Pickens writes: "Even low levels of lead can cause brain damage increasing the likelihood of behavioral and cognitive traits such as impulsivity, aggressivity, and low IQ that are strongly linked with criminal behavior. The New York Times has a story on how the phase out of leaded gasoline starting with the Clean Air Act in 1973 may have led to a 56% drop in violent crime in the United States in the 1990s. Amherst Economics Professor Jessica Wolpaw Reyes discovered the connection and wrote a paper comparing the reduction of lead from gasoline between states (pdf file) and the reduction of violent crime by constructing a panel of state-year observations linking crime rates in every state to childhood lead exposure in that state 20 or 30 years earlier. If lead poisoning is a factor in the development of criminal behavior, then countries that didn't switch to unleaded fuel until the 1980s, like Britain and Australia, should soon see a dip in crime as the last lead-damaged children outgrow their most violent years."
