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Comment Re:Singularity? (Score 1) 804

by mrtommyb (#29536163) Attached to: In 100 Years, Health Care Won't Be An Issue Because ...

Change "brilliant medical ethicist" to "faceless bureaucratic peon"

Change "faceless bureaucratic peon" to members of the community who voluntarily work on ethics panels.

If I can afford to pay for a private doctor and the private equipment to keep my "vegetable" family member alive for an extra week at home, completely out of the health system should I be "allowed"

Who ever said that?! Thats fine. You can do whatever you want with your money. Personally I would be horrified if I found out that I would be kept as a vegetable for an extended period of time. There is such a thing as dying with dignity

what's to stop the rich from hiring all the best doctors privately for themselves?

Shock, Horror. Some people go into the the medical profession to help people, not keep vegetables alive and pander to the rich.

Totalitarian is the best word to describe the NHS and any model that places heavy restrictions on doctors practising privately

Where an Earth did you get this? It is simply not true. This idea that the NHS is awful is totally wrong. Is it perfect, no, would we like to get rid of it, hell no! Yeah we complain about the NHS all the time but we are British, we complain about everything!
Space

First Rocky Exoplanet Confirmed 155

Posted by Soulskill from the yo-adrian dept.
Matt_dk writes "The confirmation of the nature of CoRoT-7b as the first rocky planet outside our Solar System marks a significant step forward in the search for Earth-like exoplanets. The detection by CoRoT and follow-up radial velocity measurements with HARPS suggest that this exoplanet has a density similar to that of Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth, making it only the fifth known terrestrial planet in the Universe. The search for a habitable exoplanet is one of the holy grails in astronomy. One of the first steps towards this goal is the detection of terrestrial planets around solar-type stars. Dedicated programs, using telescopes in space and on ground, have yielded evidence for hundreds of planets outside of our Solar System. The majority of these are giant, gaseous planets, but in recent years small, almost Earth-mass planets have been detected, demonstrating that the discovery of Earth analogues — exoplanets with one Earth mass or one Earth radius orbiting a solar-type star at a distance of about 1 astronomical unit — is within reach."
Government

James Murdoch Criticizes BBC For Providing "Free News" 703

Posted by timothy from the you-don't-trust-the-gov't-to-report-news-fairly? dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "News Corporation's James Murdoch says that a 'dominant' BBC threatens independent journalism in the UK and that free news on the web provided by the BBC made it 'incredibly difficult' for private news organizations to ask people to pay for their news. 'It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it,' says Murdoch. 'The expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision.' In common with the public broadcasting organizations of many other European countries, the BBC is funded by a television license fee charged to all households owning a television capable of receiving broadcasts. Murdoch's News Corporation, one of the world's largest media conglomerates, owns the Times, the Sunday Times and Sun newspapers and pay TV provider BSkyB in the UK and the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and Fox News TV in the US." Note that James Murdoch is the son of Rupert Murdoch.
The Military

High-Tech Blimps Earning Their Wings 200

Posted by samzenpus from the truly-goodyear dept.
coondoggie writes "The US Army this week showed off its latest high-tech blimp laden with powerful radar systems capable of detecting incoming threats 340 miles away. The helium-filled blimps, or aerostats, are designed to hover over war zones or high-security areas and be on guard for incoming missiles or other threats. The Army wants them to reduce some of the need for manned and unmanned reconnaissance flights. The aerostat demonstrated this week is known as the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Sensor System (JLENS), which is designed to fly up to an altitude of 10,000 feet. According to GlobalSecurity.org., the $1.4 billion JLENS is a large, unpowered elevated sensor moored to the ground by a long cable. From its position above the battlefield, the elevated sensors will allow incoming cruise missiles to be detected, tracked, and engaged by surface-based air defense systems even before the targets can be seen by the systems."
Medicine

Obesity May Accelerate Brain Aging 289

Posted by timothy from the to-be-aware-of dept.
natehoy writes "According to the US News and World Report, a recent study has shown a link between obesity and the loss of neurological tissue. The brains of elderly patients who were obese had on average 8% less tissue than their trimmer counterparts. Overweight patients had brains lighter by about 4%. This could have implications for the onset of dementia illnesses such as Alzheimer's. Just one more risk factor to add to the growing body (no pun intended) of reasons to try and stay trim."

Comment Re:"Scientific Consensus Over Climate Change" ? (Score 1) 1100

by CheshireCatCO (#29203307) Attached to: Global Warming To Be Put On Trial?

Sure, but you need not be conclusive to publish.

And in this case, we need not be conclusive to act. We've got a problem that won't wait around, we can't afford to wait for 3-sigma evidence. Even deferring the decision is, itself, a decision that we're making all the time. So really, all we can do is go with the best data available and do what we can.

Comment Re:"Scientific Consensus Over Climate Change" ? (Score 1) 1100

by mrtommyb (#29202015) Attached to: Global Warming To Be Put On Trial?
If you read a little further into the report they state that global warming is due to human activities at a 90% confidence level. Now, in the real world this seem definative but as a scientist this is certainly not conclusive. This is less than a 2 sigma detection, if I want to publish anything I need at least 99.7% confidence (3 sigma) that my result is correct.
Windows

China Jails Four For Microsoft XP Piracy 164

Posted by CmdrTaco from the imagine-what-they-do-if-you-make-a-silly-face dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "Chinese court has jailed four people for spreading their bootleg 'Tomato Garden' version of Microsoft's Windows XP program, in what the Xinhua news agency called the nation's biggest software piracy case. One of the four men Hong Lei, the creator of the downloadable 'Tomato Garden Windows XP' software, was jailed for three and a half years by a court in Suzhou in eastern China, Xinhua."
GNU is Not Unix

Leaving the GPL Behind 543

Posted by kdawson from the one-license-to-rule-them-all dept.
olddotter points out a story up at Yahoo Tech on companies' decisions to distance themselves from the GPL. "Before deciding to pull away from GPL, Haynie says Appcelerator surveyed some two dozen software vendors working within the same general market space. To his surprise, Haynie saw that only one was using a GPL variant. 'Everybody else, hands down, was MIT, Apache, or New BSD,' he says. 'The proponents of GPL like to tell people that the world only needs one open source license, and I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position,' says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL."
Image

NASA Wants To Fund Space Taxis 136

Posted by samzenpus from the would-you-like-a-trip-to-the-stars dept.
NASA plans on using $50 million in stimulus funds to seed development of a commercial passenger transportation service to space. Potential space taxi inventors have 45 days to submit their proposals. The proposals will be competitively evaluated and the winners will be announced by the end of September. It is unclear what other Commodore 64 games NASA plans on making a reality, but I hope Arkanoid makes the short list.

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