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Comment Re:Prior art? (Score 2) 149

How is this different from those glowing Chineese pigs or those neon tetras with unnatural colors that are illegal in California?

Those involved taking a gene that created a naturally created protein using naturally occurring amino acids and then injected them, frankenstein style into another animal. These take an artificially modified gene that uses an artificial amino acid to create worms that glow. Did you read TFS?

AI

China Catches Up With Google's Driverless Car 258

mikejuk writes "While Google makes headlines with its driverless car and even manages to lobby Nevada to legalize driverless cars on the public road — China quietly pushes ahead on its own. A driverless car navigated 286km of expressway all on its own. Using nothing but a pair of video cameras and laser rangefinders, i.e. no GPS, it managed to arrive safely even through fog. The computer vision based approach means that at the moment it can only drive during daylight hours. Google might need to speed up ..."

Comment Re:What are the derivatives? (Score 1) 210

I've not followed what has happened with previous id releases. What have people done with them?

Mostly ported them to linux. Although there have been total conversions, such as tremulous, world of padman, and urban terror. I'm not aware of any non-game uses like medical imaging, 3d printer "print previews" or anything like that.

Comment Multiple copies (Score 0) 397

If you're worried about long term reliability, try a raid-1 array of a spinning drive mirrored against an SSD. Make monthly backups to optical. That way, if your SSD fails, you still have two other options. This would probably be the most affordable method us mere mortals could have to hope to store long term data with a pretty good reliability. Unless you can get your hands on a second hand tape drive and some 500g tapes.

Comment Bout time (Score 4, Interesting) 83

I think that fee shifting should automatically be a part of any civil case. During the settlement, dismissal, or awarding process, the judge should be required to ask both sides if the bringer of the suit should pay legal fees, or a percentage of. As it stands, when you sue, most of the time you have nothing to lose and everything to gain if you get the right lawyer. Change that, break the cycle, and sanity might have a fighting chance.

Comment Alarm Clocks (Score 1) 439

How many people pop right up at 0'dark thirty in the morning and start getting ready for school/work/drinking without any signal? Yeah, me neither. The alarm clock allowed for the suburbs by letting employees not have to cluster around public alarm clocks (church bells, factory whistles, etc). If my alarm clock is late, I'm late, if it's early, i lose precious moments in bed (not as bad as the first case, but still irksome).

I hope this gets swatted down on behalf of every person who has to wake up before dawn and doesn't rely on their cell phone to wake them up.

Besides, my Mr. Coffee machine is PFM (Pure effin magic) in that it has a warm, freshly brewed carafe of joe waiting for me every morning, if this grid experiment screws that up, I might just go on a pre-coffee shooting rampage.

Comment New year of the linux desktop? (Score 1) 98

It seems like every 5-10 years or new development points to wearable electronics. First, transistors, then microchips, a decade or so ago, it was small lithium batteries, now? compact wireless. Of course i didn't RTFM, but we've been "wearing" our electronics for years. Carrying cell phones has been the status quo for a decade, walkmans/diskmans for longer. Yes, we carry more electronics every day, but I still wear a timex ironman which has the same functionality as the timex ironman I got in 1994 (indiglo FTW!). However, I doubt that people will consent to wearing t-shirts that monitor heart rate, undies that take/analyze stool/urine samples, and shoes that measure stress as long as you can get cheap clothes that look good and are comfortable. Also, the average person can, you know, feel what's going on with themselves and if they're the kind of person who would buy a watch to monitor heart rate, they can take their pulse by hand and will. How many people do you know regularly check their pulse? Especially when not exercising?

Wearable electronics are in direct competition with simple sensors that feed into your smartphone. Integrate the electronics into a garment and you only get to wear it once a week (more if you're grody) or however often you do laundry. Watches do lots, but people like not having to recharge or change batteries more than once a year.

Comment Re:N950 too... (Score 2) 252

The problem is the N950 will only be available to a select few developers, and will have zero warranty or support. Still, if you can get your hands on one it'd make for a fantastic N900 replacement.

This.

After seeing what nokia had done with w7, i lost faith. After seeing the lack of keyboard on the n9, I bought an atrix. While i'd like to see maemo/meebo take off, and i dearly loved my n900, I'll be keeping my atrix as having a rooted webtop environment and a walled garden phone makes due for me.

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