cortex - Slashdot User

Comment Don't wait for Google (Score 1) 80

by cortex on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @11:23AM (#42325687) Attached to: 5 More Google Fiberhoods Coming To Kansas City

Lobby your local city and county officials to support the installation of fiber infrastructure. Along the Wasatch Front we have the excellent UTOPIA project, which brings fiber to the home. Local cities used bonds to support setting up the infrastructure, and home owners pay for the connection from the street to their house. The fiber infrastructure is treated like a utility and any ISP can compete for your business. I have a symmetric 100 MB connection for about about 1/3 less than Comcast was charging me for a 15 MB connection, and I get MUCH better service.

Comment Fiber as a Utility Model (Score 1) 327

by cortex on Saturday December 08, 2012 @07:29PM (#42228935) Attached to: Nationwide Google Fiber Deployment Would Cost $140 Billion

Along the Wasatch Front we have the excellent UTOPIA project, which brings fiber to the home. The fiber infrastructure is treated like a utility and any ISP can compete for your business - Keeping costs down. It was a great day when I had my symmetric 100 MB connection installed and was able to say goodbye to Comcast.

Comment Biomedical Engineering has fastest job growth (Score 1, Insightful) 226

by cortex on Saturday June 16, 2012 @02:14AM (#40342599) Attached to: Too Many Biomedical Graduate Students, Not Enough Jobs

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Biomedical Engineering is one of the fastest growing occupations and has a median income of over $80,000. I think that this NIH study, which was run mainly by people in academia, doesn't fully account for the jobs in industry.

Comment Effect on Promotion and Tenure (Score 3, Interesting) 146

by cortex on Friday May 25, 2012 @11:36AM (#40109419) Attached to: Faculty Votes For Open Access Policy At UC San Francisco

Most researchers will think about this for about 2 seconds and then publish in the journal with the most prestige and highest impact factor that they can. Publishing in high impact journals is a major factor in promotion and tenure for professors, so until universities adapt their policies on promotion and tenure, professors will continue to published in prestigious and expensive closed access journals. When reviewing someone for promotion or tenure, high-level administrators don't have time to read all the journal articles a professor has published, so they really heavily on g-indices and/or h-indices that are based upon journal impact factor scores.

Comment No dexterity in the fingers (Score 4, Informative) 56

by cortex on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @12:48AM (#40013339) Attached to: Paralyzed Man Regains Hand Function After Breakthrough Nerve Rewiring Procedure

Pretty amazing surgery, but watching the videos shows limited restoration of function. The key is getting the transplanted/regenerating nerves to make the proper connections. The surgery is not going to re-wire the incredible number of connections made during development. Neural prostheses currently offer better dexterity and restoration of function than the nerve transplant. However, it is likely only a matter of time (maybe sever decades) before the neural re-wiring problem is solved.

Comment Two words (Score 5, Interesting) 599

by cortex on Saturday March 03, 2012 @12:27PM (#39231651) Attached to: Chevy Volt Meets High Resistance, GM Suspends Sales

Tesla Motors

Telsa is planning on an ~$30,000 model in the next few years. If they achieve this price point and maintain the quality of their current models, I think that they will have an all electric car that many people will want

Submission + - New smartphone with forked version of Android from (xda-developers.com)

Submitted by

cortex

on Friday December 23, 2011 @12:55PM

cortex writes: "XDA developers is reporting on a the release of a new smart phone, which runs a forked version of Google's Android operating system.

"Dell and Baidu, the Chinese search giant with over 80% marketshare in its home-country, unveiled the Streak Pro on Tuesday (via Computerworld). The device has a 4.3 AMOLED screen with 960×540 resolution and packs a 1.5 GHz dualcore Qualcomm processor. Most notably, however, is the operating system it runs: a forked Android version dubbed Baidu Yi, which replaces Google’s services with those of Baidu."

How will this impact Google's support for Android and open source in general?"

Comment Re:I want a hard wire... (Score 1) 98

by cortex on Thursday November 24, 2011 @01:22PM (#38159386) Attached to: Bionic Implants and Spectrum Clash

Any wired solution, electrical or optical, must cross the skin therefore presenting a big infection risk. The whole idea behind using wireless devices in neural prostheses is to remove this risk of infection.

Submission + - Amazon Fire Tablet (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by cortex on Wednesday September 28, 2011 @10:33AM

cortex writes: Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), the world’s largest online retailer, unveiled its Kindle Fire tablet computer, taking aim at Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s bestselling iPad with a device that’s smaller and less than half the price.

The Kindle Fire will have a 7-inch display and sell for $199, compared with $499 for Apple’s cheapest iPad, Amazon executives said in interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek. The device, a souped-up version of the Kindle electronic- book reader, will run on Google Inc.’s Android software, the Seattle-based company said.

Submission + - Sid Meier's Civ World on Facebook (facebook.com)

Submitted by

cortex

on Saturday July 09, 2011 @11:09AM

cortex writes: "We have some exciting news to share with you about Civilization for Facebook! As you can see from the new look of this page, the official title for our game is Civilization World (Civ World). Why a name change you say? The name better reflects the main theme of the game; in Civ World you will be joining your friends to form nations, which will compete with other player-nations to rule the world. Civ World’s shaping up to be a really fun Facebook game, as well as another addictive Civilization experience."

Submission + - FILM ADDS 3D TO ANY LCD SCREEN (diginfo.tv)

Submitted by

autospa

on Saturday July 09, 2011 @10:05AM

autospa writes: "Japanese firm Global Wave recently debuted film sheets that bring 3D to any LCD screen. The sheets will be available for 12.1-inch, 21.5-inch and 23-inch monitors as well as for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, and the application is compatible with both Windows and iOS."

Submission + - Ex-NSA Chief Supports Separate Secure Internet

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Saturday July 09, 2011 @09:36AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Nextgove reports that Michael Hayden, former director of both the NSA and the CIA, says the United States may seriously want to consider creating a new Internet infrastructure to reduce the threat of cyberattacks and several current federal officials, including U.S. Cyber Command chief Gen. Keith Alexander, also have floated the concept of a ".secure" network for critical services such as financial institutions, sensitive infrastructure, government contractors, and the government itself that would be walled off from the public web. Unlike .com, .xxx and other new domains now proliferating the Internet, .secure would require visitors to use certified credentials for entry and would do away with users' Fourth Amendment rights to privacy. "I think what Keith is trying to suggest is that we need a more hardened enterprise structure for some activities and we need to go build it," says Hayden. "All those people who want to violate their privacy on Facebook — let them continue to play." Clay Dillow writes that on the existing internet everyone does everything online anonymously, and while that’s great for liberties, it’s also dangerous when cyber criminals/foreign hackers are roaming the cyber countryside. Under the proposed .secure internet "you may not be able to go to certain neighborhoods of the Web without showing your papers at a checkpoint--and perhaps subjecting yourself to one of those humiliating electronic pat-downs as well," writes Dillow. "Those who want to remain anonymous on the Web can still frolic about in the world of dot-com, but in the dot-secure realm you would have to prove you are you.""

Submission + - Kelly: The Future Of Science (edge.org)

Submitted by smitty777 on Saturday July 09, 2011 @08:49AM

smitty777 writes: There is an interesting article on Kevin Kelly's vision of the future. Among some of his predictions:

There will be more changes in the next 50 years than in the last 400.

This will be the century of biology

Computers will keep leading to new ways of science

New ways of knowing will emerge

Science will create new levels of meaning

But the second half of the article (Speculations On The Future of Science) goes into the details: the multiple hypothesis matrix, zilionics, deep simulations, and hyper-analysis mapping are among some of the more interesting predictions. One of the more interesting quotes FTA: "Technology is, in its essence, new ways of thinking. The most powerful type of technology, sometimes called enabling technology, is a thought incarnate which enables new knowledge to find and develop news ways to know. This kind of recursive bootstrapping is how science evolves. As in every type of knowledge, it accrues layers of self-reference to its former state."
Sadly, I was led to this article after reading this piece on the future of the US Space Program.

Submission + - Apple Ordered To Pay $8M For Playlist Patents (appleinsider.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 09, 2011 @08:43AM

An anonymous reader writes: A federal jury in Texas has decided against Apple in a patent infringement lawsuit an ordered it to pay $8 million to Personal Audio LLC, a patent licensing company (aka troll). The lawsuit started in 2009. Last year Apple's three fellow defendants (Sirius XM Radio, Coby Electronics and Archos) settled. Apple said the patents were invalid and not infringed. The patent holder demanded $84M and will now get about 10% of that amount. Juries in East Texas frequently rule in favor of patent holders. In the same district court Lodsys has already filed four lawsuits. In one of them it targets seven app developers and Apple has moved to intervene. The first two developers were already given a deadline: they must answer Lodsys's complaint by July 21, unless they request an extension.

Submission + - This website knows when you're angry... (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk on Saturday July 09, 2011 @08:37AM

mikejuk writes: or sad, or happy, or... Face.com provide a free API that lets you apply face detection and recognition to photos that you submit to it. Now it can also tell you what their mood is. It also detects the gender of the person, the state of their lips — sealed, parted or kissing — and if they are wearing glasses. At the moment the range of moods detected — happy/sad/angry/surprised/neutral — doesn't make it the equal of Cal Lightman of "Lie to Me" but it's a start....

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