Comment No need to get the lawyers involved.... (Score 5, Funny) 278
Motorola Wants 2.25% of Microsoft's Surface Revenue
So give them a couple hundred bucks and be done with it...
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Comment Why? (Score 5, Insightful) 403
Confession: I'm a Windows/PC user. Win 7 works fine for me. I use it at work. I use it a home. I can run pretty much anything I want on it. It's stable and mostly trouble free for me.
I've yet to see a single compelling reason to move to Windows 8 for desktop/laptop. Maybe it's OK for tablets? I don't know... I use Android and I'm happy with that. Is there *any* "ohhh... gotta have that" feature in Windows 8? Looks like a usability step backwards from Windows 7 to me. Am I missing something?
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Comment Climate change (Score 5, Informative) 608
Romney: "my best assessment of the data is that the world is getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming, and that policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences. However, there remains a lack of scientific consensus on the issue â" on the extent of the warming, the extent of the human contribution, and the severity of the risk"
No, Mitt. There really is no "lack of scientific consensus". Two years ago it was at 97% of scientists in agreement.
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Comment Re:Socialism (Score 3, Informative) 97
Comment d|i|g|i|t|a|l (Score 3, Insightful) 298
I do not think d|i|g|i|t|a|l means what you think it means...
Comment Like a tick (Score 4, Funny) 331
They're sort of like a tick that attaches itself to a host and keep engorging itself until it pops.
It's gotten itself firmly attached to the wallets of 93 million people. Now it's sucking hard. The pop will come enough...
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/19/verizon-quarterly-revenues-q1-2012/
Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief 1258
Freshly Exhumed writes "A new University of British Columbia study finds that analytic thinking can decrease religious belief, even in devout believers. The study, which will appear in tomorrow's issue of Science (abstract), finds that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, shedding important new light on the psychology of religious belief."
New Study Suggests Mars Viking Robots Found Life 172
techfun89 writes "New analysis of data, now 36 years old, from the Viking robots, suggests that NASA had found life on Mars. This conclusion was published by an international team of mathematicians and scientists this week. The Labeled Release experiment looked for signs of microbial metabolism in soil samples in 1976. The general thinking was that the experiment had found geological not biological activity. However, the new study approached things differently. Researchers broke the data into sets of numbers and analyzed the results for complexity. What they found were close correlations between the Viking results' complexity and those of terrestrial biological data sets. Based on this they concluded that the Viking results were more biological in nature than just geological processes."
Comment Re:So? (Score 0) 816
I've got friends, and I'm sure you do too... obsessive about recycling, shut off the water when brushing their teeth, drive small cars with good gas mileage (and/or take public transportation, ride their bikes), support "green" causes, eat organic foods, etc... I'm sure you know the type.
But then they go and spawn. Repeatedly. Have I published a peer-reviewed, formal study? No. But I personally know some of those people, and given the limited number of people I know compared to the population of the earth, it is safe to say that those people exist, and in fairly large numbers.
And while they seem to work tirelessly to "save the planet", the act of having in excess of 2.0 children serves to greatly defeat their environmentalist activities. And yet this fact seems to escape them...
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Comment So? (Score 0) 816
Sounds like a self-correcting system to me. It's seen in nature all the time. It's just sad to me that we, as a species, are too stupid and stubborn to keep it from happening to ourselves.
I'll never understand so-called environmentalists who go out and have 5 or 6 kids. I can think of nothing quite so environmentally irresponsible...
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Comment Show me the actual accident data (Score 2) 358
Show me the massive increase in accidents and fatalities that have come along with the massive increase in cell phone usage. Then I'll believe there's a real correlation. The results of a controlled test designed to yield a certain result isn't useful data.
Here's the fatality list through 2009. It shows steady decreases in fatalities per mile driven.
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
Of course, that's 3 years old now, but still... there's been an increase in cell phone use through 2009, so if using a cell phone is as dangerous as drunk driving, I'd expect to see a big increase in the fatality rate, not a decrease.
And here's another flawed study (2010)... http://www.nsc.org/Pages/NSCestimates16millioncrashescausedbydriversusingcellphonesandtexting.aspx
They estimate that 25% of crashes involve the use of cell phones. Based on that, I would expect accident rates to increase (to a degree) along with cell phone usage. But they don't. Many states have banned cell phone use by drivers. In those states, shouldn't see a big decrease in accidents? Do we? I doubt it.
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Comment The Geek Atlas (Score 2) 363
Get this book... it's very good.
You may also know the author, John Graham-Cumming, as the guy who got the British government to apologize for their persecution of Alan Turing.
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Robot Walks Like a Human, Requires No Power 195
MrSeb writes "Today's groundbreaking entry into the Uncanny Valley is a pair of mechanical, robot legs that are propelled entirely by their own weight: they can walk with a human-like gait without motors or external control. Produced by some researchers at Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan, all the legs require for sustained motion (they walked 100,000 steps, 15km, over 13 hours last year) is a gentle push and a slight downwards slope. They then use same 'principle of falling' that governs human walking, with the transfer of weight (and the slight pull of gravity), pulling the robot into consecutive steps."
Comment More likely... (Score 1) 86
It's more likely (or at least possibly) a case of "let's see if we can get HP to cough up their Android code for the Touchpad". Step 1: Claim HP shipped Touchpads with Android. Step 2: Tell HP that this obligates them to share the code. Step 3: Hope HP complies.
TSA Groper Files Suit Against Blogger 699
An anonymous reader writes "TSA employee Theldala Magee has filed a lawsuit against a blogger demanding $500k in damages for alleging a particularly invasive search involving multiple incursions of a finger into the passenger's vagina. The passenger, who likened the feeling to being raped, is being sued for defamation for supposedly sullying the otherwise good name of a checkpoint smurf."
