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Comment Re:Socialist agenda on full display tonite (Score 2, Insightful) 529

The rich in the US are only interested in their own wealth, and not the longterm wealth of their country. So they don't want to ensure that all citizens have a good education and are able to get healthcare they need. This results in the US having one of the worst social mobility ratings in the developed world. Land of the opportunity for the filthy rich to become even richer, and most of the rest to rot.

Comment Re:NEVER (Score 2) 398

I don't disagree with your comment per se, but I think you missed the point of Nursie's comment.

sanman2 said "India's poor" are "turning their noses up" at the Nano.

However, 32.7% of Indians live in poverty. Because of this, Nursie rightly pointed out that "India's poor" probably have bigger concerns than which car to buy.

If sanman2 had said "members of India's lower middle class are already turning their noses up at the Nano" there would be no argument here.

I have been to India several times in the last 10 years and seen huge numbers of people sleeping on the streets and in shanty towns.

Comment Andromeda Strain? (Score 1) 90

It reminds me of the superb 1971 film The Andromeda Strain directed by Robert Wise. The virus in the film came from space and under a microscope is seen to grow. The new image of Mercury in the National Geographic article looks eerily like the growing virus... Sadly I can't find an image for this at the moment.

Comment Re:What is the problem? (Score 3, Informative) 124

Exactly, it is. But who doesn't have a fake facebook account ?

Logic failure. Just because you have one account for social use and one for business, one of which you could call "fake", and you consider that "okay", doesn't suddenly mean that you have to accept that all fake Facebook accounts have to be "okay". Fake accounts for the purposes of astroturfing or propaganda are definitely not okay.

In my company's sales team most everybody has at least a "commercial" and a private account. That means our company "has" euhm ... a dozen facebook accounts perhaps, something like that. You could call it "astroturfing" probably, because it kinda is. Everybody does it.

Just because some of your peers do it doesn't necessarily make it okay. http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/07/15/1351204/Internet-Astroturfer-Fined-300000

Comment Geeky proposals to non geeks (Score 1) 96

The weird part is that some of these geeky proposals seem to have been sprung on total non-geeks. For example, having to sort out an accidentally-minimised window, or having to drive them to a PC... Doesn't this seem a bit self-indulgent of the person doing the preposing?

I wonder how red the recipients of these proposals went when their friends asked how the question was popped?

Medicine

Bad Science Writer Talks About the Placebo Effect *NSFW* 131

The Guardian newspaper's Bad Science columnist Dr. Ben Goldacre does a stand-up routine about medicine, the placebo effect, and the mysteries of the human body at Nerdstock. From a scientific standpoint, I can't accurately say how funny it is because I was told it was great before I saw it.
Sci-Fi

Doctor Marries Doctor's Daughter, TARDIS Explodes 326

techmuse writes "In a veritable Who's Who of Doctor Who, 10th Doctor David Tennant is marrying Georgia Moffett, the daughter of 5th Doctor Peter Davison, who played the Doctor's daughter in an episode of Doctor Who. Except that the Doctor's daughter was a clone of the Doctor, which meant that she really was Who. So a newer Doctor is marrying an older Doctor's daughter, who is a clone of the newer doctor, but only has half the DNA of the older Doctor."

Comment Re:The background doesn't change (Score 1) 60

Can't speak for GP but I've done better using just a JPEG of a background. You can't see when I move at all.

Are you joking? The whole point is to be able to see when he moves. It's a special effect to show a sci-fi kind of "cloaking". Sure you could implement something similar with a standard webcam, but the novelty here is that he seems to use the Kinect's depth information to work out how much distortion/lensing effect to apply. Hence when he stands against the bookshelf in the background, he disappears completely.

Robotics

Toy Robots Can Guard Your Home 151

Orome1 writes "Worried about burglars ransacking your house? Buy yourself some toy robots! It is what Robert Oschler, a Florida-based programmer, did. He bought a Rovio — a Wi-Fi enabled mobile webcam robot that can be picked up from toy sections of many stores — and modified it to suit his needs. The robot already has a camera, a microphone and speakers, but the improvements he made to the software allowed him to enhance the audio and video quality of this existing equipment, and to create specific routines for the robots. This way, every time he feels the need to check what's going on in the house, he simply goes online with his laptop and directs the robot through the house."
Medicine

Woman Develops Peanut Allergy After Lung Transplant 146

An anonymous reader writes "A woman in need of a lung transplant got her new lungs from someone with a peanut allergy who died of anaphylactic shock. Seven months after the surgery, the woman was at an organ transplant support group when she ate a peanut butter cookie and had a violent allergic reaction. So how had the woman's new lungs brought along a peanut allergy? A blog post dives into the medical details and explains that immune cells in the donated lungs couldn't have lived in the new body for long enough to cause the reaction... however, if they encountered an allergen (i.e. something peanuty) shortly after being transplanted, they could have trained the woman's native immune cells to respond."

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 2, Informative) 344

I'm pretty sure I remember coming across a news piece that said exactly this a good 10-20 years ago..

Yep, it's old news. Here's an article from 2004, about some research done in the UK: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040412.html

Here's the summary of the paper at ACM.org: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=993187

You can find also find the PDF.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 270

lolwut? facebook/myspace/craigslist/etc/etc/etc.

But hey, a lot of people are on facebook, let's blame it on that.

You do realise that Britain is not part of the United States, don't you?

From http://www.clickymedia.co.uk/2009/07/uk-social-network-statistics-july-2009/ :

Facebook has long been the UK’s most popular Social Networking site and now has over 19 million active users. In May 2009 alone Facebook.com received 23.9 million visitors in the UK. Other popular social networking sites continued to struggle to keep up with Facebook – Bebo followed as the second most visited UK Social Network (8.5 million visitors), then Windows Live Profile (6.9 million visitors) and MySpace Sites (6.5 million visitors)...

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