Have you noticed how clunky the medical profession is? You sit down at the dr. office and they put a cuff on your arm to read your blood pressure and pulse, which is about the most worthless science I can think of. If they wanted to see your BP spikes they would use a sensor that is a whole lot more unobtrusive than a sphigmometer! But the medical establishment is truly in the dark ages and this is a situation where some decent sensor engineering could make a big deal. Your dr. puts you on BP meds and he wants to know if they are working. An acclerometer could give enough info so that the variance of BP is measurable from a wearable monitor, in a watch. I am quite surprised that somebody isn't pushing the problem of calibrating a small sensor to solve this problem. If if takes a couple of sphigmometer measurements to calibrate a sensor, then fine, but it seems to me that it would be worth that.

How much useful data could be gotten about blood by using a colorimeter measurement to link the spectral response, even just extinction of light transmitted or reflected from in situ blood to indicate blood chemistry, such things as Fe, sugar, chlorestrol? I haven't heard that any doctor or engineer has tried to get such data under a control. Has Anyone? A wrist watch that can do monitoring of such things is something I would buy. I don't think of the possibility as just another mobile device, in fact because of the privacy issues I would't want the device to have more than a mini USB connection, so that I can download the data for my doctor's use alone, no buetooth, no wireless, unless I can turn it on and off. The ability to do continuous monitoring would be worth the ability to have the device. This would be more valuable to a segment of the population than any smartphone conveniences, and it would undercut the medical profession's staidness.

I think that most comments in their thread miss the real story, and the issue of the OP does too. The real story here is that the economy has come to be reliant of an elite of engineers and developers who not only have discouraged other groups of people, but are by their very efforts making is harder for a majority of people to find rewarding roles in society by which they can support themselves according to the expectation that the job a person is paid to do or can create is valued. The digital revolution has erased many more jobs that it promised would be replaced by more creative and rewarding ones. This hasn't really happened. Instead more and more people have been marginalized, under-employed and just pushed off into poverty. Business people don't notice this because they see the efficiency gains as a short-term benefit while they don't have to deal with the longer-term effects. The income gap and the lopsided income distribution is a direct result of the application of computers to economics, whether to make a tiny group account for all the productivity in the economy or to allow for new forms of speculation and fraud in the financial sector. The other shoe has not dropped, but I think it will, and the population as a whole will begin to see the dark side of engineering and programming, not the rosy predictions made of technology boosters. It is not that we should put a stop to technology, no, only that we need to get much smarter about defining and measuring the side-effect and not listening to engineers who are very bad at predicting the future.

Much of this problem is due to old-fashioned political economics and economic theory that is like the blind man and the elephant. We let the people who see the short-term gain dictate our thinking rather than asking them to plan for five years or a decade. That is the fault of computers driving the emphasis on short-term ROI and of the tendency of people to be selfish. When the shine is off, these people with be made to pay in having a far less secure world. I would outlaw HFT and put a latency of all equities trades. I would discourage venture capital and other investment in areas where infrastructure is already stressed. I wouldn't let plutocrats move in and pressure the whole regional economy to meet the desires of elites. To simply argue that greed is OK is to invite the historical remedy which is not nice, it is what we are seeing in Central America right now, so heed the warning signs.

It may be hard to wean economies off burning carbon under current technological conditions, and all to our peril. Without economic incentives, it will be hard to persuade people to get out of the business of producing energy that comes from burning carbon. There are a couple of reasons for this !) The Grid was planned to make use of the abundant and cheap Carbon energy resources. Don't forget that when Oil Company Ads rig the argument about renewables not being available. The grid doesn't go to places where there might be abundant renewable energy resources and the Utilities aren't going to build the grid out there if there is no incentive to do so. 2) Renewables are not yet reliably available to meet instantaneous demand for energy that relying on Carbon burning has been able to satisfy. There is no economical way to store energy for later use, so even though there might actually be a huge abundance of renewable energy out there, there is no way to store it for later use.

Nuclear, fission and fusion, has a bad rap and it might eventually have to be used to address these issues. I have seen the argument about the investment in high pressure water reactors that use U-235 and produce weapons grade products, Pu, as a side effect, the risks of using them and the counter arguments about using Th based unpressurized reactors instead. I don't have the expertise to know if the advocates for a complete change in our nuclear energy strategy are right or not, but if we have been avoiding a safer alternative for economic and political, even military reasons, that is something that needs to be examined. A safer nuclear power source with a resource that is regarded as a contaminant and is over abundant in the refining of the other rare earths that we badly need, must get consideration.

Surely if fusion ever becomes practicable and it can be done without producing radioactive wastes, that would drastically change the energy equation, as would the use of Th reactors, if they are comparatively safe. Proper use of these could reduce the need to burn Carbon.

I was around when Star Office appeared as an alternative to Microsoft Office. People said that it couldn't compete with Microsoft Office, but it did. It later became Open Office and then Libre-Office. I am sure that there are many people, whole businesses really, who insist that people use Microsoft Office and pay the fee. But it might to hard to know about how many people chose one of these opensource alternatives because of the zero cost and the high compitability with Microsoft Office. Surely, if your dependency of the details of Microsoft file formats is less rather than more, it is easier to choose the alternative.

Much of the "Inertia" is institutional. Anyone who has done tech support knows the psychology: customers will pay for a support contract just to have someone to complain to when the product doesn't work as they want it weather of not the support staff can actually do anything about it. So, corporate support of Microsoft Office is a selling point whether or not the support is effective. This is true even if community support of an open source is just as effective and the turnaround to fixing bugs is actually faster. It is quite impressive to see how the opersource alternatives have matured even when Microsoft can claim it inspired them and had a 15 year head start on them, they still brought their alternatives up to snuff faster.

I think that Copyright is dead, not that DMCA will be ineffective, but that ultimately the small cost of distribution makes seeking legal protection not worth it. The fact that people will still pay $12 to see a movie makes all this possible, not the legal idea, and even if the media companies pursue pirates they can only get the easy targets. For that reason I immediately leave sites that have paywalls or want to charge me for something i might legitimately find for free, If I want costs to drop and the incentives to not be profits for third parties then I leave these sites. I know that if no one wanted to pay $12 to see movies that the law would not matter. People might find other reason to make movies and maybe they would make movies that had other incentives than mass appeal or profit, and the incentives to pursue pirates are economic and the law is but a tool for that.

I have noticed that in the scientific community people are using non-journal avenues to communicate and even to referee articles and "publish". It is possible to submit much more than a static text article to colleagues, You can now share the text and figures but the data and the data reduction code and graphics commands. The incentive for this is rapid turnaround of reviews but it is also a response to journal publishers who, I think, are going to go out of existence as a result. This is all caused by the cost of communications dropping with the distribution costs no longer justifying the middle man.

I have seen this seeming contradiction up close and personal and it has nothing to do with knowledge or training, it has to do with untested ideas and the lack of a challenge to form consistent sets of value. That is a failing of our culture, of many cultures, and of the educational system. The propaganda in media doesn't help nor does the numbness it creates to informal fallacies. If you spent your time discovering all the flaws in reasoning that get pitched at you in a day, you would have no time for anything else. This is a side-effect of "free speech" that depends on the size of the megaphone and what it costs to use. Citizenship requires time to reason and to think and the drivers of mass media do not want individuals to take time to think.So the barrage is a kind of mind control where the intent is to flood and discourage reflection. It is no wonder that people have such unconsidered views and that there are whole sections of their opinions that are inconsistent and viral. That is how the political machines and the corprorate controllers want it. They want a population of consumers driven by impulse and who are maleiable and easily manipulated.

A couple of days ago there was a post about a study in which the test subjects would rather give themselves electric shocks than have to spend fifteen minutes alone with just their thoughts. Not only is that classical conditioning but it may reveal that many people are afraid of the thoughts that come up when they are quiet and alone. Not only is it not in the interest of the power structure that people have the time to reflect but it is also in their interest, particularly of business people that people do not have any practice debating, discovering formal logical errors, or understanding the informal fallacies. Surely logic is important for many important pursuits in society, such as in mathematics, but a tiny elite knows about formal proofs and logic and can follow that kind of reasoning. It isn't that people are unintelligent, it is that they are unpracticed and untrained and there are powerful forces in society that want them to remain that way.

I believe that Social Media is actually a case in point, and that the blog is an impediment to people using the Internet to reason if they want. Social Media is about the propaganda va;ue of marketing in business, nothing more, and the blog restricts control of the discussion by ownership of topics. It isn't that you can't hold a reasoned conversation in a blog; it is that the structure of blogs and Social Media do not help you communicate and actually gets in the way. That is intentional by the comercal interests who drive Social Media, and makes the point that the power structure in society is not at all interested in helping us communicate and reason in the way that enables our citizenship in a society that pays lip service to democratic institutions.

What would change this is to restore some of the structure in discussion groups to the web and do away with blogs. Mark Zuckerberg's "Simple" criterion is just the wrong model and shows that Facebook is about manipulating its users.

We hear "Shhh, USENET" because it has become the avenue for pirated content and porn, but in the text-only groups beginning in 1984, there were some lively debates in which it was possible to practice your reasoning, debating, and writing skills. We need to bring some of that back and the Internet is a good place to do that, too bad that opportunity is being wasted on Social Media and Blogs. USENET discussion groups and their message structure contains the tools needed to rescue public discourse in the world, despite what Zuckerberg claims, If you want a demonstration compare what is in the DejaVu archive of USENET that Google owns with Google Groups and Google+, There is no comparison, and the fact that Google preserved the archive of old USENET posts is very telling WRT the above and as compared with the communication style they have set in their products.

Slashdot has some of the things needed, but the proposed changes to the UI are a step in the other direction, while at the same time the Social Media style of story promotion is a regression. A fairly topical subject hiererarchy like in USENET newsgroup naming is actually superior to the way topics are promoted on Social Media sites. It allows for readers to reconnect with the content even when the subject lines and threads have changed, If you look at the lack of followon to most social mediis threads, this is the reason. So contextual reply and control of the topic line isn't really enough, a topic hierarchy really helps. Slashdot could improve this by allowing for users to enter the site through the major categories rather than the headlines, which are chosen by editors.

Fuck executives and fuck people with MBAs and the accountants who feed them. Fuck them all and make them and the financial types, generally, work out in the fields picking vegetables! This class of people are useless parasites who do nothing useful. We need a Cultural Revolution for suits.

The utility of Google to its users is incidental to its commercial incentives, to get information about its users, so if its user base dried up because of a service mishap it will have to learn that it has to give something back in order to get. Now, Google Reader may not be the straw that breaks its back. My understanding is that Google Reader was abandoned in favor of Google+, which is little more than a marketing ploy, no way of doing what RSS is generally for. Now, I thought the design of Reader was quite good as compared with the available alternatives. I use Lifearea, which I have never liked as well and my use of it has dwindled. The mistake many opensource applications make is that the burden the user with choices rather than hiding them in the UI. Google Reader was as rich, but it hid the mechanical details much better. None of the alternatives, such as Feedly, which is harder to use with a vision handicap, does as well.

The important thing to remember about Google and Social Media sites generally is that they really aren't really for the benefit of their users, theri business partners matter more, even though without their users they would fail. It is one of the conundra of Capitalism that companies see how much they can abuse their customers while they can't exist without them.

Just ask around and see how many people still have Windows XP installed, even though Microsoft no longer supports it and says that is is now more vulnerable to hacking than it ever was as a result, and there are versions of Linux that do as much in less space and more efficiently. Yet, it is hard to get people to change.

The last time I dealt with Fortran was second tier support for the GCC compiler in Solaris in 2003. Some of Sun's biggest customers for the compiler were Fortran developers working in science institutes. I tested and routed test cases for customers against bugs for the F90 and F77 compilers. I assure you that there were no punch card decks involved, although when I first used Fortran in the 1960's and '70's they were involved. You can compile fortran sources on most Linux distros, and probably most every OS out there, right now.

IBM 1620 FORTRAN IV was the first compiled language I learned back in 1969. I coded Fortran IV and F77 in the decades following, and C after that. Lately I have been learning Ipython Notebook 2.0 and just installed Anacinda with all those libraries for scientific data reduction and graphics/visualization. So it is fine with me if there is some binaries in there that were compiled from FORTRAN sources, what really matters is the integration allowed and if the numerical analysis is tried and true and based on the old algorithms crafted back when I was a boy, so much the better.

Life is a set of trade offs and sometimes we settle for stuff that works for different reasons, ease of use, sometimes, efficiency at other times, and it is good to know which is which, but surely the integration now available was a dream back when we dealt with boxes of punched cards as output from programs. Now, we may have to deal with an inefficient program from time to time, as a trade off, then I welcome your algorithms hat, to tell me that you have a better code or can invent one.

To that extant, America is a land where property rights trump freedom of information and control of information. In a post-mature state, the perception of scarcity ( of opportunity) leads the powerful to clamp down on the power of information. If you don't believe me, there is a chart out there showing by year of release the number of citation sources. There is a shadow, reduced numbers, for works protected by Copyright as compared to works in the Public Domain. The reduced number of citations since 1925 is almost assuredly due to the cost to use works under Copyright. So, maybe the meaning of this is that people who are not creative, the owners and publishers, resort to the protections of property under the law to force people to pay for access using a poorly designed and broad-brushed approach that is smothering creative thinking. I don't deny that protecting property rights is necessary to create economic incentives, it is just that the legal framework and the Congress hasn't caught up the surrounding reality and it is hurting the nation. I think that the situation is far worse in the EU, where boycotts of paywalls deserves action.

The ability to do desktop resolutions from a smart phone makes sense to me if the ultimate goal is to transform the device into a Dell and HP killer by doing desktop functions from a mobile form factor. How can this be done? The high-res display could be projected onto a desk or wall with a bright laser, and either a USB or Bluetooth mounse and keyboard used or the laser could project a virtual keyboard and pointing device. The computer power of a smart phone rivals low-end desktops so a suitable dock could replace all the functionality of the desktop computer when the mobile device is brought to it. They are trying to kill the desktop, to eat its market share from the low end and if they get the desktop display right, they just might succeed.

There are other less ambitious ways to do the same. Just implement a good USB hub and plug the mobile device into that with its legacy display, mouse, keyboard and NAS. No more desktop computer needed.

There is way too much discussion of Facebook's legal standing here, and if you have ever seen a moot court, you can use legal reasoning and even the body of the law to argue either side. The law is based on competing priorities like politics is, and like economics.

A more telling result is the impression the disclosure leaves, which is why the story has legs. It is abit like what happened to Donald Sterling; something that seemed OK in one context got leaked into a different context where it appears totally wrong. Powerful people have fallen recently based on this fact and all the PR departments all you corporate smuggies talk about cannot foresee and repair the damage once it is out. You can't put Hummpty together again.

I don't know if this will get all blown up. or it just dies. Given disclosures about Facebook privacy and how they seem to bias the feed, maybe this is nothing new. On the other hand if people think Facebook crossed the line and did illegal human experimentation then even if the issues become legally moot, the damage to the reputation of the company and Mark Zuckerburg, could be considerable, and ironies of ironies, an industry that thrives on impressions could be damaged by impressions, we can hope. I have become outspoken as a critic of the whole idea of Social Media, beginning with Google and I am rooting for reputations to get damaged and these companies are actually quite vulnerable. They are vulnerable to the same buzz they are constantly creating, a buzz that is often based in inueuendo and not supported by careful research and results which they knowingly bias. I think that the blog and social media are impediments to discussion and democratic processes. So. I am hoping for indications that invalidate their business model; that some of this is curtailed and reined-in. That risk is heaped on people who deserve it.

Mariah Carey had or had a five octave vocal range, kinda like a piano's range. These other people, especially if they tend to Grunge can't have nearly as much due to abusing their voices, mega hurts.