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Comment Like texting? (Score 1) 422

by grangerg (#28636477) Attached to: Standalone GPS Receivers Going the Way of the Dodo
The first thing I think of when someone uses their phone for directions is them squinting at the screen while holding it in their hand; that's been my experience watching others (iPhone & G1). It feels like it's right between taking a phone call w/o a hands-free set and texting (but closer to texting since it diverts your eyes).

There's only so much that "voice guidance" can do, and it never seems to be enough to remove the need to see, or mess with, the map.

Biotech

Designer Babies 902

Posted by samzenpus from the wings-and-a-nice-prehensile-tail dept.
Singularity Hub writes "The Fertility Institutes recently stunned the fertility community by being the first company to boldly offer couples the opportunity to screen their embryos not only for diseases and gender, but also for completely benign characteristics such as eye color, hair color, and complexion. The Fertility Institutes proudly claims this is just the tip of the iceberg, and plans to offer almost any conceivable customization as science makes them available. Even as couples from across the globe are flocking in droves to pay the company their life's savings for a custom baby, opponents are vilifying the company for shattering moral and ethical boundaries. Like it or not, the era of designer babies is officially here and there is no going back."
Sci-Fi

Ray Kurzweil Wonders, Can Machines Ever Have Souls? 630

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'd-settle-for-a-chobit dept.
Celery writes "There's an interview with Ray Kurzweil on silicon.com talking up the prospects of gene therapy as a means to reverse human aging, discussing different approaches to developing artificial intelligence, and giving his take on whether super intelligent machines could ever have souls. From the interview: 'The soul is a synonym for consciousness ... and if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property. Brain science is instructive there as we look inside the brain, and we've now looked at it in exquisite detail, you don't see anything that can be identified as a soul — there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen. Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property.'"
Programming

Ioke Tries To Combine the Best of Lisp and Ruby 255

Posted by timothy from the like-a-sibilant-jewel dept.
synodinos writes "Ola Bini, a core JRuby developer and author of the book Practical JRuby on Rails Projects, has been developing a new language for the JVM called Ioke. This strongly typed, extremely dynamic, prototype-based, object-oriented language aims to give developers the same kind of power they get with Lisp and Ruby, combined with a nice, small, regular syntax."

Comment Masking tape works fine (Score 1) 146

Sorry you had such a bad experience. The masking tape fix worked great for our drums. We haven't had any problems with the guitars.

I followed the instructions here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhF5noVUBN8

Basically, put masking tape across the sensor and surrounding surface to increase its sensitivity. Of course, be careful about the points where the wires are soldered, but otherwise the hardware is pretty solid. It took a Philips screwdriver, scissors, masking tape, and about 10 minutes.
Medicine

Stretching Before Exercising Weakens Muscles 339

Posted by kdawson from the everything-you-know-is-wrong dept.
Khemisty writes "Back in grade school you were probably taught the importance of warm-up exercises, and it's likely you've continued with pretty much the same routine ever since. Science, however, has moved on. Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes' warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but are actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds — known as static stretching — primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them. In a recent study conducted at the University of Nevada, athletes generated less force from their leg muscles after static stretching than they did after not stretching at all. Other studies have found that this stretching decreases muscle strength by as much as 30 percent. Also, stretching one leg's muscles can reduce strength in the other leg as well, probably because the central nervous system rebels against the movements."
Security

The Real Story On WPA's Flaw 67

Posted by kdawson from the calm-down dept.
Glenn Fleishman writes "The reports earlier today on WPA's TKIP key type being cracked were incorrect. I spoke at length with Erik Tews, the joint author of the paper that discloses a checksum weakness in TKIP that allows individual short packets to be decrypted without revealing the TKIP key. I wrote this up for Ars Technica with quite a bit of background on WEP and WPA. Tews's paper, co-written with Martin Beck, whom he credits as discovering and implementing a working crack (in aircrack-ng as a module), describes a way to use a backwards-compatible part of TKIP to exploit a weakness that remains from WEP. ARP packets and similarly short packets can be decoded. Longer packets are likely still safe, and TKIP hasn't been cracked. Don't believe the hype, but the exploit is still notable."

Comment Re:Hope and fear (Score 1) 3709

by grangerg (#25642937) Attached to: Barack Obama Wins US Presidency

Hope because the idiots that have been running the country for nearly a decade are gone...

Nope. The majority of Congress kept their seats. And if you believe that party matters (and most do), the party that lead us to where we are now has actually increased their control.
The Almighty Buck

Economic Crisis Will Eliminate Open Source 753

Posted by CmdrTaco from the why-so-gloomy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The economic crisis will ultimately eliminate open source projects and the 'Web 2.0 free economy,' says Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Along with the economic downturn and record job loss, he says, we will see the elimination of projects including Wikipedia, CNN's iReport, and much of the blogosphere. Instead of users offering their services 'for free,' he says, we're about to see a 'sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor' and a rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash. Companies that will survive, he says, include Hulu, iTunes, and Mahalo. 'The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue,' says Keen."
Movies

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Protections Fully Broken 682

Posted by Zonk from the open-season dept.
gEvil (beta) writes "According to an article at BoingBoing, the processing keys for the AACS encryption scheme used by both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray video discs have been extracted, and a crack has been released. What this means is that there is now a method to extract the copy-protected content of any HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc out there. This is different from Muslix64's previous crack, which only extracted the volume key for each disc. This new method bypasses this step and allows anyone to extract the data without first requiring the volume key."

The Internet Now has Over 100 Million Web Sites 181

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the and-most-of-it-is-porn dept.
1sockchuck writes "There are now more than 100 million web sites on the Internet, according to Netcraft, whose monthly web server survey has reached 101.4 million sites. From the article: 'The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.'" This is a far cry from the August 1995 results that just cleared 18,000.

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