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Comment Re:Gruman said it wrong (Score 1) 120

He meant bold-faced lie, not bald-faced. See here for proof: http://goo.gl/GOShs (it's a google-fight link in case I mistyped it).

Except if you put the phrases in quotes... then "bald-faced lie" wins.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22bald-faced+lie%22&word2=%22bold-faced+lie%22

Since I'm not sure if the parent was a joke or not, I won't bother finding a credible source.

Comment Re:Gained respect for NYT (Score 1) 426

I cringe everytime I hear english. It's the language of borrowed words, and I'm pretty sure the rules for it were invented a lot later, when people realized they might have to teach it.

I agree it's a language of borrowed words, but it doesn't seem as obvious to me that English developed much differently than most other languages. I am not a linguist (IANAL?), so I don't know, but maybe you have an example of another widely spoken language where "rule" development was a priority when it was gaining usage?

Comment Re:it's not 1984 yet (Score 1) 93

How about those of us who don't use a cellphone to begin with? I'm a web designer and a landline serves my needs just fine, thankyou. Track me, I wish you luck ;)

The funny thing is that it probably isn't much harder to figure out your movement patterns, based on your call patterns even from a land line. In a relatively short amount of time, someone could probably figure out your work schedule. And if you don't need a cell phone, you probably spend more than the average amount of time at home and work anyway.

You probably spend close to the 93% of your time at home or at work and you probably take a route to work that is similar to what any mapping program would suggest.

What's missing could be some of the smaller but still regular habits. We wouldn't know if you go to the grocery store on the same day every week or if/where you go to church, etc.

Science

Aussie Scientists Find Coconut-Carrying Octopus 205

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from an AP report: "Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot. ... 'I was gobsmacked,' said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. 'I mean, I've seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I've never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh.'"
Space

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."
Input Devices

Brain-Control Gaming Headset Launching Dec. 21 112

An anonymous reader writes "Controlling computers with our minds may sound like science fiction, but one Australian company claims to be able to let you do just that. The Emotiv device has been garnering attention at trade shows and conferences for several years, and now the company says it is set to launch the Emotiv EPOC headset on December 21. PC Authority spoke to co-founder Nam Do about the Emotiv technology and its potential as a mainstream gaming interface." One wonders what kind of adoption they expect with a $299 price tag.

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