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United States

Every Day Is Goof-Off-At-Work Day At the US Patent and Trademark Office 327

McGruber writes An internal investigation by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office found that some of its 8,300 patent examiners repeatedly lied about the hours they were putting in and many were receiving bonuses for work they did not do. While half of the USPTO's Patent Examiners work from home full time, oversight of the telework program — and of examiners based at the Alexandria headquarters — was "completely ineffective," investigators concluded. The internal investigation also unearthed another widespread problem. More than 70 percent of the 80 managers interviewed told investigators that a "significant" number of examiners did not work for long periods, then rushed to get their reviews done at the end of each quarter. Supervisors told the review team that the practice "negatively affects" the quality of the work. "Our quality standards are low," one supervisor told the investigators. "We are looking for work that meets minimal requirements." Patent examiners review applications and grant patents on inventions that are new and unique. They are experts in their fields, often with master's and doctoral degrees. They earn at the top of federal pay scale, with the highest taking home $148,000 a year.

Comment Re:catch has gotten more specific, skill not chang (Score 1) 146

I'm not so sure I agree. When you practice out routes and sideline routes your whole career counting on push-out rules and then suddenly being pushed out means you're out of bounds for the catch, that's massive. An out route can't go as far out, and a sideline route has to be further in from the sideline. It's probably a bigger change than going from NCAA football with the one-foot rule to the NFL with the two-foot rule.

The reply rules made what counts as a catch a lot more strict, but a good solid catch with control of the ball was always the goal. Thayt didn't change too much other than getting incomplete passes more accurately called. The push-out rule changing OTOH changed how the routes are run on the same size field.

Comment Plus is primarily centralized account management (Score 1) 114

Google Plus is only incidentally a social network. It was designed to merge and centrally manage the YouTube, Picasa, GMail, et al accounts. It's been quite effective. The stream was an easy add-on goal and an additional selling point for consumers. Circles offer a nice benefit and are being used now not just for the Plus stream but to notify people about one another's activities on the other sites like YouTube.

Science

Extracting Audio From Visual Information 142

rtoz writes Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag (video) photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.

Comment Re:They don't really want them. (Score 1) 544

On top of it all, the candy bar phone has Bluetooth and Bluetooth keyboards can be had separately or built into a phone case in the $20 to $70 range. This allows people willing to pay extra for a keyboard to pick the one they want and replace it separately from the phone if they need to replace it.

Comment Re:Is it just me ? (Score 1) 97

The link appears to be made in TFA (the first one):

Intel's new Xeon E7-8895 v2 processor is pretty much identical to the top-of-the-line E7-8890 v2, except it has the ability to put its cores into ultra-low power states and then bring them back up as needed, according to Intel.

Intel introduced the 8890 v2 model this past February. It is the absolute top of the Xeon line, the only one with RAS capabilities and other high-end functions found in the Itanium and other RISC processors. The 8890 has 15 cores running at 2.8 GHz and more importantly, a massive 37.5 MB of cache per core for high performance analytics or in-memory databases.

So the chip is great for things like in-memory databases and it's from Oracle. So the warning about that combination might be a bit over-the-top but not totally out of the blue.

Comment changing your routes changes the interconnects (Score 1) 398

changing your routes changes the interconnects
changing your routes changes the interconnects
changing your routes changes the interconnects
changing your routes changes the interconnects
changing your routes changes the interconnects

Seriously, folks, changing your routes changes the interconnects.

His VPN provider probably has a much better route back to Verizon. Yes, Verizon is being somewhat dickish to not acknowledge that Netflix is a big driver for their higher speed plans and giving Netflix's bandwidth carriers a bit of a price break for that reason. No, this is no proof at all of throttling.

Is it evidence suggesting throttling? Well, yeah. Proof? Not even close. It's entirely consistent with what Verizon already said about an imbalanced interconnect that needs more hardware.

Comment Re:Legacy Systems. (Score 2) 144

Just think of it as a jobs program/economic stimulus/enrichment of a random company on the public dole. It makes perfect sense if you buy into the economic value of the government scaling big bureaucracies that depend on a competent contractor to help them scale so big being beneficial to the economy. Just think about how much more beneficial it is, then, to have it done three or four times to get it right.

On the other hand, consumers could have spent that money rather than paying the government to pay those extra contractor costs. But then again, consumers tend to over-spend anyway and corrode the economy. Sometimes that's to the point that the government has to choose between bailing out the banks and bailing out the consumers. Then again, the government encourages that, too. And of course rather than bailing out the consumers they bail out the banks so they can create more consumer debt and start all over.

The main difference between big government folks and small government folks, you see, isn't that one thinks the government is well intentioned and the other thinks it is evil and needs to be kept in check. That's certainly a factor, but it's not the main one. The main difference is that big government people have an idealized concept of the government as a doer of good. Small government people are skeptical that anything too big and too detached from the lives of real people can reasonably accomplish good things for the majority of people on a regular basis.

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