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Comment Louisiana and Mississippi (Score 1) 242

All along the Mississippi River towns filter and purify water from the river for drinking, then treat their sewage and put it back into the river. If you drink the water near the delta then part of what you're drinking has been through dozens or hundreds of people.

Connecting the output to the input eliminates some of the waste of wastewater. It's good enough for NASA, so it's good enough for you.

Comment Re: Perl (Score 1) 536

  • regardless of ease (theoretical expressivity)
  • concisely and readily (practical expressivity)
  • The first sense dominates in areas of mathematics and logic that deal with the formal description of languages and their meaning, such as formal language theory, mathematical logic and process algebra.[2]

    In informal discussions, the term often refers to the second sense, or to both. This is often the case when discussing programming languages.[3] Efforts have been made to formalize these informal uses of the term.[4]

Yes, both can be useful definitions. When discussing comparative expressiveness of two Turing-complete languages the second holds more meaning. Being Turing-complete means they are equivalent in the first meaning.

Comment Re: Perl still works, and PHP is fine (Score 1) 536

PDO is based on the Perl5 DBI which was done the right way the first time. "Deprecated" doesn't mean it's not being used. Once it's actually removed and people are actually using 5.6 in production then PHP will be more consistent.

That's just a small example, though, of the failure to support loadable modules and separate namespaces for so long. PHP historically has been very inconsistent. Future PHP may not be so, but it's not the future yet.

Government

IRS Recycled Lerner Hard Drive 682

phrackthat (2602661) writes The Senate Finance Committee has been informed that the IRS recycled the hard drive of Lois Lerner, which will deprive investigators of the ability to forensically retrieve emails which were supposedly deleted or lost in a "crash." This news comes after the IRS revealed that it had lost the emails of Lois Lerner and six other employees who were being investigated regarding the targeting of conservative groups and donors.
Cellphones

Amazon Announces 'Fire Phone' 192

Amazon has unveiled the Fire Phone. It runs a modified version of Android, and it will launch exclusively for AT&T's network. The screen is a 4.7" IPS LCD (they tested from 4.3" to 5.5", and decided 4.7" worked best for single-hand use), with an emphasis on brightness. It runs on a quad-core 2.2GHz processor with 2GB of RAM, and an Adreno 330 GPU. It has a rear-facing, 13-megapixel camera using an f/2.0 five-element lens with image stabilization. There's a dedicated physical button on the side of the phone that will turn it on and put it into camera mode when pressed. The phone comes with dual stereo speakers that produce virtual surround sound. Amazon wants the phone to be distinctive for its ability to provide video content, both from a hardware and software perspective.

The Fire Phone runs Mayday, Amazon's live tech support service for devices. They also demonstrated Firefly, software that recognizes physical objects using the phone's camera, as well as TV shows and songs it hears. It runs quickly, often identifying things in less than a second (and it pulls up an Amazon product listing, of course). It can even recognize art. Firefly has its own dedicated physical button on the phone, and Amazon is providing a Firefly SDK to third parties who want to develop with it. Another major feature of the Fire Phone is what Amazon calls "dynamic perspective." Using multiple front-facing cameras, the phone tracks the position of a user's head, and uses that to slightly adjust what's displayed on the screen so content is easier to see from the new angle. It allows for gesture control of the phone — for example, you can tilt the phone to scroll a web page or move your head slightly look around a 2-D stadium image when browsing for available seats. Putting your thumb on the screen acts like a mute button for the head tracking, so it isn't confused when you look up from the screen or turn your head to talk to somebody. It's an impressive piece of software, and they've made an SDK available for it.

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