Comment the futile irony of it all (Score 1) 583
I wish I'd known that loyalty and initiative will be punished by the insecure and incompetent ones above you.
Comment Re:Of course it bombed (Score 1) 205
Of course the poor box-office of Tomorrowland is one data point, which the superstitious oracles at Disney have taken as an omen that any film which has certain factors in common with it will also fail.... rather than an indication that maybe this movie was specifically not very good, or not properly marketed.
Comment Re:What is it you want again? (Score 1) 313
He wants a phone that can't understand the meaning of "closest to".
Oldest Stone Tools Predate Previous Record Holder By 700,000 Years 103
derekmead writes: The oldest stone tools ever found have been discovered by scientists in Kenya who say they are 3.3m years old, making them by far the oldest such artifacts discovered. Predating the rise of humans' first ancestors in the Homo genus, the artifacts were found near Lake Turkana, Kenya. More than 100 primitive hammers, anvils and other stone tools have been found at the site. An in-depth analysis of the site, its contents, and its significance as a new benchmark in evolutionary history will be published in the May 21 issue of Nature.
Comment cheese (Score 1) 50
You mean Phobos and Deimos are also made of cheese?
Comment Monkey scribes (Score 4, Funny) 270
Empirical evidence demonstrates that it took only a finite number of monkeys a finite period of time to "randomly" produce the works of Shakespeare.
Kepler Observes Neptune Dancing With Its Moons 19
New submitter Liquid Tip writes: NASA's K2 mission has the capability to stare continuously at a single field of stars for months at time. A new video shows K2 observations spanning 70 days from November, 2014 through January, 2015 reduced to a time-lapse of 34 seconds. During this time, we see some distant members of our Solar System passing through the K2 field-of-view. This includes some asteroids and the giant outer planet Neptune, which appears at day 15. A keen-eyed observer will also notice an object circling Neptune: its large moon, Triton, which orbits every 5.8 days. The fainter moon Nereid can be seen tracing Neptune's motion.
What Happens To Our Musical Taste As We Age? 361
An anonymous reader writes: New research from Spotify and Echo Nest reveals that people start off listening to chart-topping pop music and branch off into all kinds of territory in their teens and early 20s, before their musical tastes start to calcify and become more rigid by their mid-30s. "Men, it turns out, give up popular music much more quickly than women. Men and women have similar musical listening tendencies through their teens, but men start shunning mainstream artists much sooner than women and to a greater degree."
Comment airplanes have windows (Score 4, Insightful) 435
Airliners only need one set of windows at the front, for the pilots. But there's a row of windows on either side, and the seats next to those windows are the second-most-popular (after those on the aisle) despite the fact that they're the most difficult to get in and out of, have no access to the overhead bins, and offer less head/foot room. See also: trains, buses, passenger ferries. So I think the answer is yes: robot cars will still have windows.
Comment Re:Very unlikely to be triggered in the field (Score 1) 250
"most probably".
Relax.
Comment Previous ISP: a decade (Score 1) 125
I was with my previous ISP (Speakeasy) for about a decade. They were a wonderful find when my DSL provider went under without warning, forcing me to shop for an alternative from the "comfort" of a coffee place. But as the independent DSL business consolidated (read "collapsed"), they eventually got bought out, customer service predictably declined, and (worst of all) I was still paying the same amount for the same speed I'd signed up for circa 2000
Comment Tit for tat (Score 2) 347
I encourage scientists* to follow up with studies of politically-driven politics. Without involving any politicians, of course.
*Social scientists, I suppose, but that's better than nothing
Comment Re:Pay, not talent (Score 1) 553
But if an experienced landscaper is willing to do it for $20 – because he's been "laid off" from his landscaping job (unofficially for not being in his 20s anymore), but he would still like to continue eating – why shouldn't you hire him? Hiring decisions should be based on the actual job requirement (willingness to work for the pay), not assumptions about the applicants based on someone functionally irrelevant (age).
Comment Inconvenient Data (Score 5, Insightful) 179
The "review" of NASA's programs focused on studying Earth seems more like an attempt by climate-science deniers to stifle research that doesn't confirm what they want to hear, than anything to do with a supposed "turf battle with NOAA".
Comment everyone gets spam (Score 1) 227
"Have you been the victim of recruiting spam?"
I have an account on LinkedIn, so
Which is funny/sad, because there is nothing in my linked-in profile that suggests that I'm particularly qualified for any in-demand jobs. So the spam I get is for garbage jobs, and positions for which I am obviously neither qualified nor interested.
