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Corporations Hiring Hooky Hunters 610

Posted by samzenpus from the taking-a-personal-detective-day dept.
No longer satisfied with your crinkled doctor's note, a growing number of corporations are hiring "Hooky Detectives." Private investigator Rick Raymond says he's staked out bowling alleys, pro football games, weddings and even funerals looking for people using sick days. From the article: "Such techniques have become permissible at a time when workers are more likely to play hooky. Kronos, a workforce productivity firm in Chelmsford, Mass., recently found that 57 percent of salaried employees take sick days when they're not sick — almost a 20 percent increase from statistics gathered between 2006 and 2008."
Patents

8-Year-Old Receives Patent 142

Posted by samzenpus from the young-inventor-society dept.
Knile writes "While not the youngest patent recipient ever (that would be a four year old in Texas), Bryce Gunderman has received a patent at age 8 for a space-saver that combines an outlet cover plate with a shelf. From the article: '"I thought how I was going to make a lot of money," Bryce said about what raced through his brain when he received the patent.'"
Image

The World's Smallest Legible Font 280

Posted by samzenpus from the because-he-can dept.
hasanabbas1987 writes "From the article: 'Well 'technically' they aren't the smallest fonts in the world as if they were you wouldn't be able to read even a single letter, but, you should be able to read the entire paragraph in the picture given above... we did. A Computer science professor called Ken Perlin designed these tiny fonts and you can fit 500 reasonable words in a resolution of 320 x 240 space. There are at the moment the smallest legible fonts in the world.'"
Image

Denver Rejects UFO Agency To Track Aliens 80

Posted by samzenpus from the name-and-galaxy-of-origin-please dept.
Republicans weren't the only ones to win big yesterday. Aliens in The Mile-High City can breathe easier thanks to voters rejecting a plan to officially track them. From the article: "The proposal defeated soundly Tuesday night would have established a commission to track extraterrestrials. It also would have allowed residents to post their observations on Denver's city Web page and report sightings." Let the anonymous probings begin!
Media

1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film? 685

Posted by samzenpus from the I-hate-time-travel-stories dept.
Many of you have submitted a story about Irish filmmaker George Clarke, who claims to have found a person using a cellphone in the "unused footage" section of the DVD The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin movie filmed in 1928. To me the bigger mystery is how someone who appears to be the offspring of Ram-Man and The Penguin got into a movie in the first place, especially if they were talking to a little metal box on set. Watch the video and decide for yourself.
Cellphones

Porting Lemmings In 36 Hours 154

Posted by Soulskill from the first-in-line dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Aaron Ardiri challenged himself to port his classic PalmOS version of Lemmings to the iPhone, Palm Pre, Mac, and Windows. The porting was done using his own dev environment, which creates native C versions of the game. He liveblogged the whole thing, and finished after only 36 hours with an iPhone version and a Palm Pre version awaiting submission, and free versions for Windows and Mac available on his site."
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North Korea Develops Anti-Aging "Super Drink" 296

Posted by samzenpus from the can-full-of-wonder dept.
__roo writes "According to North Korea's official news agency, a drink produced by North Korea's Moranbong Carbonated Fruit Juice Joint Venture Company can cure aging and all disease. 'It, with effects of both preventive and curative treatment, helps improve mental and retentive faculties by multiplying brain cells. It also protects skin from wrinkles and black spots and prevents such geriatric diseases as cerebral hemorrhage, myocardium and brain infarction by removing acid effete matters in time.' It also has no side-effects." Last month North Korea announced its fusion breakthrough, and now it has a super drink. One can only imagine what wonders may come in July — perhaps self-buttering toast.
Image

Doctor Slams Hospital's "Please" Policy 572

Posted by samzenpus from the paging-doctor-manners dept.
Administrators at England's Worthing Hospital are insisting that doctors say the magic word when writing orders for blood tests on weekends. If a doctor refuses to write "please" on the order, the test will be refused. From the article: "However, a doctor at the hospital said on condition of anonymity that he sees the policy as a money-saving measure that could prove dangerous for patients. 'I was shocked to come in on Sunday and find none of my bloods had been done from the night before because I'd not written "please,"' the doctor said. 'I had no results to guide treatment of patients. Myself and a senior nurse had to take the bloods ourselves, which added hours to our 12-hour shifts. This system puts patients' lives at risk. Doctors are wasting time doing the job of the technicians.'"
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Police Investigating Virtual Furniture Theft 103

Posted by samzenpus from the someone-has-been-sleeping-in-my-virtual-bed dept.
krou writes "Finnish police are involved in the investigation of up to 400 cases of theft from virtual world Habbo Hotel, with some users reporting the loss of up to €1000 of virtual furniture and other items. Users were targeted using a phishing scam that used fake webpages to capture usernames and passwords. There is no mention as to whether or not the thieves made off with the bath towels, gowns, shampoo bottles, and soaps."
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Seinfeld's Good Samaritan Law Now Reality? 735

Posted by samzenpus from the not-that-there-is-anything-wrong-with-that dept.
e3m4n writes "The fictitious 'good samaritan' law from the final episode of Seinfeld (the one that landed them in jail for a year) appears to be headed toward reality for California residents after the house passed this bill. There are some differences, such as direct action is not required, but the concept of guilt by association for not doing the right thing is still on the face of the bill."

Comment Re:Why are there sectors? (Score 1) 442

by Izmunuti (#30572306) Attached to: HDD Manufacturers Moving To 4096-Byte Sectors

Hard drives are random-access devices and sectors are the smallest atomic unit that a drive can normally physically read and write. It doesn't read or write half a sector. When emulating a write to a 512 byte logical block with 4096 byte physical blocks on the media, it has to read the whole 4K sector, modify it with the changed 512 bytes, and rewrite the entire 4K sector.

The concept of sectors could be hidden from the interface, theoretically. You could put the whole file system into the drive (OSD), for example, or allow the host to address bytes, hiding all the read/modify/writes. But, all the common hard drive interfaces (ATA/SCSI) use blocks/sectors.
Space

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson from the toil-and-trouble dept.
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."

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