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Comment MIT Hacks (Score 5, Informative) 86

by e4liberty (#43948449) Attached to: MIT President Tells Grads To 'Hack the World'
At MIT, the word "hack" means something very specific, and not criminal or unethical. It is a impressive, creative, and clever achievement. From http://hacks.mit.edu/ The word hack at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and "ethical" prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!). Note that this has nothing to do with computer (or phone) hacking (which we call "cracking").

Comment Re:PIN / password for Apple apps like email (Score 1) 262

by e4liberty (#43948287) Attached to: What Features Does iOS 7 Need?
Also, it would be great to be able to set the sleep timer short, and the lock timer much longer. The concepts of Sleep and Lock should be separated. It is so annoying to put the phone down for a minute and then need to enter my entire (long because I care about security) pass phrase. It encourages people to use low security logins, or waste battery with long sleep timers.

Comment These older developers **read StackOverflow** (Score 2) 365

by e4liberty (#43585231) Attached to: Can Older Software Developers Still Learn New Tricks?
There are two selection criteria: these developers are older, and they participate at StackOverflow. So, they're the guys who sick with programming, not management or retirement, and who "get" social media, at least SO, and are developer community oriented. This is a select group of individuals!
Classic Games (Games)

Researchers Reprogram Voting Machine To Run Pac-man 132

Posted by samzenpus from the vote-cherry-this-year dept.
Philom writes "Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated that electronic voting machines can be reprogrammed to steal votes, so when researchers Alex Halderman and Ari Feldman got their hands on a machine called the Sequoia AVC Edge, they decided to do something different: they reprogrammed it to run Pac-Man. As states move away from insecure electronic voting, there's a risk that discarded machines will clog our landfills. Fortunately, these results show that voting machines can be recycled to provide countless hours of entertainment."
Medicine

Three Ground-Breaking Miniature Biosensors 18

Posted by samzenpus from the hospital-pill dept.
kkleiner writes "Over the past few years, several research teams have developed increasingly smaller and cheaper biosensors with improved detection capabilities and faster turnaround times. Whether you are a doctor diagnosing patients in the rural areas of Africa or a Homeland Security agent working to thwart an act of bioterrorism, one of these little devices should be your sidekick."
Image

Doctors Seeing a Rise In "Google-itis" 368

Posted by samzenpus from the sounds-like-rickets-to-me dept.
It's one of the fastest-growing health issues that doctors now face: "Google-itis." Everyone from concerned mothers to businessmen on their lunch break are typing in symptoms and coming up with rare diseases or just plain wrong information. Many doctors are bringing computers into examination rooms now so they can search along with patients to alleviate their fears. "I'm not looking for a relationship where the patient accepts my word as the gospel truth," says Dr. James Valek. "I just feel the Internet brings so much misinformation to the (exam) room that we have to fight through all that before we can get to the problem at hand."

Comment Re:Closed Caption (Score 1) 95

by e4liberty (#26225811) Attached to: Roku Box Adds HD, Grows Beyond Netflix
IANAL, but FCC defines a video programming distributor as

(2) Video programming distributor. Any television broadcast station licensed by the Commission and any multichannel video programming distributor as defined in  76.1000(e) of this chapter, and any other distributor of video programming for residential reception that delivers such programming directly to the home and is subject to the jurisdiction of the Commission.

and "any other distributor of video programming for residential reception that delivers such programming directly to the home" sounds like it fits.

Comment Re:Closed Caption (Score 1) 95

by e4liberty (#26216281) Attached to: Roku Box Adds HD, Grows Beyond Netflix
I'm sure Netflix can finesse this in a number of ways; for example, per this fcc page "Channels producing revenues of under $3,000,000" are exempt from the rule. Instant Watch is "free for Netflix subscribers."

There are also technical issues; HDMI doesn't have a CC stream so the merge of CC or subtitle and video have to happen in the Roku box or upstream.

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