Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:asdf (Score 1) 107

Please tell me you're not planning to stay FULL RETARD.

Doctors can't see your medical records unless you sign a release and allow them access, usually by joining their practice as a patient.

Only after that, can they request your records from your previous doctors and only then will they be provided, usually by mail.

The NSA on the other hand, probably has them in a database and at their fingertips already. Which ones you ask? ALL of them (that are in electronic medical record clouds).

Comment It's about time (Score 1) 86

For the current generation of very young kids, their first taste of video gaming is Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Candy Crush, Temple Run and the like, played on their parents' mobile devices. They're not going to ask for a Nintendo when they're older; they'll ask for an iOS or Android device. The days of selling "kiddie" handhelds with QVGA screens and $40 games are numbered. I'm just glad Nintendo has finally decided to start rolling with the tide, rather than face being washed under, like Polaroid.

United States

How To Execute People In the 21st Century 1081

HughPickens.com writes Matt Ford writes in The Atlantic that thanks to a European Union embargo on the export of key drugs, and the refusal of major pharmaceutical companies to sell them the nation's predominant method of execution is increasingly hard to perform. With lethal injection's future uncertain, some states are turning to previously discarded methods. The Utah legislature just approved a bill to reintroduce firing squads for executions, Alabama's House of Representatives voted to authorize the electric chair if new drugs couldn't be found, and after last years botched injection, Oklahoma legislators are mulling the gas chamber.

The driving force behind the creation and abandonment of execution methods is the constant search for a humane means of taking a human life. Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930. Execution is also prone to problems as witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands. The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks." The physical effects of the deadly hydrogen cyanide in the gas chamber are coma, seizures and cardiac arrest but the time lag has previously proved a problem. According to Ford one reason lethal injection enjoyed such tremendous popularity was that it strongly resembled a medical procedure, thereby projecting our preconceived notions about modern medicine—its competence, its efficacy, and its reliability—onto the capital-punishment system. "As states revert to earlier methods of execution—techniques once abandoned as backward and flawed—they run the risk that the death penalty itself will be seen in the same terms."
Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson Says Colonizing Mars Won't Be As Easy As He Thought 228

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from io9: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy filled us all with hope that we could terraform Mars in the 21st century, with its plausible description of terraforming processes. But now, in the face of what we've learned about Mars in the past 20 years, he no longer thinks it'll be that easy. Talking to SETI's Blog Picture Science podcast, Robinson explains that his ideas about terraforming Mars, back in the 1990s, were based on three assumptions that have been called into question or disproved:

1) Mars doesn't have any life on it at all. And now, it's looking more likely that there could be bacteria living beneath the surface. 2) There would be enough of the chemical compounds we need to survive. 3) There's nothing poisonous to us on the surface. In fact, the surface is covered with perchlorates, which are highly toxic to humans, and the original Viking mission did not detect these. "It's no longer a simple matter," Robinson says. "It's possible that we could occupy, inhabit and terraform Mars. But it's probably going to take a lot longer than I described in my books."

Comment Re:This ex-Swatch guy doesn't have a clue (Score 5, Interesting) 389

And back in 2007 you'd be telling us the iPhone would present no threat to BlackBerry. And before that you'd have told us that the iPod would pose no threat to other mp3 players. The sheer amount of fault predictions that Slashdot nerds have made about Apple are hilarious.

You're revising history as much as Apple revises their products. A $599 phone (with no subsidy discount), locked to one carrier, that can't run 3rd party applications, doesn't support MMS, has poor call quality and no 3G support was no threat to Blackberry. A $399, Mac-only, MP3 player that lacks USB was no threat to other MP3 players.

The iPod didn't become a genuine threat to competitors (and a runaway success) until hell froze over and Windows support was added. The iPhone didn't become a threat to competitors until Apple allowed AT&T to subsidize it. By the time the products had overcome their respective major roadblocks to widespread adoption, the current versions resembled their initial predecessors in name and physical appearance, but most of the missing capabilities the nerd peanut gallery derided them for, had been addressed.

If anything, this is a cautionary tale that while the Apple Watch may eventually be yet another blazing success story for Apple, the model that goes on sale on April 24th will be nothing like the updated version that catapults it to mainstream popularity. Of course, it could also flop. As they said on Mythbusters, "failure is always an option." Either way, it will be an amusing show, and I'm sure plenty of people will have their own revisionist history to write when it succeeds or fails.

Comment Re:BBC article (Score 1) 87

iGadgets are prevalent, and soon shall be the most common means to access web sites. Get used to it or get used to be ridiculed for being an clueless old fart too stupid to figure out how to use a "view standard version" link or to realize that most sites automatically redirect to the standard version when a desktop browser is detected, as the parent's link did.

Many mobile sites don't offer the option to switch to "desktop view". Of those that do, it's fairly common to get thrown right back to the "mobile" view, after clicking on another link. The transition can also fail in any number of frustrating ways. I've seen sites that automatically re-direct back to the "mobile" view, or take you to the main homepage of the site, rather than shown the "desktop version" of the article you desired. Lately, user agent spoofing doesn't seem to be as effective; it seems sites are using some other browser metadata to determine if the user is a mobile device.

The irony is that a sub-$100 Windows 8.1 tablet with a 1280x800 resolution has no trouble viewing the real web, but a modern flagship smartphone with a Quad HD 2560x1440 display (hell, that's better than my laptop), gets stuck browsing the mobile web. I can only conclude that some web developers must simply hate smartphone users.

Earth

Methane-Based Life Possible On Titan 69

Randym writes: With the simultaneous announcement of a possible nitrogen-based, cell-like structure allowing life outside the "liquid water zone" (but within a methane atmosphere) announced by researchers at Cornell (academic paper) and the mystery of fluctuating methane levels on Mars raising the possibility of methane-respiring life, there now exists the possibility of a whole new branch of the tree of life that does not rely on either carbon or oxygen for respiration. We may find evidence of such life here on Earth down in the mantle where "traditional" life cannot survive, but where bacteria has evolved to live off hydrocarbons like methane and benzene.

Comment Who cares!? (Score 0) 280

Who cares how much anything costs? This is the government after all and they have magic money. They can give FREE healthcare and FREE unemployment benefits, the have something called a central bank that gives them FREE MONEY, so who cares how much it costs.

This is the socialists wet dream, until the government spends their magic money on something they don't personally like, then it's like woooah, hold on how much does this cost?

How much does it cost? Fucking nothing that's how much. It's free money. Who cares? You care? Well fuck you, we have the guns and we only care about the uber riche. That's the reality of government.

Maybe someday the communist socialist ilks will realize that for every victory they have, the person in charge of the government gun that points at people, ain't them.

Comment Re:What is this nonsense? (Score 1) 631

  1. Problem
  2. Reaction
  3. Solution

I mean really, this is the oldest trick in the book of corrupt politicians. Pretend there's a problem, fabricate one, coopt one, wait for the outcry from the retard population of "do something, you gotta do something I don't care what. Think of the children", then propose your real goal, the 'solution'.

This is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Slashdot Top Deals

Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.

Working...