Comment Re:The magical ingredient (Score 1) 378
"This enabled them, on ten occasions, to reduce the time it takes to recharge the battery."
(if that's even true. Didn't RTFPA)
Comment This says it all: (Score 1) 1521
"Nobody does it better."--so true! Thanks for helping me feel like I really had my finger on the pulse of the IT world... and other worlds besides.
Thousands of Blackbirds Fall From Sky Dead 577
Dan East writes "In a fashion worthy of a King or Hitchcock novel, blackbirds began to fall from the sky dead in Arkansas yesterday. Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 birds rained down on the small town of Beeb, Arkansas, with no visible trauma. Officials are making wild guesses as to what happened — lightning strike, high-altitude hail, or perhaps trauma from the sound of New Year's fireworks killed them."
Obama FCC Caves On Net Neutrality 853
An anonymous reader writes "...the rule, which will be voted on during tomorrow's FCC meeting, falls drastically short of earlier pledges by President Obama and the FCC Chairman to protect the free and open Internet. The rule is so riddled with loopholes that it's become clear that this FCC chairman crafted it with the sole purpose of winning the endorsement of AT&T and cable lobbyists, and not defending the interests of the tens of millions of Internet users."
Comment Faraday cages (Score 2, Informative) 85
If this topic has gotten you concerned about your personal stuff getting fried (if not by a CME, then by a nuclear EMP), you may want to look into constructing a Faraday cage. Here's a couple helpful links:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100211130814AAGmUNZ
http://forums.makezine.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=752
Comment Re:35 bullion? (Score 1) 482
Good grief, Americans spend ~35 boullion dollars on health care products annually, and Europeans still think we're "dirty"? Have you even BEEN to London lately?
Comment Re:How drunk do you need to be... (Score 2, Informative) 207
If it was necrotic, he would have lost all feeling in the tissue. Same deal with destructive frostbite.
Comment Re:You guys have replaced me already? (Score 3, Insightful) 100
Comment Re:One other area... (Score 2, Funny) 129
Was the programming language LOGO?
Nuclear Power Could See a Revival 415
shmG writes "As the US moves to reduce dependence on oil, the nuclear industry is looking to expand, with new designs making their way through the regulatory process. No less than three new configurations for nuclear power are being considered for licensing by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The first of them could be generating power in Georgia by 2016."
Comment Re:Neat (Score 1) 219
If it weren't for Alfred Molina, there'd be no reason at all to see that movie.
Comment Yeah! (Score 1) 3
I'm getting the D2 error too.
Comment Re:STUPID ACROREAD ICON (Score 1) 76
I hate that too! It seems like I'm deleting the Acrobat Reader icon and shortcut every other day. I've submitted a bug report to Adobe three times already about that.
World's Fastest Robot Versus the Wiimote 92
kkleiner writes "Adept's Quattro, a placement and sorting arm, took the title of fastest robot last year, but it was only recently during National Robotics Week that it met its most gruesome opponents: nerds with Wiimotes. Visitors tried to keep the Quattro from placing and sorting on a small mechanized platform by moving it using the Nintendo video controller. The bottom line is that when it comes to simplified and repetitive tasks there's really no beating robotic prowess."
Real-World Outcomes Predicted Using Social Media 93
Hugh Pickens writes "Kevin Kelly writes that researchers at the Social Computing Lab at HP Labs in Palo Alto have found that social media content can predict real world outcomes. In their study, the researchers built a model that used chatter from Twitter to predict accurately the box-office revenues of upcoming movies weeks before the movies were released. When the sentiment of the tweet was factored in (how favorable it was toward the new movie), the prediction was even more exact. To quantify the sentiments in 3 million tweets, the team used anonymous workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk to rate a sample of tweets, and then trained an algorithmic classifier to derive a rating for the rest. But predicting box office receipts may be only the beginning. 'This method can be extended to a large panoply of topics [PDF], ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election outcomes,' the researchers write. 'At a deeper level, this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.'"
