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Government

Submission + - Is "Open Government" actually possible? 1

Submitted by olyar
olyar writes: All of the Wikileaks coverage — and their insistence that they are trying to promote "open government" got me to thinking. We take for granted that our government has to have secrets, but do they really? What if made it our policy that what you see is what you get? What if we openly published all of our military capacity and strategies, were blunt about our plans to deal with difficult world leaders, etc? Could that actually work?

Comment Re:Finally (Score 1) 114

by olyar (#33372828) Attached to: Google Testing Voice Calling In Gmail

The existing version of chat has an option to do audio chat with another Gmail user.

Starting a voice chat requires a separate connection hand shake. So I can be text chatting with someone and if they try to move to voice and I don't want to, I just don't answer the call. If you need an excuse, it's that you don't have a microphone on your machine, or whatever.

My guess is that this will work in a similar fashion.

Comment Re:Wasn't he the CEO during the pretexting scandal (Score 2, Informative) 233

by olyar (#33171444) Attached to: HP CEO Resigns During Sexual Harassment Investigation

I started working for HP shortly after Carly came in, and I had the privilege to work with a number of 30+ year HP employees. They had worked for (and in several cases personally met) Bill and Dave and they had nothing but praise for them. They also had an amazing loyalty to the company - a loyalty that took one beating after another under Carly's leadership.

Maybe you're right that no employee of a tech company has anything good to say these days, but it wasn't the case at HP for many years.

As to the current situation, I know a number of people that still work there and they are miserable - far more so than when I left 5 years ago. Things were tough when I left, but it sounds like they've gotten far worse over time.
User Journal

Journal Journal: First Entry

Journal by olyar

First time trying out the journal here. Not sure what exactly I would use it for...
Movies

Submission + - Joss Whedon to Direct the Avengers (mtv.com)

Submitted by olyar
olyar writes: Great news for Joss fans and comic fans alike. Looks like Joss is going to direct the Avengers movie. Best commentary I saw came via @DRUNKHULK on Twitter: "JOSS WHEDON TO DIRECT AVENGERS MOVIE! OUT OF TRADITION FOX HOPE FIND WAY TO TAKE MOVIE AWAY FROM HIM!"
The Internet

Submission + - Twitter Grows Up, Adds 'Promoted Tweets' (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Twitter is finally taking off the training wheels and moving into the world where real businesses tread with the launch on Tuesday of its first advertising model, dubbed 'Promoted Tweets.' The microblogging phenom has long avoided coming up with a business plan or even talking about one. Just last October, Twitter CEO Evan Williams told an audience at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that the company wanted to focus on developing the site, instead of on a business model. But the time has come for Twitter to figure out how to make money over the long haul. It's a decision that makes the company look less like a grand hobby and more like an actual business, said analyst Rob Enderle. 'Twitter is growing up,' Enderle said. 'It helps take them from a dot-com-like questionable start-up to a real business.' However, analyst Dan Old isn't so sure that Twitter users will welcome the change. 'There will be a vocal minority of users who will hate any advertising at all,' Olds said. '[Many] users understand that it's necessary and will accept it as long as it doesn't interfere with their usage. But if the ads look like regular tweets, that could cause some serious outrage from users who feel that Twitter is attempting to deceive them.'

Comment Risks and Benefits of OSS (Score 5, Insightful) 128

by olyar (#31544726) Attached to: Oracle Shuttering OpenSSO

As much as this is a bummer, it's actually a great example of the OSS model at work.

If this was a closed source solution, where the company got acquired and the product wasn't strategic, the solution would just be gone.

With OSS though, another company - for whom the solution is strategic - can step in and pick up the project.

Canada

Dead Pigs Used To Investigate Ocean's "Dead Zones" 106

Posted by samzenpus from the big-ocean-long-pig dept.
timothy writes "As places to study what happens to corpses, the Atlantic Ocean is both much larger and much more specialized than the famous 'body farm' in Knoxville, TN. But for all kinds of good reasons, sending human bodies into Davy Jones' locker just to see where they float and how they bloat is unpopular. Pigs don't pay taxes, and more importantly, they don't vote. So Canadian scientists have taken to using them as human-body proxies, to study what happens when creatures of similar size and hairlessness (aka, us) end up 86ed and in the drink."
Medicine

Brain Surgery Linked To Sensation of Spirituality 380

Posted by timothy from the applied-psychology dept.
the3stars writes "'Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. This raises a number of interesting issues about spirituality, among them whether or not people can be born with a strong propensity towards spirituality and also whether it can be acquired through head trauma." One critic's quoted response: "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items."
Censorship

Submission + - Bill to give Obama emergency Control of Internet 5

Submitted by neonprimetime
neonprimetime writes: Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
Google

Submission + - Google to Launch OS (wsj.com)

Submitted by
olyar
olyar writes: "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google has announced their intent to launch their own operating system.

Initially they'll target low end netbooks."

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