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Comment Re:Rocketboard (Score 1) 164

Pretty interesting concept and if it works as well in the real world as the video portrays, it could be very cool to use. I was all ready to sign up for early access and talk about it with my team on Monday, until I saw your comment below that it only works on Apple devices.

In the tech and development world (especially in the trenches) Android rules, and our office is no exception. What a downer.

Comment Re:From his twitter account (Score 4, Informative) 411

He died at 83; smoking probably didn't kill him so much as being old.

Considering the cause of death was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, I'd guess smoking played a major part. Says Wikipedia:

Tobacco smoking is the most common cause of COPD, with a number of other factors such as air pollution and genetics playing a smaller role.

But it's a sad day regardless.

Comment Margins (Score 1) 86

As someone who was quite vocal against Beta in the original announcement article, I've got to say that this about-face is a pleasant surprise. I don't love everything about it, but it's a far sight better than what we saw on the beta site. Glad to see the powers that be came to their senses, and were not persuaded by UX blowhards.

One bug/design issue is with the comment margins. Here's what I'm seeing in Firefox: http://i.imgur.com/YPhBVI0.png

Playing with the CSS, I think this is easier on the eyes and feels a lot less squished: http://i.imgur.com/npol1Kq.png

Which I got with this:

    #commentwrap, #commentlisting {
        padding-left: 1em;
    }

    #commentlisting {
        padding-right: 1em;
    }

Now how about some proper Unicode support? :)

Comment Re: Deal of the century? (Score 4, Interesting) 246

This all hinges on what "that money" is.

Sure, they repaid with interest "that money" which was their bailout, fronted by taxpayers when nobody else could loan cash.

But if "that money" refers to all the losses they caused to investors, losses to businesses incurring cash flow problems they wouldn't have had, losses to individuals whose homes dropped in value and were foreclosed, and the huge amount of financial loss and pain felt by pretty everyone else who works for a wage, especially people paid off work, I'm pretty sure those bankers never repaid any of "that money".

Comment Re:Big Data (Score 5, Insightful) 439

Everyone knows that the military airplane became obsolete once radar was invented. Same thing here. Must be true....

Cat and mouse, as always. Stealth subs aren't a new idea (go watch Red October, one of my all time favs) and we have only scratched the surface in that area. Even in the 80s when I was in the air force, the Navy was considered the strongest leg of the Triad. That isn't likely to change soon, although the technology they use certainly will.

Comment Re:I'd go with a projector (Score 1) 330

What an annoying site. Here I was hoping the bar would be raised with flash on the way out, but it looks like people can just recreate garbage flash sites with equally-bad HTML5 sites.
The one upside is it's slightly usable on mobile, even if it still looks awful.

Comment Re:"Privately owned drones"? (Score 1) 168

I was about to say that if you are in an area where it is acceptable to use shotguns (300ft from a home, in the county is the rule in NC) then yes, excellent target practice. I keep the shorter military/police grade buckshot in my combat shotgun, holds around 9 or 10 shells. But in all seriousness, these will be getting shot down, as not everyone cares what the law is, and will just pull out a gun and shoot it down even if they live in the city.

Businesses

Video Female-Run Companies Often do Better Than Male-Run Ones (Video) 271

Today's interviewee, Viktoria Tsukanov, is one of the executives at predictive marketing company Mintigo who did a study in January, 2015 that seemed to show that large companies with female CEOs "achieve up to 18% higher revenue per employee than male CEOs." The study, titled "She’s the CEO and She’s Sensational," used financial data Mintigo collected on 20 million companies, and determined CEOs' genders by analyzing first names, so it was not subject to survey vagaries but was a straight data analysis job. Could this be a case of correlation and causation being unrelated? It's possible. It's also possible that the revenue per employee figures are affected by the fact that female CEOs are more common in healthcare and non-profit organizations, while men dominate manufacturing and construction -- and, as Viktoria pointed out in a blog post headlined "Women Just Raised the Bar. Big Time." there may be other factors at work as well.

The "18% higher revenue" figure specifically applies to companies with more than 1000 workers, while companies with fewer workers may average more revenue per employee if they have male CEOs. Besides discussing the study itself, in our interview Viktoria talks about how male employees might want to alter (or not alter) their behavior if they find themselves working for a female boss for the first time. She also discusses challenges a woman might face if she is suddenly put in charge of a heavily male IT or programming staff. Other thoughts she shares have to do with finding mentors and dealing with negative people, both of which apply to people of all genders. Interesting food for thought all around.
Input Devices

Video Listnr Wants to be 'Your Listening Assistant' (Video) 45

This Listnr is "a new listening device connected to the cloud" being developed by a team in Japan that's currently running a Kickstarter project looking for $50,000 by March 7. The other Listnr "is a free music service helping people discover the best music from independent artists on Soundcloud and Bandcamp." More accurately, that's what it was, since their last Facebook post was in 2011 and their domain name is now for sale. Today's Listnr -- the listening device one -- claims it is able to tell whether a baby it hears is laughing, crying, gurgling or trying to talk. It is supposed to respond to finger snaps, hand claps, and other audio commands. It has an open API so that you can extend its use however you like. The company, too, is working on new applications for their product. Will there be enough of them, and will they interest enough people, to make this a success? Co-Founder Rie Ehara says, "We wanted to build something using sound to enrich and delight our lives." As of today (Feb. 2), Listnr is slightly less than halfway to its Kickstarter goal, so it's still a coin-toss whether or not Listnr will succeed.

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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