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Comment Re:Ideas (Score 2) 195

Good approach. Making a mortal enemy of the outgoing sysop, or simply his object of scorn, will screw you badly.

Other than to say "you're screwed", the big step is to also ramp up the professionalism and start building a better system governance policy and documentation process. The best way to explain that to management is to ask "Do you fail the Hit By a Bus Test? ".... If your key administrators are hit by a bus, will your systems go dark ?

Businesses

Lenovo Announces Grand Opening of US Manufacturing Facility 153

Kohenkatz writes "Chinese PC maker Lenovo had a ceremony [Wednesday] to mark the official grand opening of their new manufacturing facility in Whitsett, North Carolina. The 240,000-square-foot facility, located approximately 10 miles east of Greensboro, NC, was already being used as a Logistics Center, Customer Solutions Center, and National Returns Center, and is now also being used for Production. While actual line operations began in January 2013, the facility is on track to reach full operation by the end of June. The facility is equipped to build several types of Think-branded products, including desktops, tablets, and ultrabooks. Note that due to the extensive use of automation, the factory only adds 115 manufacturing jobs at the facility."

Comment I would toss the whole Laptop paradigm (Score 1) 591

A stylish wearable using 'cloud' functionality for processsing and storage, with haptic and voice input, and visual / voice output with beyond retina image quality that is projected into both eyes in a maskable area while using optical comparison to detect the ability of my eye to see it (avoiding bifocals, etc..) and projecting what Is actually in front of me based on eye position so I don't fall on my butt.

Comment So desperately right handed it diagnosed injury (Score 1) 260

I'm so right hand dominant that, when I shattered my right arm, my wife was the first to notice it (docs in the ER did not... I had a traumatic brain injury and in a coma... you do the fatality inducing stuff first). I was flailing around with my left hand only. They pooh poohed it. She said "You don't understand. He's so right handed that you could cut his left hand off and he wouldn't notice for hours and hours.) .

Comment Re:A wider color spectrum... (Score 1) 456

Agreed, but I'd go for full E and B field senses... and the neural net to be able to understand intercepted brain waves from other devices and creatures around me.

Sense of smell is somewhat over-rated. I lost mine for almost a decade, and haven't really gotten much of it back. Smell is a warning sense (Don't eat that ! Mate with her !) , not a critical information processing sense. Which is why the simpler part of the brain handles it.

Comment Great.. you took old technology and publicized it (Score 2) 272

I worked on a much more advanced and ultimately classified project for the Navy SEALS that produced a 'first shot kill' gun sighting system for the SEALs in ... 1993. The sight was designed to go on crew served weapons and sniper weapons. It included aim point calculation, full ballistics computing, sensors, range finder, thermal and optical sighting, low light level, yadda yadda yadda. At the time the sofware was required to be ADA (thanks, DOD).

Just because you put a shiny Linux on something doesn't make it all new and stuff.

Comment How tall is that in 5081 Punched Cards ? (Score 1) 172

At roughly 35 miles high per TB... assuming no compression... My data reaches nicely past the Mesophere.. into Outer SPAAACCEEE ! Of course if those Gazillion punched cards got sucked into the jet stream, the resultant shade would blot out the sun and cause global cooling on a massive scale. Hmm...

Crime

Paul Ceglia Arrested and Charged With Fraud Over Facebook Ownership Claims 109

whoever57 writes "The man who claimed ownership of 50% of Facebook has been arrested and charged with fraud in connection with his claims. The United States attorney in Manhattan said, 'Ceglia's alleged conduct not only constitutes a massive fraud attempt, but also an attempted corruption of our legal system through the manufacture of false evidence.' 'Dressing up a fraud as a lawsuit does not immunize you from prosecution.'"

Comment Re:The 60s and 70s (Score 3, Insightful) 181

Bingo. I can recall being in the research reactor at U Mo in Columbia in the early 1970's. People forget how accessible facilities were before 9/11 . Apparently we're so used to the Police State that we've created that it's pretty much taken for granted.

Which is a great pity. The less accessible cool research is for our children, the less interested our children will be in becoming cool researchers. Big Bang Theory and Mohawk Guy nonwithstanding.

Comment Author never read Cory Doctorow's "Scroogled" (Score 4, Insightful) 376

A quite logical extension of such thinking. When it comes to liberty of thought, the road to Orwell's 1984 is paved with 'good ideas' gone wrong.

In the late 1970's I purchased a copy (paper) of "the Anarchist's Handbook". Why ? I was doing research for a story I was writing for a Creative Writing class in college. I already *knew* how to make explosives.. I was an Engineering student !

Criminalizing people for their knowledge would mean that pretty much every Engineer will end up in jail. Yeah... that will definitely not help a modern world.

Crime

Could Cops Use Google As Pre-Cogs? 376

theodp writes "Remember the Pre-Cogs in Minority Report? Slate's Will Oremus does, and wonders if Google could similarly help the police apprehend criminals based on foreknowledge collected from searches. Oremus writes: 'At around 3:45 a.m. on March 24, someone in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., used a mobile phone to Google "chemicals to passout a person." Then the person searched Ask.com for "making people faint." Then Google again, for "ways to kill people in their sleep," "how to suffocate someone," and "how to poison someone." The phone belonged to 23-year-old Nicole Okrzesik. Later that morning, police allege, she and her boyfriend strangled 19-year-old Juliana Mensch as she slept on the floor of their apartment.' In theory, Oremus muses, Google or Ask.com could have flagged Okrzesik's search queries as suspicious and dispatched cops to the scene before Mensch's assailants had the chance to do her in." I bet you're already thinking of just a few reasons why this might not such a good idea.
Japan

Red Wine and the Secret of Superconductivity 105

cold fjord writes "Red wine is a popular marinade for meat, but it also may become a popular treatment for creating iron-based superconductors as well (Link to academic paper): 'Last year, a group of Japanese physicists grabbed headlines around the world by announcing that they could induce superconductivity in a sample of iron telluride by soaking it in red wine. They found that other alcoholic drinks also worked — white wine, beer, sake and so on — but red wine was by far the best. The question, of course, is why. What is it about red wine that does the trick? Today, these guys provide an answer — at least in part. Keita Deguchi at the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, and a few buddies, say the mystery ingredient is tartaric acid and have the experimental data to show that it plays an important role in the process. ... It turns out the best performer is a wine made from the gamay grape — for the connoisseurs, that's a 2009 Beajoulais from the Paul Beaudet winery in central France.'"
Biotech

Scientists Work Towards Naturally Caffeine-Free Coffee 312

First time accepted submitter eternaldoctorwho writes "Research has been underway to produce a coffee bean plant that naturally has no or little caffeine content. Now, it looks like that might become a reality in the near future: Paulo Mazzafera of the University of Campinas in Brazil has come closer than ever with a strain containing 'only 2% of normal caffeine levels.' Coffee, anyone?"

Comment And now, for a song ! "Sue the Birds !" (Score 1) 730

Sung to the copyrighted tune of "Feed the Birds". Extra points for Julie Andrews class voices.....

(These lyrics are lovingly given away for free as a public service an are in the public domain by me, their author)

Early each day on the steps of the Courthouse
The little old lawyer comes
In his own special way to the people he calls
Come buy my bags full of briefs
Come sue the little birds
Show them your greed
And you be glad if you do
Their young ones are too fat
Their nests all need stripping
All it takes is a lawsuit from you---u

Sue the birds, a million a chirp
million, million, million a chirp

Sue the birds, that's what he cries
while overhead, bird guano fills the skies

All around the courthouse the judges and bailiffs
look down as he sells his wares
although you can't see it
you know they are frowning
each time someone shows his gre--ed

Comment Largest problem is Multiple Docs, one Patient (Score 1) 134

My wife works in Assisted Living. She's had many situations where residents have shown signs of mental or physical degradation because of medication interactions. Not because one doctor prescribed interacting drugs, but because separate doctors prescribed interacting medications. The multi-specialist medical industry assumes that the patient is a medical expert, and can keep track of their medications AND know the interactions. All responsibility is in the hands of the patient. And guess what ? Most of us did NOT get medical training.

So a central clearinghouse system that red flags things isn't a bad idea. Most health insurance companies do it now anyway.. why ? Because they'd rather not pay for medication issues.

There's of course a darker reason... finding people who are 'doctor shopping' to enable their abuse of prescription drugs. The more centralized data is, the easier it is for a well meaning government to abuse that data for some sort of control. So...

do you REALLY want all your medications to become a public record (because we all know governments stink at privacy and security) ?

A final aside... some patients need medications that interact. My wife takes two medications that potentially interact. She's been taking them for years. But suddenly she 'cannot' because there 'is a risk'. Automating this refusal would deny patients who depend on these interactions for survival. Coding medical procedures is always a bad idea, because there has to be an exception process that involves actual human beings.

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