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Comment Re:Yeah...but (Score 1) 1303

by Mr.No (#38788737) Attached to: How the US Lost Out On iPhone Work
Thank you for writing the same thing I wanted to write but you beat me to it. Waking up people from dormitories to do some work sounds slavery to me and if companies consider this as a plus point for flexibility then I'm afraid we're going back hundreds of years.

Comment Re:Overpopulation is not a problem (Score 1) 473

by Mr.No (#37830642) Attached to: Earth Officially Home To 7 Billion Humans

You should.

Social Security (and the European equivalents) are based on the assumption that we have a lot of young workers for every elderly person so supported.

Population decline due to lower birthrates (which is what we expect to be seeing later this century) rather turns that on its head, as the number of new workers to support the elderly drops faster than the elderly do.

Isn't that called a Madoff effect i.e. you borrow more money to pay pack a loan. We're already too many on this planet, stop this stupidity about having more young workers to support old people when countries like Spain have 30% of youngsters below 30 without work.

Submission + - Sweden launches open aid with API (regeringen.se)

Submitted by
Karsten Deppert
Karsten Deppert writes: "The Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has launched openaid.se in order to promote more transparency in its aid and development fundings. Swedens aid and development budget is 30 billion kronors (4.8 billion USD) and the goal is to give a transparent view of where these money flows. From the article: "The step is being taken to better adapt development cooperation to todays reality and the opportunities created by globalisation and technological development. The goal is to achieve as effective poverty reduction as possible. To achieve this goal, development cooperation must be opened up to transparency and ideas from others. Every aspect of "Open Aid" will be underpinned by transparency, participation and cooperation."
A part of the openaid.se project is an API for easy access to all the information."
Novell

Submission + - LSE price errors ‘emerged at Linux launch' (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by DMandPenfold
DMandPenfold writes: Within the first 20 seconds of the London Stock Exchange’s new matching engine going live on Monday, price data vendors began displaying incorrect prices, blank prices and wrong trading volumes, according to Computerworld UK sources.

Thomson Reuters, Interactive Data and Netbuilder are among the largest data vendors, providing share prices to traders, that have been displaying pricing problems on some stocks throughout the week. Even the LSE’s own data vendor, ProQuote, experienced problems.

Concerns are being raised that there could be mistakenly setup connections or incorrect software interfaces at some of the large data vendors. Alternatively, there may be a data caching issue at the LSE that means data going out is not properly synchronised between different systems.
Image

Scientists Find Tears Are the Anti-Viagra 207

Posted by samzenpus from the blood-hound-gang-is-wrong dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The male test subjects didn't know what they were smelling, they were just given little vials of clear liquid and told to sniff. But when those vials contained a woman's tears (collected while she watched a sad movie), the men rated pictures of women's faces as less sexually attractive, and their saliva contained less testosterone. Is this proof that humans make and respond to pheromones? The researcher behind the study doesn't use that controversial word, but he says his findings do prove that tears contain meaningful chemical messages."
Businesses

When Smart People Make Bad Employees 491

Posted by samzenpus from the boss's-favorite dept.
theodp writes "Writing for Forbes, CS-grad-turned-big-time-VC Ben Horowitz gives three examples of how the smartest people in a company can also be the worst employees: 1. The Heretic, who convincingly builds a case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons; 2. The Flake, who is brilliant but totally unreliable; 3. The Jerk, who is so belligerent in his communication style that people just stop talking when he is in the room. So, can an employee who fits one of these poisonous descriptions, but nonetheless can make a massive positive contribution to a company, ever be tolerated? Quoting John Madden's take on Terrell Owens, Horowitz gives a cautious yes: 'If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you'll be so late that you'll miss the game, so you can't do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you'll have a player that's so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.' Ever work with a person who's so good that he/she gets his/her own set of rules? Ever been that person yourself?"
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus from the less-math-more-social-science dept.
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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