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Biotech

Citizen Scientists Develop Eye Drops That Provide Night Vision 81

rtoz writes: A group of scientists in California have successfully created eye drops that temporarily enable night vision. They use mixture of insulin and a chemical known as Chlorin e6 (Ce6) to enable the user to view objects clearly in darkness up to 50 meters away. Ce6 is found in some deep-sea fish and often used to treat night blindness. The solution starts to work within an hour of being applied to the user's eyes, and lasts for several hours afterward. The test subject's eyesight returned to normal the next day. The organization Science for the Masses has released a paper detailing the experiment on their website.

Comment Re:Legal (Score 2) 181

Is anything legal in California these days?

Medical marijuana, gay marriage, conceal/carry.

Say you're not really pissed that fucking flamethrowers aren't legal there, are you? I don't know if you've gotten a look at your fellow man in the United States lately, but are these really people you want to be able to have flamethrowers? Geez, louise, there can't be more than maybe 1 in 100 that I think should be allowed to drive a car. Maybe 1 in 10 should be allowed to have shoelaces for chrissake.

Although I'm sure we can find someone reading this that believes "More flamethrowers = Less crime".

Comment Re:Bad name (Score 1) 181

The Geneva convention does not apply. Neither am I going to war, nor are any of the affected parties non-combatants. I do not plan to use it on POWs or on shipwrecked people.

Not to mention that I never signed it and I, as a person, cannot become a signing party considering that only nations can.

Comment Re:N4N? (Score 2, Troll) 365

tech how?

It's not, but Friday night is #GamerGate and MRAs night on Slashdot, when 8chan empties out and all the manbabies meet here to cry about how the feminazis are taking away their games and comics and action figures.

Look back a few months. It happens every Friday. There is a story about gender or sexual orientation or something that can be construed as violating the natural order of the primacy of white men. Then, the tears start to flow and it all ends in the gators and the MRAs in one big group hug.

It's harmless, really. If it keeps them off the streets, I'm all for them having their own neckbeard hugbox.

Comment Re:What, no link to a hoax news site in there? (Score 1) 737

Damned near every terrorist attack in the US has been end-times or anti-government christian cultists of one sort or another. Or racist cults. Or anti-tax cults. And we don't have anyone assigned to keep track of them. I blame Obama for caving in to the Republicans on this one. Doctor killers, Dominionists, Sovereign Citizens, this-land-is-ours loonies pointing guns at sherriffs from high ground WHILE ON LIVE ON CAMERA, and nothing happens and no one gets arrested, because everyone is afraid of them and their supporters. We don't even report on them.

But if a guy with a beard does it, on the news forever. Hell, the HS guys claiming someone was GOING TO join ISIS because reasons is national news for days. Every damned day it seems.

Reposted because downvoted by Fox News enthusiasts. And, I was right again, Cudahy.

Comment Re:Disincentivized (Score 1) 407

I would include all of those, except UTA, in the "and so on".

It's a bit disingenuous to list out the Ivys while only implying the public schools, considering that the point you were trying to make was that going to a good CS school is expensive and the schools you selectively omitted disprove it.

Georgia Tech has 8 tracks. Pretty much the only hirable ones are the "Devices" and "Systems & Architecture" track. If you too CS4210 and CS4220 as electives on the "Theory" track, you might also do OK. I typically don't mention it because of the low percentage of people who opt for these tracks, compared to the other tracks at this school, so you have to be picky.

I went to Georgia Tech just long enough ago that my degree plan predated the "threads" curriculum. However, I think you're being excessively narrow in your opinion of which ones are worthwhile. Specifically, 5 of the 8 threads (all except "People," "Media," and "Intelligence" require CS2200, which is a computer architecture course that uses C for the assignments and teaches not only memory management, but threaded programming too. "Intelligence" requires CS2110, which sounds from the course catalog description like it's a less-rigorous version of the same. "Media" requires CS 2261, which is also a low-level systems programming course, but is more focused on graphics and sound.

Most of those threads also have 3000- or 4000-level classes (other than 4210 and 4220) that reinforce low-level programming skills: CS3451 (Computer Graphics) uses C and OpenGL, many of the "Modeling and Simulation" classes (e.g. CS4225) surely focus on low-level stuff since that thread is really about high-performance computing, "Information-internetworks" people are probably going to take either CS4420 (database implementation) or CS4251 (computer networking 2) which are very likely low-level, and I'm sure almost everybody in the "Intelligence" thread is going to take some kind of robotics or computer vision class.

In fact, the only "thread" where people could escape without learning C is the "People" thread, and considering that you have to complete two threads to get a degree, you're going to have to learn C to graduate no matter what you do.

I'm not saying that you should hire somebody who picked the "Intelligence" and "People" threads and took the least-rigorous classes possible (and thus got a glorified psychology degree) to do embedded device programming, but I am saying that even that guy should be competent enough to understand pointers and therefore be employable by the vast majority of Silicon Valley companies that aren't actually writing OS kernel or firmware-level code.

Comment Re:Define "Qualified" (Score 1) 407

I'm 30 and also consider myself to be among the oldest "millennials." I could have had a 5-digit UID, but lurked for a few years before joining.

(Back then, I was skeptical about joining web forums for some of the same reasons people don't like Facebook now. <hipster>I was a privacy nut before it was cool</hipster>)

Comment Re:Disincentivized (Score 1) 407

Sadly, You can no longer take a C++ class at most universities in the United States. You can take a "Databases using C++", and be expected to learn C++ on your own, but of course, that's much more likely to be "Databases using Java" these days.

If you're trying to learn pointers and memory management in a databases class, you're doing it wrong. An operating systems class is the right place to cover that topic.

Currently, ABET accreditation is "Outcome Based", a criterion which has been abandoned as hopelessly flawed in primary education for both math and reading:

General Criterion 3. Student Outcomes" ...

No where does it require proficiency in a programming language or other language, and in fact, it goes so far as to limit the requirement to reading about them - "exposure" - in section II:

Program Criteria for Computer Science and Simililarly Named Computing Programs ...
Student Outcomes ...
Curriculum

Students must have the following amounts of course work or equivalent educational experience:

a. Computer science: One and one-third years that must include: ...
2. An exposure to a variety of programming languages and systems. [CS]

WTF? The very next requirement after your quote says "3. Proficiency in at least one higher-level language. [CS] ."

The bad news is that there's only a handful of places that have these programs, such as Brown, Rice, Stanford, MIT, CMU, and so on.

The good news is that if you attend one of these handful of universities, AND you opt into the degree program that actually forces you to learn to use the tools, and use a computer as a tool, in more than a theoretical, abstract way, AND you do well, you are practically guaranteed a job at a top tier company, like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.. The bad news is that these places tend to be a heck of a lot more expensive than a community college.

Bullshit. While there are some expensive good CS undergrad programs, there are also good (relatively) cheap ones at public state universities such as University of California - Berkeley, University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor and University of Texas - Austin (and those are just schools in the top 10 -- ranked above the Brown and Rice you mentioned!).

Comment Re: finger pointing (Score 1) 407

Ridiculous. Actually, part of the problem is that due to wealth transfers (Welfare and tax credits), government handouts to unions (especially federal union jobs), etc, have made it so that engineering take home pay gets held down through taxes, and some other jobs get paid more than they should.

Yes, I agree that wealth transfers (corporate tax credits, reducing the highest marginal tax rate from 84% (in 1950) to 40% (today), having a very low capital gains tax rate) have made it so that all salaried job take home pay gets held down through taxes, while owners make much more profit than they should.

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