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Comment Re:...the dock. (Score 2) 862

Actually I find spotlight barely usable. Granted, I'm on an older Apple machine, but for me Quicksilver is the way to go hands down. Personally, I wish that Apple got rid of spotlight years ago, purchased Quicksilver, and integrated it into their base operating system. Cmd+space or ctrl+space for quick launch of applications, folders, contacts, sending email, doing arithmetic, looking up words, sending an instant message, running an applescript, and practically anything else that you would want to do on your system.

I wouldn't say the dock is useless, but over the past six years I've probably used it for less than 1% of the applications that I launch.

Comment Re:Link (Score 1) 199

By the way -- I find the title of this article somewhat misleading: he isn't cybernetic. Cybernetics implies some sort of electronic or powered enhancement; Pistorius's blades are purely mechanical.

Not even that. You can have electronic/powered mechanical systems without cybernetics. Cybernetic implies some sort of feedback system.

It seems that in the vernacular "cybernetic" has become somewhat synonymous with "cyborg" or "android".

Comment Re:Photos not allowed during police actions, citiz (Score 1) 268

I can testify that planned obsolescence of cameras is already happening. I have a working digital camera from about 1998/1999 era. ... I ended up having to purchase a 3rd party card reader to read the old card that it uses in order to pull pictures off of it.

Not supporting a device after 12-13 years isn't "planned obsolescence" it's regular obsolescence. There's no way that Microsoft/device manufacturers could find the time or money to support every legacy item. It just isn't feasible. Plus, if you could solve your problem with a card reader there really isn't much reason to worry. It's a pretty common way to access images from a camera.

Education

Ask Slashdot: Good Homeschool Curriculum For CS?? 364

dingo_kinznerhook writes "I grew up in a homeschooling family, and was homeschooled through high school. ( I went on to get a B.S. and M.S. in computer science; my mom has programming experience and holds bachelor's degrees in physics and math — she's pretty qualified to teach.) Mom is still homeschooling my younger brother and sister and is looking for a good computer science curriculum that covers word processing, spreadsheets, databases, intro to programming, intro to operating systems, etc. Does the Slashdot readership know of a high school computer science curriculum suitable for homeschooling that covers these topics?"

Comment Re:And the lawyers? (Score 1) 813

Should anything? The article has several mentions of his payment from lawyers, but does not indicate that they coerced him into falsifying data (I'm not sure about the guidelines enforced for lawyers, but I would imagine that would constitute some sort of ethical violation). People are paid to do research all the time by government, companies, non-profits, etc.

Paperwork I've done in the past for research asks you to clearly list any payment you receive that may be in conflict of interest with your work. Wakefield didn't even disclose this conflict to his co-authors. The article seems to indict Wakefield more than anyone else.
Space

Supermassive Black Hole Is Thrown Out of Galaxy 167

DarkKnightRadick writes "An undergrad student at the University of Utrecht, Marianne Heida, has found evidence of a supermassive black hole being tossed out of its galaxy. According to the article, the black hole — which has a mass equivalent to one billion suns — is possibly the culmination of two galaxies merging (or colliding, depending on how you like to look at it) and their black holes merging, creating one supermassive beast. The black hole was found using the Chandra Source Catalog (from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The direction of the expulsion is also possibly indicative of the direction of rotation of the two black holes as they circled each other before merging."

Comment Re:personally (Score 1) 1721

This is really nothing new. The prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, even literature are often given long after a discovery has been made (or late in one's career in the case of literature). Those awards are generally given for things that have stood the test of time.

The peace prize, on the other hand, requires no such scrutiny. Mahatma Gandhi never actually won a prize despite multiple nominations, yet Obama wins despite the fact that his nomination occurred before he even had time to do anything? There is something fundamentally wrong with this picture. Then again I suppose that just makes me a terrorist sympathizer, and therefore unable to form a completely impartial view on the matter.
Biotech

Startup Offers Pre-Built Biological Parts 71

TechReviewAl writes "A new startup called Ginkgo BioWorks hopes to make synthetic-biology simpler than ever by assembling biological parts, such as strings of specific genes, for industry and academic scientists. While companies already exist to synthesize pieces of DNA, Ginkgo assembles synthesized pieces of DNA to create functional genetic pathways. (Assembling specific genes into long pieces of DNA is much cheaper than synthesizing that long piece from scratch.) Company cofounder Tom Knight, also a research scientist at MIT, says: 'I'm interested in transitioning biology from being sort of a craft, where every time you do something it's done slightly differently, often in ad hoc ways, to an engineering discipline with standardized methods of arranging information and standardized sets of parts that you can assemble to do things.'"

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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