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Comment Re:Reminds me a contact from Google (Score 1) 233

I had the same experience with a recruiter for Google. I mostly have game design and production experience on my resume and since my background is in engineering, those skills listed as "side" skills probably matched his keywords. I didn't realize that at the start of the interview and was wondering why would Google be interested in a game designer. The conversation went on for at least quarter an hour, he was asking me for my experience with different software development platforms and I kept wondering why does that even matter. At a certain point I realized what was going on and said "actually I'm not interested in a software developer position"; his tone immediately changed and he quickly wrapped up the call after that.

I was wondering if my resume looked like an engineer's and went back and looked at it - nope, it didn't, at least not to me. I was getting software developer position offers every once in a while so eventually I added "Please do not contact me for positions in software engineering" to the "contact me for" part on LinkedIn. I still do get these from time to time :)

Submission + - PepsiCo To Ship Soylent Green (lifesitenews.com)

Escogido writes: PepsiCo has been granted a permission to use cells taken from human embryos (kidneys to be exact) as flavor enhancer for their beverage. Some shareholders complained, but SEC ruled it to be "ordinary business operations" and PepsiCo responded by a statement that essentially says "you guys are too dumb to understand the complexity of this issue".

Comment Re:so all of a sudden Google is now infringing (Score 1) 135

OK, that makes sense.. sort of. But still falls somewhat short of explaining what is so different about Facebook. After all, the non-tech-savvy people even don't understand the concept of a database, for many it is just "in the internet" somewhere.

On Facebook I chat with people, I use apps, I post things, I click on videos, I use search (very little, but who knows how many people treat their search essentially as a Bing portal). The only difference between this and Google services is in that activities at Google happen in differently designed pages and at different domain names. If that is the whole difference, then the question essentially becomes what is considered a "different context", or in other words to what extent Google needs to visually integrate its services to make sure people understand it's one and the same thing.

I'm all for giving people more control over what is stored in their profile and how to remove it from there, but it doesn't look like this piece of legislation does a good job at it.. looks more like a "you happen to have money and you just made yourself vulnerable" kind of reaction to me.

Comment so all of a sudden Google is now infringing (Score 5, Insightful) 135

and Facebook is not? What is it that Facebook is doing that Google has not done? Reading the FA didn't reveal anything other than an impression that "will continue their investigations with Google’s representatives" essentially means "will see if this gives us a good chance to treat Google as an ATM".

Medicine

Body 2.0 — Continuous Monitoring of the Human Body 330

Singularity Hub has a story about the development of technology that will some day allow for the constant, real-time monitoring of your medical status, and they take a look at current technological advances to that end. Quoting: "Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status? Years from now people will look back and find it unbelievable that heart attacks, strokes, hormone imbalances, sugar levels, and hundreds of other bodily vital signs and malfunctions were not being continuously anticipated and monitored by medical implants. ... The huge amounts of data that would be accumulated from hundreds of thousands of continuously monitored people would be nothing short of a revolution for medical research and analysis. This data could be harvested to understand the minute by minute changes in body chemistry that occur in response to medication, stress, infection, and so on. As an example, the daily fluctuations in hormone levels of hundreds of thousands of individuals could be tracked and charted 24/7 to determine a baseline from which abnormalities and patterns could be extracted. The possibilities are enormous."
The Courts

Will Obama's DOJ Intervene To Help RIAA? 546

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Cloud, a Pennsylvania case in which the RIAA's statutory damages theory — seeking from 2,200 to 450,000 times the amount of actual damages — is being tested, the US Department of Justice has just filed papers indicating that it is considering intervening in the case to defend the constitutionality of such awards, and requesting an extension of time (PDF) in which to decide whether such intervention 'is appropriate.' This is an early test of whether President Obama will make good on his promises (a) not to allow industry insiders to participate in cases affecting the industry they represented (the 2nd and 3rd highest DOJ officials are RIAA lawyers) and (b) to look out for ordinary citizens rather than big corporations."
Games

Study Finds Gamers Prefer Control, Competence Over Violence 219

Science News reports on a new study which found that the violence in video games was not a significant contributing factor to players' enjoyment. Instead, the feelings of control and competence the games engendered were closely linked to how fun the players found it. Quoting: "... the researchers extensively modified a popular first-person shooter video game called Half-Life 2 to have less gore. Half the people in a group of 36 male and 65 female college students were instructed to dispatch adversaries as the original game intended, 'in a thoroughly bloody manner,' says Ryan. The other half was instructed to tag enemies with a marker. 'Instead of exploding in blood and dismemberment, they floated gently into the air and went back to base,' Ryan describes. An extensive survey of the two groups showed that the exclusion of violence didn't diminish players' enjoyment of the game."
The Courts

You Are Not a Lawyer 693

Paul Ohm is starting a new "very occasional" feature on the Freedom To Tinker blog called You Are Not a Lawyer — "In this series, I will try to disabuse computer scientists and other technically minded people of some commonly held misconceptions about the law (and the legal system)." In the first installment, Ohm walks through the reasons why many techies' faith in the presence of "reasonable doubt" is so misplaced. "When techies think about criminal law, and in particular crimes committed online, they tend to fixate on [the 'beyond a reasonable doubt'] legal standard, dreaming up ways people can use technology to inject doubt into the evidence to avoid being convicted. I can't count how many conversations I have had with techies about things like the 'open wireless access point defense,' the 'trojaned computer defense,' the 'NAT-ted firewall defense,' and the 'dynamic IP address defense.' ... People who place stock in these theories and tools are neglecting an important drawback. There are another set of legal standards — the legal standards governing search and seizure — you should worry about long before you ever get to 'beyond a reasonable doubt.'"
Input Devices

Developing "Eyes-Free" Gadgets and Applications 85

The New York Times is running a story about Google engineer T. V. Raman, who lost his vision at age 14 but didn't let that stand in the way of his interest in technology. In addition to modifying a version of Google's search engine to give preference to pages that were more compliant with accessibility guidelines, Raman is now working on making cell phones easier to use without needing to look at them. "Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman created a dialer that works based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first touches the screen as a 5, the center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he simply slides his finger in its direction — up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so on. If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion." Raman and a co-worker, Charles Chen, are also attempting to extend various phones' ability to read back scanned text to include signs that are anywhere in the phone's field of view.

Comment Re:Don't. (Score 1) 262

Actually, the 'get a vacation' part was a honest piece of advice from me rather than sarcasm. It is highly likely (at least it seems so to me) that the guy is just in need for some change - and vacation, VERY unlike changing one's job, fits the bill perfectly.

Once he have rested and contemplated what his real options are, he will be able to take a much better informed decision, at the very least because his accrued irritation will no longer become a factor.

Also, if he was single, that would have been a different story. But having to endure an unpleasant job is one of the costs of having a wife and kid(s).

Data Storage

Why Not To Shout At Your Disk Array 125

Brendan Gregg of Sun's Fishworks lab has an interesting video demo up at YouTube demonstrating just how bad vibes, if expressed with sufficient volume in front of a rack full of disks, can cause a spike in disk latency. White noise, evidently, doesn't do them much harm. (Maybe they just feel awkward to get yelled at on camera.)
Earth

Leap Second To Be Added Dec 31, 2008 255

ammorris writes "Don't be the laughingstock of your friends when you shout 'Happy New Years' a second too early ... The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has announced that a leap second will be added on December 31, 2008 at 23h 59m 60s, meaning that this year will be exactly one second longer. The last leap second occurred Dec 31, 2005; they are added due to fluctuations in the rotational speed of the earth. You can read all about leap seconds on Wikipedia."

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