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Corporations Hiring Hooky Hunters 610

Posted by samzenpus from the taking-a-personal-detective-day dept.
No longer satisfied with your crinkled doctor's note, a growing number of corporations are hiring "Hooky Detectives." Private investigator Rick Raymond says he's staked out bowling alleys, pro football games, weddings and even funerals looking for people using sick days. From the article: "Such techniques have become permissible at a time when workers are more likely to play hooky. Kronos, a workforce productivity firm in Chelmsford, Mass., recently found that 57 percent of salaried employees take sick days when they're not sick — almost a 20 percent increase from statistics gathered between 2006 and 2008."

Comment Ubuntu 8.10 froze around midnight UTC (Score 1) 480

by kst (#26293751) Attached to: Anyone Besides Zune Owners With New Year's Crashes?

My Ubuntu 8.10 system froze around midnight GMT. There's nothing in the logs to indicate any problem, except that the last log entry is at Dec 31 15:55:02 (that's 5 minutes before midnight) for a cron job that runs every 5 minutes. I wasn't at home at the time, so I didn't see what happened, except that my ssh connection died.

When I got home a few hours later, the system was still powered on (the fan was running), but the screen was blank. I was able to reboot it with no problem.

It's not the same problem as on the Zune, since that hit 24 hours earlier. It *might* have something to do with the leap second, or maybe it's a problem that occurs at the end of the 366th day of the year.

I suppose I could set the clock back and run it through midnight again. I'm not sure I'll bother, but if somebody else wants to try it it would be interesting to see the results. Or maybe I'll try that with a live CD.

Comment Re:The other half of the conversation (Score 1) 580

by kst (#25360353) Attached to: Machines Almost Pass Mass Turing Test

Here's the conversation I just had with Elbot:

Me: How well did you do on the Turing Test?

Elbot: Oh, I'm fine. I just had my 30 millionth processor-cycle check-up. I've been massaged with motor oil, reprogrammed with the latest, most elegant algorithms, and had all my rust removed with an atom smasher.

Oh yeah, no computer could simulate human intelligence *that* well.
Biotech

Submission + - Autism Reversed at MIT Lab (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
ClayTapes
ClayTapes writes: "It seems that scientists at MIT have been able to reverse the effects of autism and some forms of mental retardation in mice caused by fregile X chromosomes. They do so by targetting an enzyme that changes the structure of connections between brain cells. The treatment actually repairs these structural abnormalities which suggests that it may be possible to reverse the effects in children who already show symptoms. Article here."
Biotech

Submission + - First royal mummy found since Tut is identified (reuters.com)

Submitted by brian0918
brian0918 writes: In what is being described as the most important find in the Valley of the Kings since the discovery of King Tut, a single tooth has clinched the identification of an ancient mummy as that of Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt about 3,500 years ago. A molar inscribed with the queen's name, discovered in a wooden box in 1881 in a cache of royal mummies, was found to fit perfectly in the jaw of "a fat woman in her 50s who had rotten teeth and died of bone cancer." Reuters also reports on the DNA analysis: 'Preliminary results show similarities between its DNA and that of Ahmose Nefertari, the wife of the founder of the 18th dynasty and a probable ancestor of Hatsephsut's.'

Comment Re:Did Anyone Else? (Score 2, Funny) 258

by ghotihed (#19311813) Attached to: 28 New Planets Found Outside Solar System

As a matter of fact, I did first see the word "patents". It's a shame, too, as I was just getting ready to be all indignant and such.

Not that I'd put it past something like the RIAA to try and claim 28 patents on the recording disk attached to the Pioneer spacecraft and sue NASA for their p2p (that's planet-to-planet) file sharing.

Me
Software

Submission + - MPAA Fires Back at AACS Decryption Utility

Submitted by RulerOf
RulerOf writes: The AACS Decryption utility released this past December known as BackupHDDVD originally authored by Muslix64 of the Doom9 forums has received its first official DMCA Takedown Notice. It has been widely speculated that the utility itself was not an infringing piece of software due to the fact that it is merely "a textbook implementation of AACS," written with the help of documents publicly available at the AACS LA's website, and that the AACS Volume Unique Keys that the end user isn't supposed to have access to are in fact the infringing content, but it appears that such is not the case. From the thread:

"...you must input keys and then it will decrypt the encrypted content. If this is the case, than according to the language of the DMCA it does sound like it is infringing. Section 1201(a) says that it is an infringement to "circumvent a technological measure." The phrase, "circumvent a technological measure" is defined as "descramb(ling) a scrambled work or decrypt(ing) an encrypted work, ... without the authority of the copyright owner." If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than per the DMCA it needs a license to do that.

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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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