Comment Re:Failed state policies (Score 1) 435
Anyway, they've gotten plenty of money from Russia and Venezuela, so it's kind of hard to give them a fair judgement.
Comment Re:It's time (Score 2) 222
No offense to AOL, I don't even know that they do anymore I just know public perception
You don't know, but unless you have ad-block you probably have some of their cookies in your browser.
AOL had a ton of cash (still gets something like $50 million from dialup) after people switched to broadband, so the turned into a kind of venture capital, and bought a bunch of companies. Now they own leading 'web properties,' like Huffington Post and Tech Crunch.
AOL is producing a lot of 'high quality' content and can monetize it, whereas Yahoo is lacking in content, but has plenty of users. That is the thinking behind the activist investors who want to join the two together.
Other than a few activist investors, no one in either company wants to join together, as far as I can tell. The CEO of AOL says, "We've already been through one really bad merger, we don't want to do it again."
Comment Re:How long things take.. (Score 3, Interesting) 222
The CEO of a multi billion dollar company has lots of responsibilities, writing production code is NOT one of them.
And that is why I hope never to be CEO.
Submission + - Lockheed Martin's 100 MW Compact Fusion Nuclear Reactor (globalspec.com)
Roger Pink writes: When I first heard the announcement regarding Lockheed Martin's plan to produce a compact fusion reactor (CFR) in five years, I was pretty skeptical. Then a lot of skeptical articles were written and I felt my first instinct was validated. The only problem is I think I was wrong. Having researched this story for an article I've written, I'm pretty much convinced this is actually happening.
This isn't cold fusion. Back in the late eighties a couple chemists thought they had fusion and rushed to publish out of fear of having the credit stolen. It was a complete failure of the scientific process and it set fusion back two decades. This time is different. The project leader has over a decade of experience studying and modeling fusion. The institution has a history of novel technologies and absolutely no reason to risk their credibility.
In short, it really seams like it's more likely there will be a CFR in the next ten years then not. Here's an article for a little background why:
http://insights.globalspec.com...
This isn't cold fusion. Back in the late eighties a couple chemists thought they had fusion and rushed to publish out of fear of having the credit stolen. It was a complete failure of the scientific process and it set fusion back two decades. This time is different. The project leader has over a decade of experience studying and modeling fusion. The institution has a history of novel technologies and absolutely no reason to risk their credibility.
In short, it really seams like it's more likely there will be a CFR in the next ten years then not. Here's an article for a little background why:
http://insights.globalspec.com...
Comment Re:40 is an artificial boundary (Score 1) 286
Good job.
Comment Re:Clapper (Score 1) 232
Devices should complement each other. Besides, have you ever wished you had your phone so you could call your phone because you can't find your phone? :-)
Journal Journal: Looks like we're getting closer to the truth 4
Two interesting submissions from the firehose:
Comment Re:Failed state policies (Score 1) 435
So you are saying if the communist country had access to a free market and the banking system, they would do better?
Comment Looks like more lies ... (Score 1) 1
Two interesting submissions from the firehose:
Woman game developer may have never "fled her home"
Previously unknown indie game developer Brianna Wu made international news, including on the green, after claiming on October 11 that threats from the Gamergate movement had forced her to flee her home. As one report briefly mentioned, at that time Wu was on a planned trip to New York where she was scheduled to speak at Comic-Con. Later news interviews placed Wu at her home as they reported that she had fled from it, raising the question of whether she had ever been forced to flee her home at all.
As has come to be usual for any news on this subject, Medium administrators deleted an article that had provided additional evidence that Wu's secret media interview location was in fact her own home from which she had never fled."
and FBI confirms open investigation into Gamergate
v3rgEz (125380) writes
"In a terse form letter responding to a FOIA request, the FBI has confirmed it has an open investigation into Gamergate, the loose but controversial coalition of gamers calling for ethics in gaming journalism — even as some members have harassed and sent death threats to female gaming developers and critics"
Analysis of photos on reddit (scroll partway down) calling her claim to be in hiding false.
Here's something important I just found out.
DougieFFC in the comments below you noted how she was in the New York Comic Con the very weekend she was supposedly driven home. So I just looked it up, and I may have found more proof. So she attended NYCC on October 12, the same weekend the claimed to have been driven from her home:
https://archive.today/PRHu2
https://archive.today/SytE8
Now here's the interesting bit: she was scheduled to attend that NYCC panel since September 16:
In other words, she was "driven from her home" in the exact same weekend she already had scheduled to be out of town for months beforehand. And as the pictures show, she was back home on October 13, the very next day after the NYCC panel she attended.
Trust but verify and all, but we may have stumbled on a smoking gun, thanks to DougieFFC's comment.
I had always maintained that Wu was misleading people into believing that she was "forced from her home", that the "internet death threats" were not to be taken seriously, and that the police did NOT tell her to go into hiding. There's also the pics that show she was back home when she did the interview claiming to be on the run and not knowing when she'd be returning. So obviously she didn't take the threats seriously either - it was all hype. Whether she didn't take them seriously because she was the source of them is now a fair question.
Why? My guess is she wanted to get into the public speaking gig scene, since she wasn't exactly making a hit as a game developer. Of course, after the HuffPost interview where she claimed to have both studied law and to have a background as a journalist, but got so many things wrong, it became painfully obvious that wasn't going to happen.
Submission + - Uber agrees to temporarily suspend service in Portland (cnn.com) 1
mpicpp writes: Uber is standing down for the next three months in Portland, just one of the cities where it has run into trouble.
The company said it would stop picking up customers there for three months after the city sued, asking a judge to order Uber to stop operating until it is in compliance with safety, health and consumer protection rules.
But Uber fully expects to be back. In fact, this could be good news for Uber fans in the long-run.
The city has agreed to update its laws, creating a new regulatory framework for companies like Uber that tend to fall somewhere between a taxi and a ridesharing service. People use it by requesting a driver with a smartphone app.
Uber, which operates in 60 cities across 21 countries, has run into problems because its drivers do not always meet the city's regulations for taxi and car services.
Last week, for example, a judge in Spain temporarily blocked Uber because the Madrid taxi service said it was unfair to competition and not properly licensed.
The company said it would stop picking up customers there for three months after the city sued, asking a judge to order Uber to stop operating until it is in compliance with safety, health and consumer protection rules.
But Uber fully expects to be back. In fact, this could be good news for Uber fans in the long-run.
The city has agreed to update its laws, creating a new regulatory framework for companies like Uber that tend to fall somewhere between a taxi and a ridesharing service. People use it by requesting a driver with a smartphone app.
Uber, which operates in 60 cities across 21 countries, has run into problems because its drivers do not always meet the city's regulations for taxi and car services.
Last week, for example, a judge in Spain temporarily blocked Uber because the Madrid taxi service said it was unfair to competition and not properly licensed.
Submission + - Scientists Discover That Exercise Changes Your DNA
HughPickens.com writes: The human genome is astonishingly complex and dynamic, with genes constantly turning on or off, depending on what biochemical signals they receive from the body. Scientists have known that certain genes become active or quieter as a result of exercise but they hadn’t understood how those genes knew how to respond to exercise. Now the NYT reports that scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have completed a study where they recruited 23 young and healthy men and women, brought them to the lab for a series of physical performance and medical tests, including a muscle biopsy, and then asked them to exercise half of their lower bodies for three months. The volunteers pedaled one-legged at a moderate pace for 45 minutes, four times per week for three months. Then the scientists repeated the muscle biopsies and other tests with each volunteer. Not surprisingly, the volunteers’ exercised leg was more powerful now than the other, showing that the exercise had resulted in physical improvements. But there were also changes within the exercised muscle cells’ DNA. Using technology that analyses 480,000 positions throughout the genome, they could see that new methylation patterns had taken place in 7,000 genes (an individual has 20–25,000 genes).
In a process known as DNA methylation, clusters of atoms, called methyl groups, attach to the outside of a gene like microscopic mollusks and make the gene more or less able to receive and respond to biochemical signals from the body. In the exercised portions of the bodies, many of the methylation changes were on portions of the genome known as enhancers that can amplify the expression of proteins by genes. And gene expression was noticeably increased or changed in thousands of the muscle-cell genes that the researchers studied. Most of the genes in question are known to play a role in energy metabolism, insulin response and inflammation within muscles. In other words, they affect how healthy and fit our muscles — and bodies — become. Many mysteries still remain but the message of the study is unambiguous. “Through endurance training — a lifestyle change that is easily available for most people and doesn’t cost much money,” says Sara Lindholm, “we can induce changes that affect how we use our genes and, through that, get healthier and more functional muscles that ultimately improve our quality of life.”
In a process known as DNA methylation, clusters of atoms, called methyl groups, attach to the outside of a gene like microscopic mollusks and make the gene more or less able to receive and respond to biochemical signals from the body. In the exercised portions of the bodies, many of the methylation changes were on portions of the genome known as enhancers that can amplify the expression of proteins by genes. And gene expression was noticeably increased or changed in thousands of the muscle-cell genes that the researchers studied. Most of the genes in question are known to play a role in energy metabolism, insulin response and inflammation within muscles. In other words, they affect how healthy and fit our muscles — and bodies — become. Many mysteries still remain but the message of the study is unambiguous. “Through endurance training — a lifestyle change that is easily available for most people and doesn’t cost much money,” says Sara Lindholm, “we can induce changes that affect how we use our genes and, through that, get healthier and more functional muscles that ultimately improve our quality of life.”
Submission + - Space X - Going where no one has gone before (planetary.org)
ColdWetDog writes: This Friday, SpaceX will attempt what no agency or company has done before: land a used rocket stage on a floating ocean platform. The effort will be made during the private spaceflight company's fifth paid cargo run to the International Space Station. Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 40 is scheduled for 1:22 p.m. EST (18:22 UTC).
Comment Re:Neville Chamberlin was not available for commen (Score 2) 230
Germany was spending far more on their military during that time than Britain was. If Britain and France had stepped in earlier, Germany would have been totally unprepared and the war would have ended quickly. Not to mention all of the horrors of the Holocaust that would have been prevented.
If Britain and France had managed to delay the war to "prepare" even more, say a few years, the Luftwaffe would have been dominated by jets, German ballistic missiles would have been longer range and more precise, and they might even have become a nuclear power. I really don't think this is the analogy you're looking for.
Comment Re:I blame Microsoft (Score 1) 148
This is like the big flamewar back from the days of VMS vs Unix.
As for me, I'm happy that we've moved beyond 8+3.
As for me, I'm happy that we've moved beyond 8+3.
Comment Re:I blame Microsoft (Score 4, Insightful) 148
Yeah, what's next? Case-insensitive email addresses and domain names?
Remember, the whole reason files have names and not sequences of random hex is for human legibility. For most applications, case sensitivity does not increase legibility.
