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Comment Re:Creepy, but it used to be more common (Score 3, Insightful) 354

That isn't what they want to do here. What they want to do is become the prime retailer for a set of products that people start buying at certain stages in their lives. Like how Gillette will send out free razors to people when the turn 18 to try and make them Gillette consumers for their life's supply of shaving products. Target here is trying to predict people who are pregnant and have reached the stage where they are ready to buy the associated baby products and providing incentives for these people to buy the products at Target. Then, the customers will be predisposed to continue buying these products at Target.

They aren't trying to convince them to buy products they don't need, they are trying to convince them to buy a new range of products that they will need or want to buy from a specific retailer.

Comment What does NASA have to do with this though? (Score 1) 556

The worst thing about this summary is that it attempts to link Rossi to the far more legitimate research being conducted by NASA. The linked NASA materials make no reference to Rossi from what I can find. But it is this repeated implied associations that Rossi relies on to get people to buy in on what only screams snakeoil.

Robotics

Lego NXT Bot Beats Rubik's Cube Record 50

kkleiner writes "The current official human record for the Rubik's cube 3×3×3 puzzle is just 5.66 seconds. Now a robot called CubeStormer II did it in just 5.35 seconds. CubeStormer II is controlled by four Lego NXT 'bricks' that communicate via Bluetooth with a Samsung Galaxy SII smart phone. A special app on the phone takes a picture of the cube, solves the puzzle virtually, and then relays the solution to the Lego robot. From click to finish the whole process takes just seconds."

Comment BSNES? Well there's your problem. (Score 1) 229

BSNES would make a supercomputer beg for mercy. The author of the program even wrote an article entitled, "Why Perfect Hardware SNES Emulation Requires a 3GHz CPU." Just use SNES9X as it is pretty efficient and it doesn't suffer from some of the... errors... that the BSNES author harps on again and again in his defense of BSNES.

http://www.tested.com/news/why-perfect-hardware-snes-emulation-requires-a-3ghz-cpu/2712/

Comment Re:And the Cost Reflects This (Score 1) 674

I don't know about you, but I don't buy my speaker equipment using gold, I use USD (when in the proper country). If we look at the change in the strength of the dollar due to inflation, the price in 2011 is only 3.5 times the 1978 price. ($4571.35). So it's actually cheaper than the current flagship model. Seriously, given that the rate of inflation is usually around 4% on average, do you really think that after 33 years the dollar would drop to a seventh of its value?

http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm

Not that I totally trust the above but if we allow 4% constant inflation it's not too far off.

Biotech

Scientists Derive Gelatin From Human Tissue 123

An anonymous reader writes "Conventional gelatin is made from collagen inside animals' skin and bones, however a group of researchers has managed to replace that animal base with a human one. The process involves taking human gelatin genes and inserting them into a strain of yeast, which can be cultivated to grow gelatin with controllable features. Jinchun Chen, the leader of the study, and his colleagues believe they can scale this process up to produce large amounts of human-based gelatin for medical uses. The research appears in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry."

Comment Re:Yea (Score 2) 320

Commies, or Communists, come in many dastardly forms. They include:

1. Pinko.
2. Bolshevik.
3. Russian.
4. Chinese.
5. Cuban.
6. Canadian.
7. European.
8. Anyone of differing opinion.

God help us if anyone of the above manage to infiltrate the US and spread their Communist creed.

Comment Ah yes, Hong Kong real estate. (Score 1) 178

Ugggg... this just drives home the latest statistic that I heard. The housing prices here in Hong Kong have increased 70% in the last two years. Unfortunately these kinds of modifications and specialized furniture usually cost an arm and a leg. Well, the most economical space saving design I've done is to import a Kindle. Lord knows I can't afford the give up anymore space to books.

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