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Comment: Don't mind Opendemocracy (Score 1) 727

by Ateocinico (#38577578) Attached to: Are Engineers Natural Libertarians Or Technocrats?

This is not their first article accusing engineers of having an authoritarian mind set. They have a typical humanistic hatred for people in the areas of science and technology, for they feel that engineers and scientists limit the possibilities of imposing an utopian system on society. Also in the past they used to support Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. That gives you an idea of what means libertarian to Opendemocracy. And worst of all, their jargon is typically of a humanities faculties (puck).

Comment: Re:Is this a Godwin-invoking comment? (Score 1) 764

by Ateocinico (#33545290) Attached to: German Military Braces For Peak Oil

World War II was fought because of natural resources.
Japan made war against the USA, England and the Netherlands because
of a comodities embargo.
Germany expanded over Europe because of the "Lebensraum" concept.
In both cases, small countries who depended on imported minerals for
their industrial development, tried to attain the control over those resources
by war.
And it goes far far back to the times of Sargon of Akkad (2334 BC - 2279 BC)

Image

The Real 'Stuff White People Like' 286

Posted by samzenpus
from the taking-a-closer-look dept.
Here's an interesting and funny look at 526,000 OkCupid users, divided into groups by race and gender and all the the things each groups says it likes or is interested in. While it is far from being definitive, the groupings give a glimpse of what makes each culture unique. According to the results, white men like nothing better than Tom Clancy, Van Halen, and golfing.
Image

Russians Urged To Drink and Smoke More 1

Posted by samzenpus
from the a-plan-you-can-get-behind dept.
Alexei Kudrin, Russia's finance minister, has a plan to drink and smoke his country out of its financial woes. He has urged his countrymen to drink and smoke more to help boost government revenues. "If you smoke a pack of cigarettes, that means you are giving more to help solve social problems. People should understand: Those who drink, those who smoke are doing more to help the state," he said.
Businesses

HP Backs Memristor Mass Production 116

Posted by Soulskill
from the can't-wait-for-the-next-round-of-patent-battles dept.
neo12 writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is teaming with Hynix Semiconductor, the world's second-largest producer of memory chips, to mass produce memristors for the first time. Quoting the BBC: "HP says the first memristors should be widely available in about three years. The devices started as a theoretical prediction in 1971 but HP's demonstration and publication of a real working device has put them on a possible roadmap to replace memory chips or even hard drives. ... Steve Furber, professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, explained that the potential benefits lie in the fact that memristors are 'much simpler in principle than transistors. Because they are formed as a film between two wires, they don't have to be implanted into the silicon surface — as do transistors, which form the storage locations in Flash — so they could be built in layers in 3D,' he told BBC News. 'Of course, the devil is in the detail, and I don't think the manufacturing challenges have been fully exposed yet.'"
Science

Charles Darwin's Best-Kept Secret 254

Posted by samzenpus
from the garden-of-darwin dept.
beschra writes "BBC writes of 'terra-forming' Ascension Island, one of the islands Charles Darwin visited. He and a friend encouraged the Royal Navy to import boatloads of trees and plants in an attempt to capture the little bit of water that fell on the island. They were quite successful. The island even has a cloud forest now. From the article: '[British ecologist] Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way."'"
Medicine

Possible Treatment For Ebola 157

Posted by samzenpus
from the there's-a-pill-for-that dept.
RedEaredSlider writes "Researchers at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases have found a class of drugs that could provide treatment for Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fever. The new drugs are called 'antisense' compounds, and they allow the immune system to attack the viruses before they can do enough damage to kill the patient. Travis Warren, research scientist at USAMRIID, said while the work is still preliminary -— the drugs have been tested only on primates — the results are so far promising. In the case of Ebola, five of eight monkeys infected with the virus lived, and with Marburg, all survived. The drugs were developed as part of a program to deal with possible bioterrorist threats, in partnership with AVI Biopharma."

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