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Comment Re:Neat! (Score 3, Interesting) 90

No, corporations aren't going to work on these things for 43,75 USD/hour.

As you can see by the screenshots they provide, the average winning rate is 171 USD/hour, which does add up with the data from BLS.gov, since you have to account for benefits and a lot of the overhead, plus, they're looking for senior people, after all.

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current...

Comment Wait, they never ruled out HTLV! (Score 2) 138

In the US, they've entertained the idea to stop testing donor's blood for HTLV-1/2 because it's so rare in North America, but in Japan, the virus is epidemic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Based on the criteria for compensation described in the article, it looks like the HTLV status of this worker has never been taken into any consideration, so just because his claim was valid and was accepted, doesn't at all mean that there's a correlation between the events.

Comment And even more legal in Hollywood, too. (Score 1) 602

And don't forget the people working in Hollywood. If you're working as an extra for background actions, for the minimum wage already, and it takes you half the time to find jobs where you match the requirements, as well as extra money for costumes etc, then you're effectively working for half the minimum wage. Not to mention hour-long commute times!

I've recently visited LA for the first time, and participated as an unpaid extra (just for fun) in Ted 2 (just happened to be the movie available), also talked with the locals on the set who work as paid extras. I got the impression that overall they totally hate the unpaid ones, because that's further reinforcement for their minimum wages.

Submission + - Disruptive bloodwork startup may offer mostly vaporware

dmr001 writes: As seen previously, Palo Alto startup Theranos planned to put the power of affordable lab work directly in the hands of patients with tiny fingerprick samples taken at Walgreen's, with four hour turnaround. The company claimed their tests were "made possible by advances in the field of microfluidics." But they were cagey about methodology and didn't use FDA approved analyzers.

Now, the Wall Street Journal reports (paywalled) (among others) that all but one of Theranos' analyzers currently in use is off the shelf, and that their tiny samples may not always have been accurate. Typically cagey founder Elizabeth Holmes vigorously disputes the criticism of her $9 billion startup, but entrenched players like Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp (which do quite well charging orders of magnitude above Theranos' prices) are likely doing a happy dance.

Physicians worrying about patients bringing in their own carcinoembryonic antigen levels and Epstein Barr Virus panels to confirm their Internet diagnoses of cancer and chronic fatigue may also be breathing sighs of relief, albeit with bittersweet regret at the potential loss of the price advantage and milliliter samples.

Submission + - Amazon lawsuit aims to kill fake reviews (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: The ability to read reviews of products before making a purchase is one of the great advantages of online shopping. But how do you know that what you're reading is a genuine review and not just glowing praise planted by the seller or manufacturer? Fake reviews are a serious problem, and Amazon is trying to do something about it.

The retail giant has filed a lawsuit against 1,114 individuals for writing "false, misleading, and inauthentic" reviews. Amazon says that the fakers are tarnishing its reputation, and the attempt to clean up the site is something that will be welcomed by consumers.

Comment These are great for programmers (Score 0) 77

These are great for us technical folks.

I'm a systems engineer; when I'm doing a new web-site, I just go to http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-colo..., and select one of the fancy names, and see how it looks.

If it doesn't match with the rest of the colour scheme or just looks off, I scroll the list until I see another colour and name that I like.

Better than in the old days where you had to use hex number or a palette, plus with these fancy names, you can be guaranteed that the colours would be consistent and at least somewhat maintainable.

Submission + - Over 10,000 Problems Fixed In Detroit Thanks To Cellphone App (motorcitymuckraker.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Six months ago, Detroit's city officials launched a smartphone app called "Improve Detroit." The idea was to give residents a way to easily inform city hall of problems that needed to be fixed. For example: potholes, abandoned vehicles, broken hydrants and traffic lights, water leaks, and more. Since that time, over 10,000 issues have been fixed thanks to reports from that app. "Residents have long complained about city hall ignoring litter and broken utilities. But the app has provided a more transparent and direct approach to fixing problems." Perhaps most significant is its effect on the water supply: running water has been shut off to almost a thousand abandoned structures, and over 500 water main breaks have been located with the app's help. Crowd-sourced city improvement — imagine if apps like this become ubiquitous.

Submission + - Debian dropping Linux Standard Base (lwn.net)

basscomm writes: For years (as seen on Slashdot) the Linux Standard Base has been developed as an attempt to reduce the differences between Linux distributions in an effort significant effort. However, Debian Linux has announced that they are dropping support for the Linux Standard Base due to a lack of interest.

If [Raboud's] initial comments about lack of interest in LSB were not evidence enough, a full three months then went by with no one offering any support for maintaining the LSB-compliance packages and two terse votes in favor of dropping them. Consequently, on September 17, Raboud announced that he had gutted the src:lsb package (leaving just lsb-base and lsb-release as described) and uploaded it to the "unstable" archive. That minimalist set of tools will allow an interested user to start up the next Debian release and query whether or not it is LSB-compliant—and the answer will be "no."


Comment And there's always nginx rewrite, too — mdoc (Score 2) 138

I might be subjective as I'm the author of it, but this somewhat remind me of my http://mdoc.su/ project, which is what I call a deterministic URL shortener, or, perhaps, better yet, a semantic URL provider.

The whole source code is an nginc.conf configuration file, and is just a bunch of regular expressions and `rewrite` and `location` rules, available under an BSD/ISC licence, of course -- that's the one that comes with "no strings attached", BTW!

http://mdoc.su/
http://mdoc.su/FreeBSD-10.2/fs
http://mdoc.su/f102/resolvconf
http://nginx.conf.mdoc.su/mdoc...
https://github.com/cnst/mdoc.s...

Comment Twitter download private links? (Score 1) 80

If Twitter's behaviour for elongating the URLs in the public Tweets is any indication, their own bots actually download the contents of the links, allegedly trying to scan it for malware or whatnot.

I, personally, suffer because I never experience any URLs being shortened, they instead only get elongated by the service, reducing already constrained character space.

I mean, you don't have to go far to find a URL shorter than http://t.co/qLxImbQYvn. Even if you have a newly registered .com, it's still likely they'll only elongate it if you ever post a link to it.

And Twitter should really change the name of their subservice disservice to be more technically accurate.

The CEO of Sonic.net is especially annoyed (and rightly so) -- he can't even refer to his company without getting an elongation!

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