Comment: Increased popularity = increased malware (Score 1) 511
Apparently their increased popularity has not gone unnoticed by malware writers.
Comment: Bad... (Score 3, Insightful) 239
Throwing out data in order to be able to analyze other data, especially when it comes to genes and how they interact, sounds like one of the worst ideas I've heard.
Comment: Already there? (Score 3, Interesting) 1167
This is already the case in our company; salaried employees are marked as "Exempt"... which means, exempt from getting paid overtime. How is this a government legislative issue??
Comment: Re:A sad world. (Score 1) 268
Where I live, there have always been plate readers. We call them 'Sir'. They register plates that seem suspicious to them and store them in little black notebooks that they keep 'til retirement, half a century sometimes. They work only 8 hours a day and want wages, uniforms, typing machines, unions, sick time, vacations, retirement money and other stuff the new ones don't need. The new ones are much cheaper for us taxpayers. They also know every fucking stolen car's plate by heart and can't be bribed by a doughnut. When we want to be anonymous, we walk or use a bike and not a car which have had license plates to identify them since the last 100 years. I guess that this new stuff is definitely eroding the right to drive a car in public that is registered as stolen, used in a robbery, kidnapping or murder.
Your observations are spot-on in a world where 1984 is only a fictitious book by George Orwell. Otherwise... not so much.
Comment: Re:I wonder (Score 1) 433
Reinventing their cell walls is an evolutionary step that would also imply other things (i.e. would the bacterium be able to survive with the new cell wall structure; would it be less susceptible to alcohol but more susceptible to something else; would it be able to replicate the new structure, etc). I'm no bacteriologist but aren't bacteria in endospore-mode not susceptible to alcohol?
Comment: Re:stifling innovation (Score 1) 323
Wouldn't it be spectacular if we as a people would get the fsck out of our own way?
Comment: Re:Suspens (Score 1) 323
If they did that it might lead one to believe that they aren't capable of competing based on quality of product -- that or they have no faith in their own ability to continue to innovate.
Comment: Re:Facebook sends CD's? (Score 2) 125
The problem is that the legislative body becomes deadlocked on just about anything they debate and thus "free market" decides. Unfortunately, Free Market is essentially Mob Rule. And the mob are idiots. Legislative body isn't much better.
Comment: The end of an era (Score 3) 80
Next you'll tell me that FidoNet is going away!
Comment: Re:What is good for the consumer? (Score 1) 232
To some degree this is correct; however when you let Cheap and Plentiful run rampant you get what you have now -- everything made to last for about a year, landfills full of cellphones and similar that will be intact a thousand years from now, etc. Our planet simply can't sustain that kind of mentality.