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.
Comment Re:Yeah... Cheating... Sure... (Score 2) 232
It seems as if you're not taking into account the subsidization by the Chinese government that takes place so that Chinese products almost always undercut domestic-made products in price, driving domestic companies out of business. It's one thing to "compete" on product quality; it's another to simply flood the market with subsidized waste.
Comment golf carts? (Score 1) 295
... and the company is also testing a fleet of self-driving golf carts on its campus.
Highschool coaches everywhere are jumping for joy.
Comment Re:Real scifi isn't about predicting the future (Score 1) 258
6: And the big one; fewer and fewer people will have traditional jobs, letting the robots/computers do the admin / manual work for them. Instead, we'll be exploring, learning, creating, having fun, or socializing (eventually mankind will realize that higher unemployment is a good thing, and not a bad)
The problem with this is that it's exactly what they said would happen back in the 50's... we'd have all this leisure time and it would become a problem since no one had anything to do. I don't know about you, but I have less time for anything now than ever before.
Comment Re:For the non-molecular biologist among us (Score 1) 138
Hox genes are defined as having
-
a DNA sequence known as the homeobox
My surprise at the fact that "homeobox" has not yet been appropriated to name some useless piece of merchandise knows no bounds.
Comment Re:Use a firewall (Score 1) 204
Does this also encrypt the traffic for the link you click from the search results? If no, then Verizon still has the site you're eventually destined for and the search itself is moot.
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