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Microsoft

With 'Obamacare' Kicking In, Microsoft Sees a Health-Data Windfall 201

Posted by timothy
from the in-the-cloud dept.
curtwoodward writes "Now that President Obama's federal health care reform is past its major political hurdles — and with renewed focus on out-of-control costs in healthcare — companies that sell 'big data' software are licking their chops. The reason: Healthcare has huge piles of information that is being used in new ways, to track patient admissions, spending, and much more. From hospitals to insurance companies, they'll all need new ways of crunching those numbers. It's basically an entirely new field that will dwarf the spending growth in traditional data-heavy industries like finance, retail and marketing, a Microsoft regional sales GM says."
Security

'Old School' Hackers Attack European Governments Using 'MiniDuke' Malware 48

Posted by Soulskill
from the you-don't-want-to-go-full-duke dept.
puddingebola writes "The Guardian reports that hackers have been targeting officials from over 20 European governments with a new piece of malware called 'MiniDuke.' 'The cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, which discovered MiniDuke, said the attackers had servers based in Panama and Turkey – but an examination of the code revealed no further clues about its origin (PDF). Goverments targeted include those of Ireland, Romania, Portugal, Belgium and the Czech Republic. The malware also compromised the computers of a prominent research foundation in Hungary, two thinktanks, and an unnamed healthcare provider in the US.' Eugene Kaspersky says it's an unusual piece of malware because it's reminiscent of attacks from two decades ago. 'I remember this style of malicious programming from the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. I wonder if these types of malware writers, who have been in hibernation for more than a decade, have suddenly awoken and joined the sophisticated group of threat actors active in the cyber world.' The computers were corrupted through an Adobe PDF attachment to an email."
Education

IBM's Watson Goes To College To Extend Abilities 94

Posted by samzenpus
from the welcome-back-students dept.
An anonymous reader writes in with news that IBM's Jeopardy winning supercomputer is going back to school"A modified version of the powerful IBM Watson computer system, able to understand natural spoken language and answer complex questions, will be provided to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, making it the first university to receive such a system. IBM announced Wednesday that the Watson system is intended to enable upstate New York-based RPI to find new uses for Watson and deepen the systems' cognitive computing capabilities - for example by broadening the volume, types, and sources of data Watson can draw upon to answer questions."

Comment: Re:The first online appliance that non-geeks disco (Score 1) 236

by teknopurge (#42550047) Attached to: Timothy Lord Discovers the Good Night Lamp at CES (Video)
I don't buy that argument - we've had IP appliances(Fridges, home security systems) for the better part of a decade. We've had alarm clocks that get global time information sync'd for decades. Connected appliances, and recently on-line appliances are not innovative.

Comment: Bubble Tracking (Score 1, Insightful) 236

by teknopurge (#42546121) Attached to: Timothy Lord Discovers the Good Night Lamp at CES (Video)
More than anything I was interested to figure out what the leading indicators of the next industry bubble would be(after being in college during the 90s.com fun). My takeaway from this is while it's a fun gimmick, it's a solution looking for a problem. The fact it's getting traction in conversation is fascinating and provides greater insight than the concept itself.
Shark

Congress Wants To Resurrect Laser-Wielding 747 302

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the it-works-on-tee-vee dept.
Harperdog writes "Noah Schactman has a great piece on the Airborne Laser, the ray gun-equipped 747 that became a symbol of wasteful Pentagon weaponeering. Despite sixteen years and billions of dollars in development, the jet could never reliably blast a missile in trials. Now the House Armed Services Committee's Strategic Forces wants the Airborne Laser to be used to defend us against the threat of North Korea's failed missiles."

Comment: Re:Duh? (Score 4, Interesting) 327

I have no love for AT&T and I'm glad the guy won, but if one of my customers sued me, I'd drop them in a heartbeat!

If you're not falsely-advertising your services, then you have nothing to worry about.

We run a hosting company and have been putting up with this for years. We provide underloaded servers that have packages with hard limits to prevent abuse and to ensure people get what they pay for. All these "unlimited" hosting plans have been scams from day-1 and we're glad someone is finally getting held to task for the dumbing down of the market.

AI

Just Months After Jeopardy!, Watson Wows Doctors 291

Posted by Soulskill
from the do-no-harm-while-killing-all-humans dept.
kkleiner writes "Following its resounding victory on Jeopardy!, IBM's Watson has been working hard to learn as much about medicine as it can with a steady diet of medical textbooks and healthcare journals. In a recent demonstration to the Associated Press, Watson showed a promising ability to diagnose patients. The demonstration was a success, and it is the hope of IBM and many medical professionals that in the coming years Watson will lend doctors a helping hand as they perform their daily rounds."
Space

Project Icarus: the Gas Mines of Uranus 155

Posted by samzenpus
from the cue-the-obvious-jokes dept.
astroengine writes "When considering the fuel source for a fusion-powered interstellar probe, wouldn't it be a good idea to set up a colony on the moon and start pillaging the lunar surface for its helium-3 riches? Not so fast, says Adam Crowl of Project Icarus, there may be a far more viable source. What about the gas giants? Although Jupiter's gravity could pose a problem and Saturn's rings might get in the way (and forget Neptune, that place is one hell of a commute), perhaps the helium-3 in the Uranian atmosphere could be mined using atmospheric balloons?"

Beam me up, Scotty!

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