Unloaded - Slashdot User

Comment The root of the problem... (Score 3, Insightful) 246

by Unloaded on Monday December 16, 2013 @09:30AM (#45702775) Attached to: The Business of Attention Deficit Disorder

...aside from the big push by the drug companies is that they allow family doctors to diagnose ADHD and prescribe the meds at all. The docs, parents, and teachers get handed a checklist and if the kid (or adult) meets a certain number of criteria on the checklist then they're told meds are the answer. Some doctors who work for the big PPOs and HMOs are expected to see 6 or more patients an hour so they are taught to rely on the checklists to give them answers. Sometimes it comes down to the fact that a few parents and teachers have lost the ability to set and hold limits with their kids. Sometimes a kid is just being a brat. I'm simplifying so I'm hoping someone can expand on my idea more, but ADHD is serious and needs to be diagnosed by a psychiatrist. Attention problems and hyperactivity can be symptoms of things other than ADHD too.

Comment Missing Option (Score 5, Interesting) 135

by Unloaded on Monday April 01, 2013 @12:23PM (#43331363) Attached to: Radio Shack TRS-80 Vs. Commodore 64: Battle of the Titans

Once again the TI 99/4a gets left out. Anybody want a Jello Pudding Pop?

Submission + - 'Silicon Valley' Documentary Debuts Tonight (theverge.com)

Submitted by Unloaded on Thursday February 07, 2013 @10:27AM

Unloaded writes: The latest episode of PBS' documentary series American Experience is airing tonight, and it should be an episode of particular interest for those who follow the history of technology. Silicon Valley debuts tonight at 9PM ET, and instead of focusing on more modern-day tales, the documentary digs into the story of eight chipmakers who broke off to start their own transistor business way back in 1957. The leader of this group was 29-year-old Robert Noyce — known as the "Mayor of Silicon Valley" and the co-founder of both Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel just over a decade later. While these Silicon Valley pioneers may not be quite have the same name recognition as a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, there's no doubt that their work affected our industries for decades to follow.

Submission + - What Are the Odds of Another 9/11 Event?

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Thursday September 13, 2012 @04:54PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Statisticians make predictions about all kinds of phenomena governed by power laws, everything from earthquakes, forest fires and avalanches to epidemics, the volume of email and even the spread of rumors. Now "This Week" reports that two statisticians — Aaron Clauset at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and Ryan Woodward at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology — have put together a comprehensive global database including 13,274 terrorist events from 1968 to 2007 and created an algorithm to predict the odds of a large-scale terrorist attack with similar or greater consequences happening again. They estimated that the historical probability of an attack on 9/11's scale happening at anytime in the last 40 years was somewhere between 11 and 35 percent. "That's important," says Technology Review. "It means that 9/11 itself was not at all unlikely given the pattern of terrorist activity leading up to it." Assuming that the number of terrorists events per year remains roughly what it is now (2000 per year), the likelihood of another large-scale terrorist attack anywhere in the world (with a death toll greater than or equivalent to 9/11) is between 20 and 50 percent over the next decade (PDF). A 50-50 chance, the top of that range, means "a catastrophic attack is as likely as not.""

Comment Already Done (Score 4, Funny) 234

by Unloaded on Friday November 04, 2011 @04:42PM (#37952020) Attached to: Mathematically Pattern-Free Music

......"set out to do what no musician has ever tried — to make the world's ugliest piece of music"...... Already done... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(You're)_Having_My_Baby

Submission + - Apple Wins Ban on Samsung Tablet in Australia (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Unloaded on Wednesday October 12, 2011 @10:42PM

Unloaded writes: FTA: An Australian court on Thursday temporarily banned Samsung from selling its new Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer in the country, after rival technology giant Apple accused the company of copying features from its popular iPad tablet.

Submission + - Australian court blocks sales of Samsung Galaxy Ta (itnews.com.au) 2

Submitted by jimboh2k on Wednesday October 12, 2011 @09:46PM

jimboh2k writes: Apple has succeeded in blocking the sale of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in Australia until a final hearing can be heard in the case down under. The judgment on Thursday could effectively kill chances of the tablet ever launching properly in Australia after Samsung claimed further delays to the product would threaten hopes of gaining traction.

Feed News: Vonage CEO resigns, cost-cutting moves planned (macworld.com)

From feed by macworldfeed on Thursday April 12, 2007 @10:53AM

Vonage CEO Michael Snyder resigns and the company announces cost-cutting moves.

Feed Ofcom consults on unlicensed radio (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed on Thursday April 12, 2007 @10:52AM

Free spectrum for all

UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom has published a consultation document which suggests expanding the use of unlicensed spectrum in frequencies over 40GHz, and for low-power technologies including ultra-wideband, and is looking for feedback before 21 June.

Feed EFF takes up arms against IPRED2 (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed on Thursday April 12, 2007 @10:52AM

Brandishes web petition

The European wing of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has taken on the might of the European Commission by beginning its opposition to IPRED2, the proposed new directive that aims to harmonise European copyright laws.

Submission + - Korea launches a switch to open source

Submitted by on Thursday April 12, 2007 @10:13AM

An anonymous reader writes: Thousands of computers in ministries, government-linked organizations and universities in South Korea will replace Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office productivity suite with open-source alternatives under the plan, according to the country's Ministry of Information and Communication.

Twenty percent of desktop software and 30 percent of server software will be changed to open source by 2007, said a representative from the Ministry of Information and Communication.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5084811.html

Submission + - Apple, Opera, and Mozilla Push for HTML5

Submitted by

foo fighter

on Thursday April 12, 2007 @10:00AM

foo fighter writes: "The insular World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been slumbering the past several years: HTML was last updated in 1999, XHTML was last updated in 2002, and no one is taking their largely incompatible work on "next-generation" XHTML or "modularized" XHTML seriously. Both HTML and XHTML are in sorry need of removing deprecated items while being updated to reflect the current practices of web and browser developers yet remaining compatible with legacy Recommendations. The much more open and transparent WHATWG formed in 2004 to address this problem and has been hard at work on developing a draft spec for HTML5 to update and replace legacy versions of both HTML and XHTML. The quality of this work has reached the point that Apple, Opera, and Mozilla have requested the adoption of HTML5 as the new "W3C Recommendation" for web development."

Submission + - IBM Designs Stackable Chips

Submitted by

narramissic

on Thursday April 12, 2007 @09:54AM

narramissic writes: "IBM has announced plans to build smaller, more efficient chips by stacking a processor on top of its memory or power components. While some chip makers already stack processors, they connect them with long wires wrapped around the edges of the chips. By etching holes straight through the processors, IBM can use wires one-thousandth as long, and use 40 percent less electrical power, said Lisa Su, VP for IBM's semiconductor research and development center.

'Since the mid-60s we've just used the X and Y dimensions of integrated circuits. Now we can use this new approach to get around some huge problems. The bandwidth between logic and memory will go up, and it could help with the problem of power and heat dissipation,' says Dave Lammers, director of www.WeSRCH.com for VLSI Research Inc."

Submission + - New File Sharing Method Increases Download Speed

Submitted by

s31523

on Thursday April 12, 2007 @09:21AM

s31523 writes: "With more and more web content being shared, download speeds are a concern since traditional methods, like BitTorrent, are limited by the number of people sharing a specific file. A new sharing technique, Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET), claims to be able to increase download speeds up to %500. According to the article, researchers found that many files have chunks of identical data which can be leveraged in farming out the file to others who are downloading it."

Submission + - Was videogaming better 30-years ago?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12, 2007 @08:58AM

An anonymous reader writes: Sean Sands at Gamers With Jobs looks back at the dawn of videogaming, when we were all kids just typing in our games, one line of basic at a time. And he finds the present lacking:

The dreamers became assets instead of leaders, and the rockstar designers became, well, Rockstar ... or Blizzard, or Valve. Publishers with cash-rich money to spend bought the creative process, and the minds of marketing professionals replaced four guys hopped up on sugar doughnuts and generic cola. So, how dare I be surprised that the price of today's gaming blitz is a little piece of last generation's soul?
Read the whole thing.

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