Comment Re:Never? (Score 1) 499
I dunno, even when I was in elementary school, they discussed civil rights, the new deal, Kennedy's push for the moon, etc. He likely flunked elementary school history too.
Comment Re:appropriate vid (Score 1) 499
This was done decades earlier, and is far more accurate:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7200374813151075996
Comment Re:Let's pave the road with solar cells. (Score 1) 712
Or at least get you a few trips through time in a DeLorean @88 MPH.
Comment Yaknow, ironically... (Score 1) 242
One can buy an RV with twin slideouts on each side, with equal features, for 1/100th of that price? And equal footage.
Comment Don't forget soft drinks! (Score 2, Interesting) 468
Considering there's almost 200% as many people drinking soda pop, one would think there's more of a threat from drinking a Coke than someone drinking a beer.
Robotic Prostheses For Human Faces 111
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on a patent application that suggests implanting polymer muscles beneath the skin of people suffering paralysis of the face to give them control of their features. The technique has already been used successfully to reanimate the eyelids of human cadavers. Movement could be returned to other facial features and even paralyzed limbs in the same way, the surgeons at University of California Davis say. The full patent application is also available on the WIPO site."
Comment Re:Proof that they are master programmers (Score 1) 600
What a coincidence, my attempted tag which died a horrible death was: Tetrisisso80sdude
New Ads That Watch You 238
Pandanapper writes to tell us Yahoo is reporting that if you find yourself watching an ad on a video screen in a public venue, the ad may be watching you as well. "Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer's gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity -- and can change the ads accordingly. That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens."
Comrade, You Are So Not Getting a Dell 600
theodp writes "At the World Economic Forum, Michael Dell's pitch to help Russia with its computers got the cold-as-Siberia shoulder from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. 'We don't need help,' shot back Putin. 'We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity' (video — rant starts at 1:24). 'Our programmers are some of the best in the world,' Putin continued. 'No one would contest that here — not even our Indian colleagues.'"
Toward Autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Technology 137
coondoggie writes with a NetworkWorld piece that begins, "Researchers at Purdue will soon experiment with an unmanned aircraft that pretty much flies itself with little human intervention. The aircraft will use a combination of global-positioning system technology and a guidance system called AttoPilot ... to guide the aerial vehicle to predetermined points. Researchers can be stationed off-site to monitor the aircraft and control its movements remotely. AttoPilot was installed in the aircraft early this year, and testing will begin in the spring, researchers said."
Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds 1061
Tibor the Hun writes "NPR reports that Susan Solomon, one of the world's top climate scientists, finds in her new study that global warming is now irreversible. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that even if we could immediately cease our impact on pollution and greenhouse gasses emissions, global climate change would continue for more than a thousand years. The reason is the saturation of oceans with carbon dioxide. Her study looked at the consequences of long-term effect in terms of sea-level rise and drought."
Comment My memory may be a bit rusty, but... (Score 1, Informative) 545
Haven't "docks" been in use since BEFORE Microsoft introduced theirs with Windows 98?
Cases in point, NeXT OS, and IBM's OS/2 4 Warp, both used docks (a dock launch bar in NeXT's case, and a task bar launch bar in the case of OS/2. The Mac OS only picked this up as an official feature with OSX, while before that, you had to run a 3rd party app to simulate NeXT OS' docks (at least back in 1992 with System 7 on).
If one was to claim copying was made, then didn't Apple swipe their docks from NeXT OS (yeah, that was also Jobs' baby), and for that matter, didn't Microsoft in fact swipe their quick launch bar from OS/2 4 Warp?
And before any Mac fans mod this down in an effort to try and rewrite history, remember that the original Mac interface itself was swiped from Xerox PARC. They admitted to it themselves, and after introducing it to the mainstream, the idea of moving an arrow back and forth between graphical icons pretty much became the defacto standard.
It's that, or spend the rest of your life using CLI for *everything*.
Submission + - How to properly start a pirate TV network?
NeuroManson writes: Well, when the digital transition goes through, I've been led to the following conclusion: How does one get into pirate television, hardware and software wise? Sure, you could go to YouTube, but if you want to provide media that is still under (questionable) ownership, if you want to provide media that is also questionable (say the occasional odd show that *gasp8 makes people think), AND you want to provide said material to people who are holdouts, not willing to pay $50 just to watch even more FCC filtered media, what do you do?
The massive gap that the loss of broadcast spectrum would represent means there will be a large opportunity (a'la Big Time Television) for pirate broadcasters to use the still unused frequencies available, AND lucrative for advertisers desperate to keep the remaining 100,000,000 roughly audience.
So simply put, what equipment would be nessesary to provide broadcasts for the fleeting but still available market?
Comment Smug Mode on. (Score 1) 249
A few years ago, I breached the question of the digital transition for television and its inevitable environmental impact as hundreds of millions of TV sets go this route: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/21/2128220.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Actually, judging from this article, we've not only ignored the iceberg, but invited it in for a hot cup of tea, and asked how many people it would like to kill while ignoring the sinking ship entirely.
It's sad that seven years down the line, the obvious severity of the issue has not only gone ignored, but even condoned to date. Hell, even as I write this, I'm on a 5 year old Tablet PC that I also use for graphics (using an Intel graphics chipset, *gag*), most of my electronics are over 5 years old. What's the oldest electronic devices you use today, hmmmmm?
Comment Re:Waiting (Score 1) 330
What about the absolute FIRST Doctor, from Dr. Who and the Daleks? Sure, he's human in that one, but Peter Cushing was 53 at the time that was released.
