Comment Re:All this shows (Score 2) 334
Welcome the New boss, same as the Old boss, only, more "hip".
Comment Re:Blame it on Liberals and Communists (Score 1) 566
Pretty good summary, I have to say, of mainstream 'liberals' and 'conservatives'.
I consider myself a Classical Liberal.
Comment Re:Do like the Romans (Score 1) 135
Distinction without difference, or at least too little difference to matter.
We all have the British Foreign Office to thank for most of this anyway.
Scottish Scientists Develop Whisky Biofuel 172
RabbitWho writes "It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'one for the road.' Whisky, the spirit that powers the Scottish economy, is being used to develop a new biofuel which could be available at petrol pumps in a few years.
This biofuel can be produced from two main by-products of the whisky distilling process – 'pot ale,' the liquid from the copper stills, and 'draff,' the spent grains.
Copious quantities of both waste products are produced by the £4bn whisky industry each year, and the scientists say there is real potential for the biofuel, to be available at local garage forecourts alongside traditional fuels. It can be used in conventional cars without adapting their engines. The team also said it could be used to fuel planes and as the basis for chemicals such as acetone, an important solvent."
Comment Re:Cutting corners is the name of the game (Score 1) 383
Part of the problem *is* that it's not real money.
Overall it's just chits of debt to the federal reserve, if it were real money, you could run out, thus providing a sustainable feedback mechanism which would probably lessen the bad things that "capitalism" is being blamed for in this case, and others.
Corporations themselves rely on the states that define them. Liability shields and incestuous dealings with regulators (revolving doors and their attendant failures of regulatory oversight) abound in many industries.
In this instance you'd think the ridiculously low quality computers would be detected by the frequent audits of the private backers of the endeavor, if those backers had any sense. BP being a multinational plays by all the rules on paper, shit happens, since they just rent the land from the government, the landlord gets to pay the bills / suffer the consequences with little to no recompense when it all goes to hell.
Modern Day Equivalent of Byte/Compute! Magazine? 327
MochaMan writes "I grew up in the '80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line by line, and figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way. Since then, the personal computer market has obviously moved away from hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware, but I imagine there must still be a market for similar do-it-yourself articles. Perhaps the collective minds of Slashdot can divine some online sources of fun and educational mini-projects like 'write your own assembler' or 'roll your own bootloader.'"
Newsweek Easter Egg Reports Zombie Invasion 93
danielkennedy74 writes "Newsweek.com becomes the latest in a long list of sites that will reveal an Easter egg if you enter the Konami code correctly (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter). This is a cheat code that appeared in many of Konami's video games, starting around 1986 — my favorite places to use it were Contra and Life Force, 30 lives FTW. The Easter egg was probably included by a developer unbeknownst to the Newsweek powers that be. It's reminiscent of an incident that happened at ESPN last year, involving unicorns."
Intel Abandons Discrete Graphics 165
Stoobalou writes with this excerpt from Thinq: "Paul Otellini may think there's still life in Intel's Larrabee discrete graphics project, but the other guys at Intel don't appear to share his optimism. Intel's director of product and technology media relations, Bill Kircos, has just written a blog about Intel's graphics strategy, revealing that any plans for a discrete graphics card have been shelved for at least the foreseeable future. 'We will not bring a discrete graphics product to market,' stated Kircos, 'at least in the short-term.' He added that Intel had 'missed some key product milestones' in the development of the discrete Larrabee product, and said that the company's graphics division is now 'focused on processor graphics.'"
Doctors Seeing a Rise In "Google-itis" 368
It's one of the fastest-growing health issues that doctors now face: "Google-itis." Everyone from concerned mothers to businessmen on their lunch break are typing in symptoms and coming up with rare diseases or just plain wrong information. Many doctors are bringing computers into examination rooms now so they can search along with patients to alleviate their fears. "I'm not looking for a relationship where the patient accepts my word as the gospel truth," says Dr. James Valek. "I just feel the Internet brings so much misinformation to the (exam) room that we have to fight through all that before we can get to the problem at hand."
Programming Clojure 109
eldavojohn writes "Programming Clojure by Stuart Halloway was very near to the perfect book for me. It covers many things common to many Lisp languages while highlighting in moderate detail the things that make Clojure unique and worthy of some attention. The book spends a large amount of time dealing with the intricacies of interfacing fluidly with Java (down to a package rewrite inside a large project). This fits me perfectly as a Java programmer, and I now feel ready to experiment with peppering functional language capabilities into an object oriented language. The book also strives to show how to simplify multithreading through functional programming, which is good because I find multithreading in Java a serious headache that few are good at. Programming Clojure, released in May 2009, is currently the only book out there devoted to Clojure, and the introduction is written by the language's creator, Rich Hickey, who says, 'What is so thrilling about Stuart's book is the extent to which he "gets" Clojure.' The book earns its place on the Pragmatic Bookshelf by guiding the user through rewriting a part of Ant into a new build tool called Lancet — adding to the project what you just learned about Clojure at the end of each chapter." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.
Submission + - Parts of Iron Man 2 costumes made on a 3D printer (bnet.com)
bizwriter writes: The production company for Iron Man 2 the gloves that Robert Downey Jr. wore in the movie on a 3D printer. The technology let them control the fit of the piece down to 10 microns. Apparently in the first movie, the gloves fit badly, hampered the actor's movements, and kept falling apart, so someone had to keep putting them back together during shooting.
Submission + - Facebook exec defends site's privacy policies (computerworld.com)
CWmike writes: Social networking giant Facebook has been taking it hard on the chin lately as critics contend that recent upgrades to the site and a bug that lets users view their friends' chat sessions raise a bevy of privacy issues. However, in an interview with Computerworld on Thursday, one Facebook executive insisted that users are happy with recent changes to the site despite the hornet's nest of controversy stirred up by online pundits and commentators. Ethan Beard, director of Facebook's developer network, noted that the millions of users that have joined Facebook's social network did so specifically to share information. Beard also talked about the social network's controversial privacy settings, why users' information isn't private by default, and reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that people shouldn't expect online privacy. Is it just the media to blame for hyping Facebook's privacy woes?
Games Workshop Goes After Fan Site 174
mark.leaman writes "BoingBoing has a recent post regarding Games Workshop's aggressive posturing against fan sites featuring derivative work of their game products. 'Game publisher and miniature manufacturer Games Workshop just sent a cease and desist letter to boardgamegeek.com, telling them to remove all fan-made players' aids. This includes scenarios, rules summaries, inventory manifests, scans to help replace worn pieces — many of these created for long out of print, well-loved games...' As a lifelong hobby gamer of table, board, card and miniature games, I view this as pure heresy. It made me reject the idea of buying any Games Workshop (read Warhammer) products for my son this Christmas. Their fate was sealed, in terms of my wallet, after I Googled their shenanigans. In 2007 they forbid Warhammer fan films, this year they shut down Vassal Modules, and a while back they went after retailers as well. What ever happened to fair use?"
Comment Re:Michigan is fucked (Score 1) 717
I couldn't understand how she was re-elected. It just reestablishes my belief that the vast majority of people vote party line, and don't really care who is running for their respective party. I know there may be a few people who could be swayed, but in general, I find the philosophy of both parties to be pretty incompatible. I question anyone's sanity who can switch back and forth on a whim.
I couldn't understand how she was re-elected. It just reestablishes my belief that the vast majority of people vote party line, and don't really care who is running for their respective party. I know there may be a few people who could be swayed, but in general, I find the philosophy of both parties to be pretty incompatible. I question anyone's sanity who can switch back and forth on a whim.
Pretty incompatible? Both parties (R and D) gather money from the same corporate entities (that the government regulates) and set the rules of that legislation. The incompatibilities are window dressing for the most part. We are currently experiencing a (numbers for relative ordinal influence, higher being better) Financial Sector (+2) Military Sector (+1) government where before perhaps it was a Military Sector (+2) Financial Sector (+1).
Their bread is buttered by the same people, with a bunch of steadily willfully more ignorant proles to be kept in the dark by sports match-ups and mass media. Oh, and the entertaining fallacy that war is good for the economy. That one pays dividends for years.
Many NeoCons were actually communists and lobby for high regulatory measures and police state law enforcement. Many NeoLiberals are actually communists, and even hold dual party membership as socialists, and value the protective umbrella of high regulatory measures and police state law enforcement.
Comment Re:RTFS?? (Score 1) 904
Protectionist steel tariffs was an early one.
The Old Right (Buchanan et. al.) had been very critical of him throughout his presidency.
Rush was also critical, but he was an unapologetic supporter of the war and mouthpiece for his buddy Cheney. Rush's show allowed a reasonable amount of dissenting opinion from his guest hosts. Neal Boortz became a Libertari-neocon.
