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Comment Re:what? (Score 1) 201

Ok, by and large psychologist != medically qualified (at least here in the UK) and certainly not a pharmacologist. So testimony is basically pulled out of their arse. Secondly, being bipolar myself (and YMMV), I would be inclined to the view that most of the available medication (apart from Lithium) actually makes things worse, not better. But that's a side issue. Yer basic problem here is a legal system where throwing mud is a legitimate tatic. How on earth anyone could extrapolate a photograph on FB (unless, as suggested above, of cutting off someones head with a chainsaw) into making a meaningful judgement as to the fitness of ability to be a good parent is a mystery to me. Horseshit of the highest order.
Facebook

Sex Drugs and Texting 287

statesman writes "The Associated Press reports that teens who text frequently are three and a half times more likely to have sex. A survey of 4,200 public high school students in the Cleveland area found that one in five students sent more than 120 text messages a day or spent more than 3 hours a day on Facebook. Students in this group were much more likely to have sex. Alcohol and drug use also correlate with frequent texting and heavy Facebook use."
Piracy

UK ISPs Profit From Coughing Up Customer Data 59

nk497 writes "ISPs in the UK are charging as much as £120 to hand customer data over to rightsholders looking for proof of piracy, according to the Federation Against Software Theft. While ISPs have to hand over log details for free in criminal cases, they are free to charge in civil cases — and can set the price. 'In 2006, we ran Operation Tracker in which we identified about 130 users who were sharing copies of a security program over the web,' said John Lovelock, chief executive of FAST. 'In the end we got about 100 names out of them, but that cost us £12,000, and that was on top of the investigative costs and the legal fees.'"
GNU is Not Unix

New LLVM Debugger Subproject Already Faster Than GDB 174

kthreadd writes "The LLVM project is now working on a debugger called LLDB that's already faster than GDB and could be a possible alternative in the future for C, C++, and Objective-C developers. With the ongoing success of Clang and other LLVM subprojects, are the days of GNU as the mainstream free and open development toolchain passé?" LLVM stands for Low Level Virtual Machine; Wikipedia as usual has a good explanation of the parent project.
KDE

A Quick Look At KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1 122

dmbkiwi writes "The latest in the 4.x series of the KDE Software Compilation is due to be released in early August 2010. With the first beta of this release recently unleashed, I thought I'd download the openSuse packages and see what 4.5's got in store for us."
Image

Steak-Scented Billboard Entices Drivers 282

In addition to car exhaust and road grime, travelers along Highway 150 in North Carolina can now enjoy the smell of a barbecue thanks to a new billboard. The work of ScentAir, which provides custom scents for businesses, the advertisement for a local grocer emits the smell of charcoal and black pepper over the highway. "Marketing director Murray Dameron said the beef scent was emitted by a high-powered fan at the bottom of the billboard that blows air over cartridges loaded with BBQ fragrance oil. 'It smells like grilled meat with a nice pepper rub on it,' he explained."
Image

Doctor Slams Hospital's "Please" Policy 572

Administrators at England's Worthing Hospital are insisting that doctors say the magic word when writing orders for blood tests on weekends. If a doctor refuses to write "please" on the order, the test will be refused. From the article: "However, a doctor at the hospital said on condition of anonymity that he sees the policy as a money-saving measure that could prove dangerous for patients. 'I was shocked to come in on Sunday and find none of my bloods had been done from the night before because I'd not written "please,"' the doctor said. 'I had no results to guide treatment of patients. Myself and a senior nurse had to take the bloods ourselves, which added hours to our 12-hour shifts. This system puts patients' lives at risk. Doctors are wasting time doing the job of the technicians.'"
Earth

Breaking the Squid Barrier 126

An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Steve O'Shea of Auckland, New Zealand is attempting to break the record for keeping deep sea squid alive in captivity, with the goal of being able to raise a giant squid one day. Right now, he's raising the broad squid, sepioteuthis australis, from egg masses found in seaweed. This is a lot harder than it sounds, because the squid he's studying grow rapidly and eat only live prey, making it hard for them to keep the squid from becoming prey themselves. If his research works out, you might one day be able to visit an aquarium and see giant squid."

Comment Easy to predict what happens next. (Score 1) 821

In case no-one noticed, the last two attempts to blow anything up in flight, using a shoe, then pants, were utterly inept. Consequently, passengers have to take off their shoes, and now go through naked blob-body scanners. So the bad guys no longer have to actually come up with a viable attack, just persuade some idiot to somehow carry a noxious (of any description) substance onto a plane and fiddle about with it in order to ramp up the hysteria and precautions to a new and invidious level. We are making ourselves hostages to fortune here, because you just know how the next two attempts (I'm predicting both male and female protagonists) are going to go. At which point I hope that you've already unloaded any airline stock you happen to own. Remember, you read it here first!

Comment Re:Why Mainframes exist in my organization (Score 3, Insightful) 361

And I cannot stress how much you should be glad that your paycheck goes via a bank that runs its core systems on a mainframe instead of relying on your fuckwitted opinions as to how to implement data processing in a robust and scalable manner. Write a powershell script about that motherfucker!

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