Comment Re:alamo drafthouse (Score 2) 409
What the hell kind of theater sells beer???
If only someone had written an example in the post title. Some kind of drafthouse I would expect... But I guess we'll never know.
Google: Best Adaptation of a Novel To a Patent? 42
theodp writes "The USPTO's Thursday publication of Google's patent application for Inferring User Interests was nicely-timed, coinciding with what ZDNet called Google's privacy policy doomsday. The inventors include Google Sr. Staff Research Scientist Shumeet Baluja, the author of The Silicon Jungle, a cautionary tale of data mining's promise and peril, which Google's Vint Cerf found 'credible and scary.' No doubt some will feel the same about Beluja's patent filing, which lays out plans for mining 'user generated content, such as user interests, user blogs, postings by the user on her or other users' profiles (e.g., comments in a commentary section of a web page), a user's selection of hosted audio, images, and other files, and demographic information about the user, such as age, gender, address, etc.'"
Comment Re:Copyright trap (Score 2) 71
These are commonly called 'copyright traps' or 'fictitious entries'
Last year Google did a similar thing to Microsoft - by placing meaningless entries in their database - when they suspected Bing was copying their search results.
Comment Re:Article is BS. (Score 1) 554
OK, fair enough. :-)
Comment Re:Article is BS. (Score 1) 554
Bananas good? WTF? It's all starch with a bit of sweet-tasting sugars and some potassium. It's nutritionally as useful as a potato.
What's nutritionally useless about a potato? They contain decent amounts of a range of vitamins, as well as complex carbs, a small amount of protein, and almost no fat...
Comment Re:New Sign in the Doctors Office... (Score 1) 1271
*Citation needed* I was raised SDA in Australia, and lived in SDA communities in Cali, strangely enough one centered around Loma Linda University Medical Centre, a very highly regarded hospital. You can bet that everyone in that community got their shots, it was a prerequisite for going to Loma Linda Academy, run by the SDA church.
He might be mixing up SDA and Jehovah's Witnesses, who will refuse blood transfusions.
There are occasionally stories in the news about doctors going to court to overrule the decisions of parents who won't let their children receive a transfusion. Unfortunately this doesn't always happen, such as in the case of a teenager dying in the UK a couple of years ago. However, despite the negative consequences that dogma can have on them and their children, they are rarely referred to a "cult"; this is a recognised religion, with all the protections that the law therefore provides to it.
There's an interesting video on YouTube about faith healing, and specifically the harm that "Christian Scientists" can cause their children by believing that medical science is a myth, and the only true way to heal disease is through prayer. Again this leads to unnecessary suffering and death, both of adults and children. However again this is a recognised religion, protected by law.
Before modding me as “troll”, note that I'm not trying to argue that all religion is evil etc. etc. However, the rights of the individual to practise their own religious beliefs should never be more important than the rights of their children to receive the correct medical care.
Comment Re:In perspective (Score 1) 380
As someone who doesn't bike regularly, I've completed a century (100 mile ride) in less than 5 hours. 200 miles in a day should be no problem for an experienced racer, and even 400 miles is probably not outside the realm of possibility.
Hmm... Fair point.
I've just done a bit of Googling, and it seems you're absolutely correct; it looks like Greg Kolodziejzyk holds the record, who managed 647 miles within 24 hours.
I retract my original comment.
Comment Re:In perspective (Score 1) 380
Space "exploration"? I can bike further in a day than the Shuttle went up... What, precisely, is being explored?
I know you're trolling, but... No you can't.
Comment Physical keyboard? (Score 2, Insightful) 188
I'm not saying that the iPhone isn't a good phone, but it has no physical keyboard. Many employees use their phone for answering email; to me the iPhone seems like it would really inconvenient for use in this manner. Does anybody else use an iPhone as their primary work device?
Submission + - Video-On-Demand Rides To The Rescue At Sundance (showbizsandbox.com)
sperlingreich writes: "This podcast features independent film industry veteran Michael Tuckman sizes up this year’s Sundance Film Festival and highlights some of its most noteworthy movies. Tuckman explains how video-on-demand has become a big part of the distribution strategy for indie films, providing them with a wider audience than traditional art houses."
Submission + - Linux 3.3 Will Let You Boot Into Android: Greg-KH (muktware.com)
sfcrazy writes: In an exclusive interview, Greg KH told the site that "The code is almost all there already. The 3.3 kernel release will let you boot an Android userspace with no modifications, but not very good power management. The 3.4 kernel release will hopefully have the power management hooks that Android needs in it, along with a few other minor missing infrastructure pieces that didn't make it into the 3.3 kernel release."
Submission + - Posthumous pardon for Alan Turing (bbc.co.uk)
Submission + - EU Privacy Rules Enforce Net Neutrality (itworld.com)
jfruh writes: "In a scene familiar to those following the net neutrality debate in the US, a representative of the broadband industry — Cisco, in this case — declared that government intervention in favor of net neutrality removes incentives to invest in high-speed networks. The twist, though, is that the Cisco exec was talking about EU privacy rules. These rules don't explicitly enforce net neutrality, but make it illegal to do the sort of packet inspection that "traffic shaping" requires."
Submission + - Comparative effectiveness research: A new approach (patexia.com)
techgeek0279 writes: "Since the early 1990s, a popular procedure for relieving the pain of spinal column fractures in patients with osteoporosis was vertebroplasty – the injection of acrylic cement into the fractured areas of bone to relieve pain. The procedure cost around $5,000 and was widely practiced. Then in 2009, the medical community was surprised when a randomized clinical trial showed that the procedure was no better than placebo in improving pain in patients with osteoporosis. Over the course of the last several years, studies like this trial have been drawing attention and prompting health policy experts to raise questions about whether spending on interventions with no proven benefit and potential adverse risks is justified. These studies have also led to a reassessment of the priorities of medical research and shifted the paradigms of clinical investigation."
Submission + - Zuckerberg's IPO letter is a data-miner's delight (forbes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Data mining — taken to new extremes. Forbes reports on a University of Texas professor who has combed through Mark Zuckerberg's 2,100-word IPO letter for Facebook, looking for unusual patterns.
"As for the Zuckerberg letter, Pennebaker finds repeated clusters of distinctive traits. Words such as “win,” “lose,” and “try” make up 5.09% of Zuckerberg’s letter, more than any of his three peers. Yet money terms make up just 1.19% of the Facebook founder’s text, less than half the rate for any of the other founders.
Zuckerberg’s word use “suggests someone who is driven by very high rates of need for achievement” but low rates for building wealth or social affiliation, Pennebaker concludes. "
"As for the Zuckerberg letter, Pennebaker finds repeated clusters of distinctive traits. Words such as “win,” “lose,” and “try” make up 5.09% of Zuckerberg’s letter, more than any of his three peers. Yet money terms make up just 1.19% of the Facebook founder’s text, less than half the rate for any of the other founders.
Zuckerberg’s word use “suggests someone who is driven by very high rates of need for achievement” but low rates for building wealth or social affiliation, Pennebaker concludes. "
