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Submission + - Daylights Saving Time-Shift Causes Employees to Loaf on Monday (bestsyndication.com)

Submitted by happylucky
happylucky writes: Virginia Tech University researchers say that the annual shift to daylight savings time makes employees tired, resulting in more time spent surfing the web during their workday... Rather than work, employees will spend more time “cyberloafing” while on the clock. Although they extrapolated some of their data from Google, the researchers also conducted a lab experiment that required sleep-deprived subjects to watch a boring lecture online...
United States

Submission + - Coca-Cola and Pepsi Change Recipe to Avoid Cancer Warning (guardian.co.uk) 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: California has added 4-methylimidazole (a caramel coloring) to the list of carcinogenic compounds that require an explicit warning when added to foodstuffs. Incidentally, this has entailed the big two cola beverages to modify the recipe to decrease the amount of the substance, just enough to avoid the warning. The change to the recipe has already been introduced in California but will be rolled out across the US to streamline manufacturing. The American Beverage Association noted that there is not enough evidence to show the coloring to cause cancer in humans.
Cloud

Submission + - Cloud provider Livedrive has critically failed leaving users without access (livedrive.com)

Submitted by Overzeetop
Overzeetop writes: For three days, Livedrive has been offline, denying access to users files except through their one-file-at-a-time web interface. The support forum, which is limited to registered users only and is submission moderated, has had no posts since late February 23rd, just before the first major service error occurred. Since the service went offline on March 6th, there have been no status updates except to indicate a new date on the status page. Will this service interruption finally kill off the UK-based cloud service provider, which has been losing £1,000,000 a year?
Medicine

Submission + - LSD can treat alcoholism (nature.com) 1

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: LSD has potential as a treatment for alcoholism, according to a comprehensive retrospective analysis of studies published in the late 1960s and early 1970s (http://www.nature.com/news/lsd-helps-to-treat-alcoholism-1.10200).

The researchers sifted through thousands of records to collect data from randomized, double-blind trials that compared one dose of LSD to a placebo. Of 536 participants in six trials, 59% of people receiving LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse, compared to 38% of people who received a placebo (full paper (PDF) http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/03/08/0269881112439253.full.pdf+html). The study adds to the weight of evidence that hallucinogenic drugs may have important medical uses, including, for example, the alleviation of cluster headaches (http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/06/28/0416208/lsd-alleviates-suicide-headaches).
Japan

Submission + - Thyroid screenings detect relatively high exposure around Fukushima (nhk.or.jp)

Submitted by
AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: "Experts have detected radioactive iodine in the thyroid glands of 80 percent of the people who used to live near the Fukushima nuclear plant. Five of them had dosages of more than 50 millisieverts. Hirosaki University Professor Shinji Tokonami says the levels of radioactive iodine were relatively low compared to the scale of the accident, but that some residents face potential health risks from the exposure, and they should have continue to have regular health checkups by professional researchers."

Submission + - "Vegetarian cutlet factory" produces endless slabs of fake meat (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging is working on a device nicknamed the "vegetarian cutlet factory." It produces continuous slabs of veggie-based mock meat, which is reportedly quite similar to the real thing. Fraunhofer is one of several groups involved in the European Union "LikeMeat" project, the aim of which is to develop palatable, cost-effective meat alternatives from raw vegetable materials. Some of the main plant sources being looked at include wheat, peas, lupins and soya.

Comment Re:This is (Score 1) 2

by tomhudson (#39295497) Attached to: unjava-2012-03-08 now available
Thanks. If you think this is cool, remember - this is only the first step. Ultimately, there will be a complete class hierarchy in parallel to the regular java class hierarchy, but without the constraints that the Java class system has (and without the OvrlyLongNamesForClasses.andStupidlyNamedMethods().

For example, yesterday I re-implemented the TPoint, TDim (dimension) and TRect classes for a future release that will not use the standard java classes.... there are no separate getter/setter methods named getX and setX, just an overloaded x() operator that allows you to optionally set the value of x. Also very handy for chaining ... so you can do stuff like rect2.x(rect1.x(42)) to set both rectangles x coordinate in one line, or rect2.x(rect1.x()) to set rectangle 2 left to whatever rectange 1 left is.

I've been using this style for ... gee, since before the web or java were invented ... and I don't understand why nobody else has come up with anything similar. I guess people just like to make things more complex than they should be.

BTW - you can do the same thing in languages that don't support operator overloading, just check the number of parameters to determine if you need to set a value before returning a value.
Java

Journal Journal: unjava-2012-03-08 now available 2

Journal by tomhudson
For those who don't know java, but want to move away from being web monkeys, there's a new version of unjava. This release includes automatic jar generation as well as auto-creation of a non-static main class for your project, to reduce "non-static variable cannot be referenced from static context" errors.
Power

Submission + - Microscopic Fractal Trees Hold Key to New Solar Cells (ucdavis.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of chemists at the University of California, Davis believe that the future of solar technology may lie in cells made from a film of tiny silver nitrate fractal trees. The research team, led by Professor Frank Osterloh, believes that by harnessing the conductive power of these fractal trees, they can create “better, more efficient solar cells” than the silicon-based photovoltaic panels currently available. The silver nitrate fractals form when silver salt is applied to fluorine-doped tin oxide. The resulting electrochemical reduction causes the silver nitrate to grow into a tiny tree like structure, with central “branches” of silver nitrate less than 1/50th the width of a human hair supporting ever smaller branches.

Submission + - US Lawmaker Opens up ACTA to Online Comments (pcworld.com)

Submitted by
WhyNotAskMe
WhyNotAskMe writes: "Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican, posted ACTA on his Keepthewebopen.com site Tuesday. Even though the U.S. and seven other countries signed the agreement in October, the public needs to be included in the debate as President Barack Obama's administration begins to implement ACTA, Issa said.

Issa criticized the agreement, saying most negotiations were in secret. The deal appears to violate Congress' authority to make policy affecting U.S. trade and intellectual property law, he added. "ACTA appears to be an unconstitutional power grab started by President George W. Bush and completed by President Barack Obama."

Gee — President Obama seemed to be such a nice guy. Then he sold out to the entertainment lobbies. "Yes we can — bypass Congress and impose a treaty developed by the MPAA on the whole world". Now that's optimism!"
Privacy

Submission + - $1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
TheNextCorner
TheNextCorner writes: "This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is safe (radiation what?) and non-invasive (nude pictures who?). The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort."
AI

Submission + - IBM Watson heads to Wall Street (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "After conquering Jeopardy, battling patent trolls, making inroads into medical insurance claims, and threatening to replace customer service representatives, IBM’s Watson is now looking to take its first foray into Wall Streetesque financial services. Working with Citigroup, IBM has entered into an 'exploratory agreement' that will cover everything from streamlining the banking experience for customers, through to 'empowering financial professionals to make better business decisions.' In other words, watch out stock traders: Watson’s coming, and he wants a piece of your fat bonus."

Comment Re:back in the saddle (Score 1) 15

by tomhudson (#39261287) Attached to: I was actually able to get back into coding tonight

Go for it - my original idea was for something that would unify all resources - web pages, local documents, music and videos, etc ... and it's just not possible in a browser without some really lame work-arounds (like requiring people to run an instance of a server locally)

Browsers really do suck for lots of things.

Comment Re:Canonical (Score 1) 11

by tomhudson (#39261155) Attached to: Canonical's Ticking Time Clock
Thanks for the positive feedback. However, it doesn't address the real issue directly - that most open source doesn't have a valid financial model.

It's one reason why Linus did his "you should do everyone a favour and just kill yourselves" rant against opensuse - the resources that *could* be used to develop something that works properly are spread among far to many distros and projects, and none of them is in a position to spend what it takes to fix the problems, because they won't get a ROI on it - everyone else will just appropriate it.

It's funny how Apple was able to create their original box - hardware and software - for less than has been wasted so far, despite hardware now being cheaper, and we have far better software tools now than we did 30 years ago.

Or how they were able to shift to x86 and improve things, and here I am stuck with a linux desktop that can't talk to my camcorder, scanner (though the linux-compatible printer now *finally* works), etc. and that even after adding the fusion repos, still some formats re not supported ....

I'm beginning to think I'm sticking with linux out of sheer stubbornness ... :-p

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