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AI

Just Months After Jeopardy!, Watson Wows Doctors 291

Posted by Soulskill from the do-no-harm-while-killing-all-humans dept.
kkleiner writes "Following its resounding victory on Jeopardy!, IBM's Watson has been working hard to learn as much about medicine as it can with a steady diet of medical textbooks and healthcare journals. In a recent demonstration to the Associated Press, Watson showed a promising ability to diagnose patients. The demonstration was a success, and it is the hope of IBM and many medical professionals that in the coming years Watson will lend doctors a helping hand as they perform their daily rounds."
Space

Project Icarus: the Gas Mines of Uranus 155

Posted by samzenpus from the cue-the-obvious-jokes dept.
astroengine writes "When considering the fuel source for a fusion-powered interstellar probe, wouldn't it be a good idea to set up a colony on the moon and start pillaging the lunar surface for its helium-3 riches? Not so fast, says Adam Crowl of Project Icarus, there may be a far more viable source. What about the gas giants? Although Jupiter's gravity could pose a problem and Saturn's rings might get in the way (and forget Neptune, that place is one hell of a commute), perhaps the helium-3 in the Uranian atmosphere could be mined using atmospheric balloons?"
Games

Duke Nukem Forever Goes Gold 277

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the but-will-it-run-on-the-hurd dept.
An anonymous reader writes with enthusiasm "Duke Nukem Forever has finally gone gold!" Looks like it'll be on shelves around June 10th with a demo available for Duke Nukem First Access Club members available June 3rd. Can it really be true?

Comment Re:Won't touch the cloud now. (Score 1) 117

by teknopurge (#35975198) Attached to: Amazon EC2 Failure Post-Mortem
Cloud computing is a marketing architecture, not a technical architecture.


Cloud computing is a form of shared hosting, just with more encapsulation; Clouds fall over the same way a server can fall over. It's hard to blame "The Cloud" when the reality is the people that were suckered in by obtuse, non-specific marketing are the ones at fault. The argument can even be made that Clouds are worse becuase instead of many discreet isolated servers you start sharing more single points of failure, which lead to IO bottlenecks, etc.
Hardware Hacking

DIY Laser Pistol Shoot 1MW Blasts 284

Posted by Soulskill from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It doesn't get cooler than this — a German hacker put together a 1MW laser pistol capable of shooting straight through a razor blade with a single pulse. Quoting: 'Fitted with a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser, it fires off a 1 MW blast of infrared light once the capacitors have fully charged. The duration of the laser pulse is somewhere near 100ns, so he was unable to catch it on camera, but its effects are easily visible in whatever medium he has fired upon.'" Update: 03/17 18:22 GMT by T : Too bad; turns out it's "only" 1KW, rather than 1MW. I still want one.

Comment Re:In a free country (Score 1) 586

by teknopurge (#35379980) Attached to: Student Sues FBI For Planting GPS Tracker

To be the devil's advocate - gathering evidence IS the attempt of proving guilt.

That makes no sense. You can't break-into someone's house to gather evidence just because you feel like it. There are rules that must be followed, and yes, the law applies to the govt. too. Even if they have the means to skirt the law via warrants, etc, they must follow procedure. TBH, I'm glad the judicial branch is starting to get a backbone.
IBM

Watch IBM's Watson On Jeopardy Tonight 293

Posted by CmdrTaco from the yeah-i-think-i'll-pass dept.
JohnMurtari notes that the media hype machines are massively promoting tonight's battle between Jeopardy champions and a super computer. Yes it's a PR stunt. But I imagine the actual research probably had a lot of interesting problems to address. Anyway, you can learn about IBM Watson if you're interested. I'm sure the most amusing bits will be on YouTube about 30 seconds after air time.

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