Comment Re:Vibe education (Score 1) 119
Plus, how much do you want to bet that their T&Cs give them at least partial ownership/equity of any projects or startups the students create?
Comment Re: Wonder if he can make it funny again. (Score 1) 30
It's a shame Literally Unbelievable stopped posting: https://literallyunbelievable....
Comment Where does the hydrogen go? (Score 1) 18
"its own on-board oxygen factory, which generates oxygen by splitting water vapor found in the body"
What does the device do with the two hydrogen atoms that are left over for every oxygen atom harvested from a water molecule? Or more likely, what does the body do with them?
Comment Re:Curious wording (Score 1) 121
I'm sure that's what they meant, but it's not what they asked. I'm with maglor_83 on this one.
Comment "Improve the sound quality of speech"? (Score 1) 98
But that's not how it will be used. Telecoms companies will use it to compress voice traffic down to the same crappy sound quality as they do now - carefully engineered to be one iota better than "costs us more in complaint handling than it saves us in bandwidth".
Comment "Something you are" by itself is too IRL-vulnerabl (Score 1) 166
Once your fingerprint is the only skeleton key to all your data, all an old-fashioned IRL criminal needs to do is hold you down and put your finger on the phone, and that's the whole ball game.
It's also why, if you're going to attend a protest, you should set your phone access to password-only - no fingerprint, no face ID - for when the police demand to inspect it without a warrant.
Comment Re: They'll be hiring soon (Score 1) 226
Developers will also get first-hand experience of how the drivers' app is used. I'll wager it gets much less love and attention than the customer-facing app does.
Comment Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt (Score 1) 110
It came up on xBox Game Pass at exactly the right time, and like all the best RPGs, it's a huge and much-appreciated time sink.
(Also Civilization 6, but I've been playing that steadily for years, so it doesn't really count here.)
Comment I got a FIGHT+ROBOT notification for this? (Score 1) 29
Besides, given that COVID-19 already sounds like a malevolent android, can we be sure the robots won't side with the virus?
Comment Re: How hard is it to change the mode to full auto (Score 2) 118
They won't have to flip the switch. The human gatekeepers will quickly get complacent - when's the last time you actually read the T&C's before clicking "Continue"? - and pretty soon, the difference between life and death for some poor brown kid with a rock will be Homer's nodding-bird desk toy.
Comment "unspecified cargo"? (Score 5, Funny) 108
I'm assuming it'll mostly be union organisers.
Comment SPOILER FOR A 32-YEAR-OLD BOOK FOLLOWS (Score 1) 264
Isn't this similar to Carl Sagan's Contact, with its image of a circle embedded in the digits of pi?
Comment Bring back renameable terminal tabs (Score 1) 298
They vanished in 15.04, and the world wept at their departure.
...OK, I wept.
...OK, I shouted at the screen, spent too long searching for it as a bug, eventually found it was a "feature", then shouted at the screen some more.
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.'"
The Best Robots of 2009 51
kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."
