Comment calling people gay (Score 4, Funny) 413
"who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.'"
Really? Is calling people it doesn't like gay really the governments new tactic?
Comment Re:Not exactly banging down the gates (Score 1) 395
The Shark Tank has certainly done the opposite to that area of San Jose. Lower crime and increased property values. It's one of the reasons why Santa Clara wanted the stadium
Comment Re:AltaVista (Score 1) 176
It's not so much that they didn't see the potential; it's that they couldn't let go of their legacy business to pursue other avenues while that legacy was so much of their culture and revenue.
DEC saw Unix coming and responded with Ultrix; they saw internet search coming and responded with AltaVista etc etc. In every case DEC saw technology and change and made great products in response.
What they didn't do was really commit to those products.
For DEC it was all about VMS. Especially on VAX and later on Alpha. Other products could exist but the core of effort and marketing always had to go that directions.
It's a story that has played out over and over in tech at Wang, IBM, and even now is playing out at Microsoft.
Comment Humorously (Score 1) 158
At this point the only reason a prefer Google search is that I have Firefox configured to remove all advertising from Google. Until it's similarly easy to strip all advertising out of Bing it's just not worth looking at.
Comment The Weird Vast Tolerance of Opinions in Europe (Score 3, Interesting) 58
I think these stories of pirate parties, or communists, or greens, running and being elected to various governmental office are so titillating to Americans because we find it hard to imagine the vast tolerance of divergent opinions in non-american politics. In the USA we have two center right parties with almost no divergence over core political issues who fight to endlessly promote minor political issues or social wedge issues so as to disguise their complete lock on political power.
In the US you could no more elect a pirate, a communist, or an atheist, than you could elect bear. So in the end for us these stories are dancing bear type stories. No one asks if a dancing bear dances well. We aren't interested all that much in the policies or the questions themselves; we're just kind of amazed that you guys would conceive of electing someone whose opinion diverges so far from your rulers.
Comment What people seem to miss (Score 1) 248
Microtransactions ARE how the web is funded currently. The majority of commercial web sites use advertising to monetize their content.. By placing ads on their pages they receive a minuscule sum of money for each unique user who views a page. The cost of the advertising is made up in the price of goods. ie just as in a classic microtransaction system the user puts money into an organization that pays small amounts to the owner of pages they visit.
Imagine if instead ISPs charged slightly more and paid a tiny amount say 1000th of a cent to the owner of websites you visit.
Submission + - Game site wonders what next when 50% of users block ads (destructoid.com)
6 writes: Destructoid, one of the few remaining bastions of independent game journalism online, wonders what to do now that nearly 50% of their users run ad-blockers.
Submission + - All the TV News Since 2009, now Available in the Internet Archive (nytimes.com) 1
6 writes: As of Tuesday, the archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news.
Submission + - Time's Person of the Year is 'The Protester'
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Time's editor Rick Stengel announced on 'The Today Show' that "The Protester" is Time Magazine's Person of the Year: From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow. “For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restless promise, for upending governments and conventional wisdom, for combining the oldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity and, finally, for steering the planet on a more democratic though sometimes more dangerous path for the 21st century." The initial gut reaction on Twitter seems to be one of derision, as Time has gone with a faceless human mass instead of picking a single person like Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who Time mentions in the story and is widely acknowledged as the person who set off the "Arab Spring." In 2006, Time chose "You" with a mirrored cover to much disappointment, picked the personal computer as "Machine of the Year" and Earth as "Planet of the Year," proving "that it should probably just be "Story of the Year" if they aren't going to acknowledge an actual person," writes Dashiell Bennett. "By not picking any one individual, they've basically chosen no one.""
M.U.L.E. Is Back 110
jmp_nyc writes "The developers at Turborilla have remade the 1983 classic game M.U.L.E. The game is free, and has slightly updated graphics, but more or less the same gameplay as the original version. As with the original game, up to four players can play against each other (or fewer than four with AI players taking the other spots). Unlike the original version, the four players can play against each other online. For those of you not familiar with M.U.L.E., it was one of the earliest economic simulation games, revolving around the colonization of the fictitious planet Irata (Atari spelled backwards). I have fond memories of spending what seemed like days at a time playing the game, as it's quite addictive, with the gameplay seeming simpler than it turns out to be. I'm sure I'm not the only Slashdotter who had a nasty M.U.L.E. addiction back in the day and would like a dose of nostalgia every now and then."
The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
Submission + - Why is Hollywood Making a Sequel of the Napster Wa (informationweek.com)
6 writes: "Cory Doctorow has an interesting article over on Information Week about Hollywood's strategy of suing sites such as YouTube.
The sue-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out plan was a flop in the box office, a flop in home video, and a flop overseas. So why is Hollywood shooting a remake?"
Submission + - Red Cross sued for using... a red cross (iht.com) 4
Swampash writes: "Johnson & Johnson, the health-products giant that uses a red cross as its trademark, is suing the American Red Cross, demanding the charity halt its use of the red cross symbol on products it sells to the public."
Submission + - An Optical Solution For an NP-Complete problem? (opticsexpress.org)
6 writes: Tobias Haist and Wolfgang Osten have proposed a novel idea for solving the traveling salesman problem...
We introduce an optical method based on white light interferometry in order to solve the well-known NP-complete traveling salesman problem. To our knowledge it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non-polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed. We will show that this achievement is limited by the number of available photons for solving the problem. It will turn out that this number of photons is proportional to NN for a traveling salesman problem with N cities and that for large numbers of cities the method in practice therefore is limited by the signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method is meant purely as a gedankenexperiment.
We introduce an optical method based on white light interferometry in order to solve the well-known NP-complete traveling salesman problem. To our knowledge it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non-polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed. We will show that this achievement is limited by the number of available photons for solving the problem. It will turn out that this number of photons is proportional to NN for a traveling salesman problem with N cities and that for large numbers of cities the method in practice therefore is limited by the signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method is meant purely as a gedankenexperiment.
Submission + - MIT Engineers World's First Schizophrenic Mice
Frosty Piss writes: "MIT researchers have created a schizophrenic mouse that pinpoints a gene variation predisposing people to schizophrenia. Research with the mouse may lead to the first genetically targeted drugs for the disease, which affects 1 percent of the population worldwide. This is the first study that uses animals who demonstrate an array of symptoms observed in schizophrenic patients to identify specific genes that predispose people to the disease."
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He keeps differentiating, flying off on a tangent.
