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Comment Re:This is only a toy (Score 1) 157

"Wake me when it can detect an opening in the opponent's defense and strike at it." Do you say this to your beginning students? The fact that this robot has the ability to track its opponent's sword, and using its programming, place its own sword in the "best" (in the minds of the programmers, who are clearly not swordsmen, as you and I are) position for anticipatory defense is a milestone. Give it time; it will be a relatively short step to add heuristic algorithms to this, and then the machine will simply learn what works and what doesn't. After, of course, a decent programmer works with a decent swordsman to give the robot access to the techniques of I.33, Talhoffer, Durer, Agrippa, and personally, I'd hope Donald McBane.

Comment Re:Nearly Impossible? (Score 1) 254

Amen to this. I got hired on by a company on Madison, WI in January of 1999 and was told on my first day that "this Y2K thing" was my first priority, since my predecessor had put in maybe 3 hours of work on the project. Oh, and I had to do it while getting our network up to date. Frankly, it was a cinch, once they'd approved the budget. *That* took until June, too, so I really did the entire project in 6 months.

Comment Re:And it slows things down (Score 3, Informative) 254

As someone who's working with this stuff right now, I can say if it's slowing you down, you're not taking advantage of the available tools. They're out there. Keep looking. Moreover, "data entry" is one way of looking at it. A different way to call it is "documenting what they're doing with sufficient detail". That was the entire point of these kinds of standardized coding systems: to (as best as we can) remove the fuzzy documentation in the systems before, and to remove the idiosyncrasies from medical records. With the proper coding systems in place, a patient in Allentown who moves to Duluth can have his PHI moved to the new caregiver and be (for the most part) confident that the Iowans will be able to understand what the Pennsylvanians did for him before. Yeah, there's going to be transitional pain. There always is. But as has been pointed out in other posts, it's not like ICD-10 ambushed anybody. Frankly, if you haven't been moving toward ICD-10-capable systems for at least 2 years, you've been slacking. There's a penalty for that at crunch time.
Power

Submission + - Solar cell breaks 40% efficiency barrier.

Fysiks Wurks writes: From the DOE web site:

New World Record Achieved in Solar Cell Technology: WASHINGTON, DC — Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexander Karsner announces that with DOE funding, a concentrator solar cell produced by Boeing-Spectrolab has recently achieved a world-record conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, establishing a new milestone in sunlight-to-electricity performance.

more: http://www.energy.gov/news/4503.htm

Just imagine a solar powered iPod, or Zune....never mind.

Feed Mum's the Word on NSA Spying (wired.com)

Under questioning, the White House's new privacy oversight board admits its knows how many Americans were targeted by a controversial surveillance program. But it won't share the data and won't say if it recommends the data be shared. In 27B Stroke 6.


Feed Is Battlestar Galactica Doomed? (wired.com)

Once an official member of the Commander Adama fan club, Annalee Newitz examines the top 10 reasons why Battlestar Galactica is dying in deep space. Cylon threesomes come in at No. 6. In Table of Malcontents.


Microsoft

Submission + - Why Novell's deal with MS is very very bad

jamienk writes: PJ from Groklaw has taken the time and really explained the big picture of the Novell/MS deal and how it all fits into the SCO case and the strategy some have employed to attack Free Software. If you thought PJ was becoming too shrill before, or if you don't understand what the big deal is it's really worth a read.

From the article:
This is Groklaw's 2,838th article. We now have 10,545 members, who have worked very hard to disprove SCO's scurrilous claims, and we did. We succeeded, beyond my hopes when we started.

But here's the sad part. As victory is in sight, Novell signs a patent agreement with Microsoft...
Linux Business

Linux Desktops Catching On In Education 379

digihome writes to point us to an appreciation of the state of Indiana's project of moving students from Windows desktops to Linux. In about a year, 22,000 students have made the switch, using a variety of Linux distributions. The crn.com writer tried switching his own two children to Linux laptops. From the article: "'So Dad,' [the 10-year-old son] asked. 'What is the difference between Linux and Windows?' I tried to explain but it was a waste of breath. 'What difference do you see?' I asked back. 'Nothing, really.'"

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