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Comment Evolutionary... (Score 1) 1486

The circular logic to your comment is that science has given you a medium (Slashdot) to voice your concerns. I don't have the faintest idea where I would start if I were to try and understand the sciences you mention. However, I DO think that understanding science(s) is based on our own evolution in the way that some scientific findings are eventually accepted as "truths". For example, 4000 years ago, we had no concept of the number 0. Basic math which my 3 year old daughter understands quite fully. A few hundred years ago, our planet was thought to be flat. Once again, we learn very early in our lives that the Earth is flat. My expectation is this : Give us another 500 or 1000 years, and we'll have quantum mechanics in elementary school. You heard it here first.
Security

Submission + - Fired Gucci Employee Accused Of Attacking Network (computerworld.com)

WrongSizeGlass writes: Computer World, Information Week, The Register are all reporting on the story of a former Gucci IT employee who is accused of a November 2010 assault on Gucci's network deleting files and virtual servers, taking a storage area network offline, and deleting mailboxes from the corporate email server. The lost productivity is estimated at $200,000. Sam Chihlung Yin, 34, of Jersey City, NJ, allegedly created a fake VPN token in the name of a non-existent employee which he tricked Gucci IT staff into activating in June 2010, a month after his employment contract was terminated by Gucci for unrelated reasons.
Nintendo

Wii 2 Unlikely For 2011, Maybe In 2012 303

An anonymous reader writes "As discussed on Slashdot earlier this year, the lack of a next-generation Wii may be hurting Nintendo. That doesn't seem to concern the company's US chief, Reggie Fils-Aime, who said this week that a Wii 2 might not appear until 2012. He wants to sell a few million more consoles before a successor is launched. So, no Wii 2 for 2010 or 2011 — meanwhile, the PS3 and Xbox consoles get motion control support and other content enhancements. What does that mean for the success of Nintendo's gaming console business? Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?"
Games

Why Don't We Finish More Games? 341

IGN has an opinion piece discussing why, as video games get shorter, we seem less likely to finish them than in the past. For example, BioWare said only 50% of Mass Effect 2 players finished the campaign. The article goes into several reasons gamers are likely to drop games without beating them, such as lowered expectations, show-stopping bugs, and the ease with which we can find another game if this one doesn't suit us. Quoting: "... now that gamers have come to expect the annualized franchise, does that limit the impetus to jump on the train knowing another one will pull up to the station soon enough? ... In the past, once you bought a game, it was pretty much yours unless you gave it to somebody else or your family held a garage sale. The systemic rise of the used games market now offers you an escape route if a game just isn't your bag. Is the middle of a game testing your patience? Then why not sell it back to your local game shop, get money back in your pocket, or trade it in for a game that's better – or at least better suited for your tastes? After all, the sooner you ditch it either at a shop or on an online auction site, the more value you stand to get in return."
Medicine

What US Health Care Needs 584

Medical doctor and writer Atul Gawande gave the commencement address recently at Stanford's School of Medicine. In it he lays out very precisely and in a nonpartisan way what is wrong with the institution of medical care in the US — why it is both so expensive and so ineffective at delivering quality care uniformly across the board. "Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has... enumerated and identified... more than 13,600 diagnoses — 13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we've discovered beneficial remedies... But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we're struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver. ... And then there is the frightening federal debt we will face. By 2025, we will owe more money than our economy produces. One side says war spending is the problem, the other says it's the economic bailout plan. But take both away and you've made almost no difference. Our deficit problem — far and away — is the soaring and seemingly unstoppable cost of health care. ... Like politics, all medicine is local. Medicine requires the successful function of systems — of people and of technologies. Among our most profound difficulties is making them work together. If I want to give my patients the best care possible, not only must I do a good job, but a whole collection of diverse components must somehow mesh effectively. ... This will take science. It will take art. It will take innovation. It will take ambition. And it will take humility. But the fantastic thing is: This is what you get to do."

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