Comment Dump Wikipedia (Score 1) 2
It's about time to dump the English wikipedia on our hard drives!
Comment The next step (Score 2, Insightful) 112
I think the next question is to ask ourselves how we are going to deal with these near-Earth asteroids. We should be ready for a rare but possible asteroid crash so that we don't have a second oil-spill-like incident.
Comment Applications in dentistry? (Score 1) 103
I wonder what the applications are for future dentists like me?
Many systemic diseases can already be detected even earlier in a patient's mouth by trained dentists.
Why the IRS Should Automatically Fill In Returns With What It Knows 613
theodp writes "An article in the NY Times begins, 'In the digital age, filing income tax returns should be a snap. Important data from employers and financial institutions has already been sent to government computers. Yet taxpayers are still required to perform the chore of preparing a return from scratch, in many cases paying a software company for the privilege.' Why, if your needs are simple, can't you just download forms pre-filled with whatever data the IRS has received about you, make any necessary adjustments, and automatically get the IRS calculation of your taxes? Sounds reasonable, but the IRS rejected the President's proposal to give taxpayers the option to do so as 'not feasible at this time' due to delays in the receipt of W-2 and 1099 data. However, California managed to offer a pre-filled state tax return, which cost only 34 cents to process compared to $2.59 to process a traditional paper return. Despite the success of the pilot, meager funds have been allotted for the program due to the strength of its political opponents — 'principally, Intuit' — according to the state controller. Intuit argues it would be a 'conflict of interest for government to be both tax collector and tax preparer.'"
FBI Violated Electronic Communications Privacy Act 285
An anonymous reader writes to tell us of a report from the Washington Post which alleges that the FBI "illegally collected more than 2,000 US telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records." The report continues,
"E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats. ... FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. The searches involved only records of calls and not the content of the calls. In some cases, agents broadened their searches to gather numbers two and three degrees of separation from the original request, documents show."
Displayport V1.2 To Take Giant Leap Over HDMI 345
An anonymous reader writes "With HDMI becoming increasingly common, Displayport has been slow to emerge as a widely used connection interface, but a plethora of new features in the new v1.2 standard could see that change. As well as doubling the data rate of the existing v1.1a standard to 21.6 Gbps, the update allows for multiple monitors to be connected to a single Displayport connector and adds support for transporting USB data at up to 720Mbps, enabling embedded webcams, speakers and USB hubs over a single cable. Ethernet data is also supported. The improved data rate will allow for richer, larger and higher resolution displays, and the new version is also backward compatible with the current display technology, so all the ports, cables and devices will be interchangeable, although they will revert to the lowest common denominator."
Comment Re:chimps have 97% of human DNA (Score 4, Interesting) 120
I agree with mangu that "DNA tests should be used for finding someone innocent rather than guilty." Paternity tests are done in a similar way even though the general public does not seem to know: genetic microsatellite tests can disprove paternity but not prove if it is in fact the father due to false positives. The question should be how many microsatellite sites (sites that are usually different in the human population) should be analyzed to arrive to a conclusion?
Comment Re:progress, kind of (Score 1) 42
Yeah, several groups are working with these techniques for years. Duke chemistry department is doing something similar too: http://dynamicchemistry.wordpress.com/research/molecular-recognition/
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