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Comment Re:why not a fine instead (Score 1) 577

Let's try again with the car analogy. What about if your car doesn't have an alarm system in it, and it gets broken into? Should the government be punishing the car owner, the car manufacturer, or the criminal? If the government really wants to get involved, let's form a SWAT team that tracks down and kills the people making malicious software.

Google

Submission + - Google Launches Dictionary; Drops Answers.com

ObsessiveMathsFreak writes: "Google has expanded its remit once again with the quiet launch of Google Dictionary. Google word search definitions now redirect to Google Dictionary instead of to Google's long term thesaurus goto site, Answers.com, which is expected to take a serious hit in traffic as a result. Dictionary pages are noticeably more plain and faster loading than their Answers.com equivalents, and unusually feature web citations for the definitions of each word. This means that, unlike most dictionaries, Google considers ginormous a word. In related news just as Answers.com has been silently phased out, Google's web search page now silently phases in. Google works in mysterious ways."
Idle

Submission + - Gran Turismo gamer becomes pro race driver (pcauthority.com.au) 2

An anonymous reader writes: Back in 2008, Lucas Ordonez lived what seemed like an ordinary existence. The 22 year old Spanish student was an avid motorsports fan, but he lacked the suitable investment necessary to become a professional race driver and had virtually given up on racing. Besides, he was already knee-deep in trying to complete an Master of Business Administration (MBA). But it was Ordonez' passion for virtual racing, particularly his love of Grand Turismo, that made him stand out from his peers — both off the track and eventually on it. In just a few months, Ordonez' life was suitably transformed from console dreamer to racing the real thing at a real race track in Europe . And Ordonez managed to do the unthinkable: go from the couch car to the race car and win.

Comment Re:Smart Grid (Score 1) 412

The plan I heard described a network of objects in your house that can work to optimize energy usage, coupled with an incentive strategy on the part of the electric company to encourage customers to be more efficient. You're correct; it's easy to see a benefit to the power company at a large scale, but without an incentive that shares the benefit with customers, nobody is going to go along with this. I love how, in this case, basic economics can be used to save everyone money and maybe preserve the environment too.

Comment Ctrl-Tab Switching (Score 1) 216

I'm glad they're taking out the Ctrl-Tab switching. I use a logitech mouse with a tilting scroll wheel, which adds two extra buttons. I currently have one direction of the tilt mapped to CTRL+Tab and the other direction to Ctrl+Shift+tab, so that I can browse through my tabs just by flicking the side of my scroll wheel. The tab switching feature screwed this up because Ctrl-Tab would have swapped back and forth instead of always moving over to the tab to the right.

Comment Machine Learning? (Score 1) 181

This could actually be useful if they applied machine learning techniques to allow the browser to remember which engine works best on which site. As long as switching the rendering engine doesn't take too long, you could probably get a decent overall boost in performance.

Patents

McDonalds Files To Patent Making a Sandwich 346

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "McDonalds has applied for patent WO2006068865, which carries the title 'METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MAKING A SANDWICH.' John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, can eat his heart out (unless that's been patented, too). Undoubtedly, some people are contemplating whether there's anything novel in this patent that is somehow obscured by its generic title. Feel free to examine their flowchart for yourself and see exactly how novel their sandwich 'subroutines' are. The good news is that, given that it only mentions generic sandwich making 'tool(s),' rather than any specific machine, it might not survive after the In Re Bilski decision, which was meant to put a stop to absurdities such as this. But until McDonalds's application is rejected or invalidated, make sure you don't use their flowchart when making sandwiches. After all, if you 'apply appropriate condiments to appropriate compartment,' you might infringe upon their IP."
Government

Anti-Matter Created By Laser At Livermore 465

zootropole alerts us to a press release issued today by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, announcing the production of 'billions of particles of anti-matter.' "Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear. The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma 'jet.' This new ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts." The press release doesn't characterize the laser used in this experiment, but it may have been this one.

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