Key part of the article that is not in the small summary...

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt have now discovered a single neuron in the brain of locusts that enables the adaptive regulation of sparseness in olfactory codes

Time for Jamie to bring Blendo out of retirement...bring that ratio back down.

Mr. President, we can't afford to have a killer robot-elevator ratio gap.

Thats twisted. You want to send killing machines to Fukushima!

Or are you trying to make a Robot Civilization in SimEarth?

Waay back when I was in school I used to work with VR, and CAVE systems quite a bit. And in giving tons of open house tours I've noticed that the amount of disorientation varies quite a bit from person to person.

Most common are:

- Motion Sickness

- Vertical Motion Sickness (players of FPSs tended to be better as handling the strain X/Y/Z motions but not pitching and rolling)

- Eyestrain (lots of people tend not to blink when using shutter glasses for some reason, I never bothered to research why)

- Focus strain (Generally as your focus is fixed by the camera, so some peoples brains can't handle not being able to focus on arbitrary objects in their field of vision. Also generally in computer generated 3D the entire field of vision may be in focus, and this can disorient people too. This may also have to do with the involuntary eye-wobble that your brain does to obtain more eye parallax information, since this is not compensated for with 3D gear it may cause disorientation or strain)

Usually however I've found that the more exposure people have the more adaptive they get to just ignoring these sensations. Since spending so much time with them all disorientation fades after 5 mins.

Well considering that Veloz was killed those assets are not going to do him much good

Anyone in congress who blanket refuses to look at matters that a Chairman of an government agency recommends is not doing their job. Yes I understand that their opposition is just a letter from a committee saying they do not like the FCC's approach to Net Neutrality. But the fact is they are objecting before the FCC has even discussed the matter yet. The real thing to do is wait till the FCC has a proposal and then the committee should discuss and provide a detailed critique of the individual rules in the plan that they need revisited. Representatives and Committees are defying the oath of their position every time they stick their fingers in their ears and shout 'La La La I am not listening to this branch of government La La La'.

Actually he did give about 50% of his net worth to charity via a number of foundations. That's what moved him from being the richest person in the US to the 2nd richest behind gates. Over the long term he has pledged that 99% of his wealth will go to philanthropic causes.

When I used to for the John D and Cathrine T MacArthur foundation I found it surprisingly does take a lot of time, and man-power to give away that much money (assuming you limit it to programs that actually help people and not get wasted, stolen, mis-used). Usually the amount of research, financial tracking, charitable tax paperwork, legal department, IT department, international relations, government relations, etc people is very much like a 200-300 employee endeavor right there. And all the time your doing all this work to ensure that the money goes to people who really need it you are making more money.

On top of that Buffet is going to all his Billionaire buddies and saying "do you really need to have a net worth of 20 Billion? Why not give away 10 billion, cause you have the ability to make that back over a decade or two anyway".

Yes same company, they are a chemical giant. Monsanto has had a long history with environmental issues. I remember the Illinois plants being still pretty bad in the 80's too..

Before regulation (and actually right as recently as 2000 ) their common practice was to dump industrial waste/PCBs/etc in fields, rivers, streams, ponds, and lakes surrounding their plants.

Basically it started in Beverages in early 1900 (specifically a chief supplier of Coca-Cola flavorings/preservatives).
They moved on to sweeteners (they own NutraSweet)
They moved to industrial chemicals, electrical components, and eventually plastics and polymers. They also were one of the first LED makers (still are damn big in LEDs/LCDs etc).
They moved to weed killers/fertilizers (they own Roundup). They also were one of the top Agent Orange Producers.
Then finally they became one of the first companies to push to Genetically altering crops, and stop the practice of farmers producing seed crops.

Its a ROADM (Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexor) doing DWDM. In otherwords high speed re-tunable lasers that can be configured for different wavelengths on the fly.

Now all these "colors" are all infrared...at intervals between 1500-1600nm. Its basically been in use on a wide scale for the past 5-7 years.

Real-time is okay, which is mainly why most of the big dragon medical based systems run back-end speech rec, which runs at about a 1:2, 1:3 ratio (dictation time to CPU time). Then are finally QAed by medical transcriptionists for medical accuracy. On back-end systems you can also look at completed & corrected historical information, look at the contextual information of the entire document, etc. Not to say that the real-time system is bad, its just more limited it what it can look at on the local PC (it cannot reprocess models off hours, it cannot store gigs of historical data, etc).

Of course you also tend to find a lot of systems that are using engines 4-5 years out of date too (which does tend to impact things).

IBM closed many of their speech research offices 1-2 years ago and transferred most of the research/data to Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking research.

Full Disclosure: I work for Nuance

Cory Doctorow: Little Brother
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Cory_Doctorow_novel)
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Everyone should select other and either enter:
- Enter N/A
- Make up your own race name, in fact recruit all your friends to
- Enter your favorite Sci-Fi reference (Mon Calamari, Klingon, Peacekeeper, Replicator, Troll, Kobold, Half-Elf, Member of the MacLeod cloud, Freman, etc.)

Yep DCU is a great credit union...although I've only deposited 3-4 random checks by scanning over the past 2 years. But yes they've accepted scans for quite some time now.