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Comment Market Cap is baloney (Score 1) 378

by cloudsinmycoffee (#37090702) Attached to: Which Company Is the Largest?
'Market Cap' is a crock of shit and a red herring. Remember pre - 'crash and burn' Enron. I believe it had an astronomical Market Cap at it's peak of popularity, right before it got obliterated off the planet. It is an almost meaningless set of figures, or perception of value.

Comment It's about polish and not much else (Score 1) 487

by cloudsinmycoffee (#36718352) Attached to: Have American Businesses Been Stranded By the MBAs?
I believe the adolation of MBA's and their culture have been very bad for business in this country, and has been a sea change for the worse here in the last quarter century. I don't think it is a mere coincidence that their short-sighted focus has corresponded with a collapse of American manufacturing. I saw it somewhere I think in the WSJ some time ago that "If Thomas Edison had had an MBA working for him, he wouldn't have invented the Lightbulb, he's have invented the Bigger Candle" The skills you learn there are about being polished and not much else. In my own experience, too many of the MBA's I have met have been clubby, ruthless, smug, arrogant little snotnoses, filled with their own sense of importance and self-worth.

Comment Propaganda News Reporting? (Score 1) 132

by cloudsinmycoffee (#35959582) Attached to: Does China's Cyber Offense Obscure Woeful Defense?
I hope this young man is correct in his assessments which pretty much trash / emasculate Chinas own Cyber vulnerability in the eyes of the readers. I had read for some time already that since many or most Chinese computers run on pirated Microsoft Window products that this could be the case. I always wonder when odd perspectives like this are injected into a volatile mix in the area of Warfare / Public Opinion / Technology if their isn't some attempt being made to mold, test or to shape popular opinion. This was especially the case in WWII when there were efforts of all sort underway these releases were attempting to obscure through - 'disinformation'. During WWII this was commonplace. To what ends I cannot guess - it could be even be exotic..? Any thoughts on this from the /. Community?
Government

China's Influence Widens Nobel Peace Prize Boycott 360

Posted by timothy from the friends-of-un-friends dept.
c0lo writes "Not only did China decline to attend the upcoming Nobel peace prize ceremony, but urged diplomats in Oslo to stay away from the event warning of 'consequences' if they go. Possibly as a result of this (or on their own decisions), 18 other countries turned down the invitation: Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco. Reuters seems to think the 'consequences' are of an economic nature, pointing out that half of the countries with economies that gained global influence during recent times are boycotting the ceremony (with Brazil and India still attending)."
Image

Corporations Hiring Hooky Hunters 610

Posted by samzenpus from the taking-a-personal-detective-day dept.
No longer satisfied with your crinkled doctor's note, a growing number of corporations are hiring "Hooky Detectives." Private investigator Rick Raymond says he's staked out bowling alleys, pro football games, weddings and even funerals looking for people using sick days. From the article: "Such techniques have become permissible at a time when workers are more likely to play hooky. Kronos, a workforce productivity firm in Chelmsford, Mass., recently found that 57 percent of salaried employees take sick days when they're not sick — almost a 20 percent increase from statistics gathered between 2006 and 2008."
Media

1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film? 685

Posted by samzenpus from the I-hate-time-travel-stories dept.
Many of you have submitted a story about Irish filmmaker George Clarke, who claims to have found a person using a cellphone in the "unused footage" section of the DVD The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin movie filmed in 1928. To me the bigger mystery is how someone who appears to be the offspring of Ram-Man and The Penguin got into a movie in the first place, especially if they were talking to a little metal box on set. Watch the video and decide for yourself.
Idle

Physicists Discover Universal "Wet-Dog Shake" Rule 97

Posted by samzenpus from the thank-you-science dept.
Dog owners can sleep easy tonight because physicists have discovered how rapidly a wet dog should oscillate its body to dry its fur. Presumably, dogs already know. From the article: "Today we have an answer thanks to the pioneering work of Andrew Dickerson at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a few buddies. But more than that, their work generates an interesting new conundrum about the nature of shaken fur dynamics. Dickerson and co filmed a number of dogs shaking their fur and used the images to measure the period of oscillation of the dogs' skin. For a labrador retriever, this turns out to be 4.3 Hz."
The Military

Russian Army Upgrades Its Inflatable Weapons 197

Posted by samzenpus from the blowing-up dept.
jamax writes "According to the BBC: 'The Russian military has come up with an inventive way to deceive the enemy and save money at the same time: inflatable weapons. They look just like real ones: they are easy to transport and quick to deploy. You name it, the Russian army is blowing it up: from pretend tanks to entire radar stations.' But the interesting thing is these decoys are not dumb - actually they appear to be highly advanced for what I thought was a WWII-grade aerial photography countermeasures. Apparently they have heat signatures comparable with the military tech they represent, as well as the same radar signature."
Medicine

Possible Treatment For Ebola 157

Posted by samzenpus from the there's-a-pill-for-that dept.
RedEaredSlider writes "Researchers at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases have found a class of drugs that could provide treatment for Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fever. The new drugs are called 'antisense' compounds, and they allow the immune system to attack the viruses before they can do enough damage to kill the patient. Travis Warren, research scientist at USAMRIID, said while the work is still preliminary -— the drugs have been tested only on primates — the results are so far promising. In the case of Ebola, five of eight monkeys infected with the virus lived, and with Marburg, all survived. The drugs were developed as part of a program to deal with possible bioterrorist threats, in partnership with AVI Biopharma."
Image

Medieval Copy Protection 226

Posted by samzenpus from the thou-shall-write-your-own-book dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In medieval times a 'book curse' was often included on the inside cover or on the last leaf of a manuscripts, warning away anyone who might do the book some harm. Here's a particularly pretty one from Yale's Beinecke MS 214: 'In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. In the one thousand two hundred twenty-ninth year from the incarnation of our Lord, Peter, of all monks the least significant, gave this book to the [Benedictine monastery of the] most blessed martyr, St. Quentin. If anyone should steal it, let him know that on the Day of Judgment the most sainted martyr himself will be the accuser against him before the face of our Lord Jesus Christ.'"
Biotech

Fly Eyes Used For Solar Cells 73

Posted by samzenpus from the windows-to-the-power-pole dept.
disco_tracy writes "Researchers took corneas from blow flies, fixed them on a glass substrate, added a polymer to protect the shape and then coated nine-eye arrays in nickel within a vacuum chamber. The result was a master template that retained those useful nanoscale features and can be used to make solar cells."

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