gorgeousplanet - Slashdot User

Comment Re:It flew under the radar (Score 1) 656

by gorgeousplanet on Wednesday July 09, 2008 @09:09PM (#24127949) Attached to: Best Buy Is Selling Ubuntu

the business owner isn't apparently entitled to earn a little money, either.

If you can get these things for free, and are willing to do the work yourself, then fine, do so and don't pay Best Buy to do it for you. Best Buy, OTOH, shouldn't be expected to do it for you for free when it costs them money to do it.

My parents own a small restaurant and I currently work at Best Buy: You summed up what I was thinking exactly. Thank You!

Robots Aim To Top Humans At Air Hockey 177

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 09, 2008 @05:17PM from the air-hockey-tables-suck dept.

An anonymous reader writes "You probably knew that the Deep Blue supercomputer beats chess masters, and that last weekend a software robot defeated four poker champions. But you may have missed this one: a GE Fanuc robot is taking on humans at air hockey. The robot is powered by a special PC-board that can instantly switch between 8-bit and its 32-bit modes. The 8-bit version lost to most human players, but the 32-bit microcontroller has defeated even the best human air hockey players by a ratio of three to one."

Scientists Find Believing Can Be Seeing 169

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 21, 2008 @08:58AM from the the-mind-is-quicker-than-the-eye dept.

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Scientists at University College London have found the link between what we expect to see, and what our brain tells us we actually saw revealing that the context surrounding what we see is all important — sometimes overriding the evidence gathered by our eyes and even causing us to imagine things which aren't really there. A vague background context is more influential and helps us to fill in more blanks than a bright, well-defined context. This may explain why we are prone to 'see' imaginary shapes in the shadows when the light is poor. "Illusionists have been alive to this phenomenon for years," said Professor Zhaoping. "When you see them throw a ball into the air, followed by a second ball, and then a third ball which 'magically' disappears, you wonder how they did it. In truth, there's often no third ball — it's just our brain being deceived by the context, telling us that we really did see three balls launched into the air, one after the other." The original research paper is available on PLOS, the open-access, peer-reviewed journal."

Identical Twins Not Identical After All 159

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 21, 2008 @04:56AM from the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Contrary to previous beliefs, identical twins are not genetically identical. Researchers studied 19 pairs of monozygotic, or identical, twins and found differences in copy number variation in DNA which occurs when a set of coding letters in DNA are missing, or when extra copies of segments of DNA are produced. In most cases, variation in the number of copies likely has no impact on health or development but in others, it may be one factor in the likelihood of developing a disease (pdf). "Those differences may point the way to better understanding of genetic diseases when we study so-called discordant monozygotic twins....a pair of twins where one twin has a disorder and the other does not," says Carl Bruder, Ph.D. "If twin A develops Parkinson's and twin B does not, the region of their genome where they show differences is a target for further investigation to discover the basic genetic underpinnings of the disease.""

Should Addictive Tech Come With a Health Warning? 329

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday February 20, 2008 @06:51PM from the nanny-state dept.

holy_calamity writes "Academics researching how technology addiction affects businesses and employees say 'habit-forming' gadgets like Blackberries should be dispensed along with warnings about the effect they can have on your life. 'We don't want to be in a situation in a few years similar to that with fast food or tobacco today. We need to pay attention to how people react to potentially habit-forming technologies.'"

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