When I was first learning Spanish, I had a very hard time understanding some older people. To me, they sounded like they had cotton in their mouths. I assume the elderly often sound like that to foreign-speakers trying to learn another language.
I'm not trying to bash the elderly -- but they do have a unique way of sounding that language students may find challenging. Still, if you can make out their words, you can probably understand just about anyone.
netbuzz writes: A band called netcat is generating buzz in software circles by releasing its debut album as a Linux kernel module (among other more typical formats.) Why? “Are you ever listening to an album, and thinking ‘man, this sounds good, but I wish it crossed from user-space to kernel-space more often!’ We got you covered,” the band says on its Facebook page. “Our album is now fully playable as a loadable Linux kernel module.”
High school students should get some exposure to programming, but I think more useful would be typing (keyboarding, whatever you want to call it). It's an essential skill that is often overlooked and can greatly help them in most fields of study, including programming.
Raging Bool writes: As discussed in Star Trek (TOS), the concept of "race memory" is thought not to exist in practive. But the BBC is reporting (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25156510) that acquired phobias or aversions during one's lifetime can be passed on to subsequent generations. They provide a link to an abstract in the journal Nature: (http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.3594.html).
sciencehabit writes: This morning, an animal rights group known as the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a lawsuit in a New York Supreme Court in an attempt to get a judge to declare that chimpanzees are legal persons and should be freed from captivity. The suit is the first of three to be filed in three New York counties this week. They target two research chimps at Stony Brook University and two chimps on private property, and are the opening salvo in a coordinated effort to grant “legal personhood” to a variety of animals across the United States. If NhRP is successful in New York, it would upend millennia of law defining animals as property and could set off a “chain reaction” that could bleed over to other jurisdictions, says Richard Cupp, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and a prominent critic of animal rights. “But if they lose it could be a giant step backward for the movement. They’re playing with fire.”
kkleiner writes: Among the possible uses for Google Glass that early adopters are dreaming up, you can now add "surgical assistance" to the list. With approval from the institutional review board, a UCSF cardiothoracic surgeon recently utilized Glass during procedures by utilizing its voice activation features to refer to patient x-ray scans. Aimed at providing surgeons with the most up-to-date patient data, a startup named VitaMedicals is building apps to stream in patient records and live scans to the device. Even though it's early days for Glass, its potential in the medical space is huge and could revolutionize how doctor's access and apply information from patient records.
As earlier said, most people don't read the paperwork they sign. In addition, how many people with toothaches actually read fine print? They just want to get the paperwork over with and see the dentist NOW.