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Comment Re:On the one hand... (Score 3, Insightful) 327

The reality here is though, we don't want these. We've got plenty of contracts for Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J vaccines that are safer and more efficacious than the AZ vaccine. The FDA is dragging their feet on approving it because they don't want to approve an obviously worse vaccine.

They should just sell them to the highest bidder now while other people want it and give our population the much more effective vaccines that we have a large supply of already, and orders for plenty of doses in the next couple months. If it delays the vaccine rollout by a week or two, in the long run, I think that's still superior to giving our population a less effective vaccine.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin Tops $1,000 For the First Time 371

An anonymous reader writes with this bit from The Next Web "Bitcoin hit a new milestone today, passing the $1,000 mark for the first time. The virtual currency is currently trading above the four-digit figure, with its highest at $1,030 on Mt. Gox, one of the largest exchanges. Last week, Bitcoin's high for the day was $632. That means its trading value has surged 62.83 percent in a week, assuming we're looking at just its high points. That figure could of course rise even further if Bitcoin continues to push further up throughout the day."

Comment Re:Structural Unemployment for Middle Men (Score 1) 443

What they're talking about here is the use of Steam as a copy-protection system, which is completely integrated into a game, including the retail "disk" version. When one installs it from a disk, it first prompts you to either log into steam or make a steam account, and then it installs the purchased game into the Steam folder and activates it on your steam account. The first games to do this were official retail release of Valve games, but since then, many other games have implemented it due to the various advantages of using Steam in your game (good copy protection, Achievements/stats tracking integration, ease of updating, multiplayer server browser, etc). What they're trying to say, essentially, is that these "other" retail games are promoting their competitors, and they don't like it.

Comment Re:But in-game ads will always affect gameplay (Score 1) 119

In recent years, this restriction has been relaxed. The Forza Motorsport series in particular has been putting a lot of pressure on companies to allow realistic damage modelling. In Forza Motorsport 2, one could turn on simulation damage to the vehicles that modeled performance problems that would be created by, say, bumping into a wall, even though the visual damage was limited.

In Forza 3, they're also introducing rollover for the cars, which was previously prohibited by licensors, and are introducing even more realistic damage modeling (comes out this fall)

From this article: http://kotaku.com/5284706/forza-3-car-porn-in-motion

Damage modeling for the cars, all of the cars, is also carefully detailed. And in Forza 3, all 400 cars now include the ability to completely roll over in a race, something no racing game has ever tried before, Greenawalt said. Getting permission from the 50 manufacturers for this unheard of level of damage modeling was a matter of talking to each individually. "We go to a manufacturer and say we're a sim and as a sim, cars roll over," Greenawalt said.

So I think car manufacturers are getting somewhat more lenient with these things because they know that fans want to play a racing simulation. And with Forza, at least, if some manufacturer really insists on not having the damage modeling, they just get to not be in the game, and I think most know that would be terrible publicity with all their competitors in there.

Medicine

Valuable Objects Stimulate Brain More Than Junk 118

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to researchers at the University of California at San Diego, visual areas of our brain respond more to valuable objects than other ones. In other words, our brain has stronger reactions when we see a diamond ring than we look at junk. Similarly, our brain vision areas are more excited by a Ferrari than, say, a Tata new Nano car. In this holiday season, I'm sure you've received gifts that excited your brain — and others that you already want to resell on an auction site."
Displays

Oblong's g-speak Brings "Minority Report" Interface To Life 221

tracheopterix writes "Oblong Industries, a startup based in LA has unveiled g-speak, an operational version of the notable interface from Minority Report. One of Oblong's founders served as science and technology adviser for the film; the interface was an extension of his doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab. Oblong calls g-speak a 'spatial operating environment' and adds that 'the SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984.'" The video shown on Oblong's front page is an impressive demo.
Graphics

Content-Aware Image Resizing 174

An anonymous reader writes "At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego, two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, have demonstrated a new method to shrink images. The method is called 'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing' (PDF paper here) and it figures out which parts of an image are less significant. This makes it possible to change the aspect ratio of an image without making the content look skewed or stretched out. There is a video demonstration up on YouTube."
Privacy

Submission + - Skype-Linux reads /etc/passwd and firefox profile! (skype.com)

mrcgran writes: "Users of Skype for Linux have just found out that it reads the files /etc/passwd, firefox profile, plugins, addons, etc, and many other unnecessary files in /etc. This fact was originally discovered by using AppArmor, but others have confirmed this fact using strace on versions 1.4.0.94 and 1.4.0.99. What is going on? This probably shows how important it is to use AppArmor in any closed-source application in Linux to restrict any undue access to your files."
Businesses

Submission + - Unix Admin's Unit of Production? 4

RailGunSally writes: I am a (strictly technical) member of a large *NIX systems admin team at a Fortune 150. Our new IT Management Overlord is a hardcore beancounter from Hell. We in the trenches have been tasked with providing "metrics" on absolutely everything from system utilization to paperclip recycling. Of course, measuring productivity is right up there at the top of the list. We're stumped as to a definition of the basic unit of productivity for a *nix admin. There is a school of thought in our group that holds that if the PHBs are simple enough to want to operate purely from pie charts and spreadsheets, then we should just graph some output from /dev/random and have done with it. I personally love the idea, but I feel the need for due diligence, so I put the question to the Slashdotters: How does one reasonably quantify admin productivity?

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