Comment Software patents (Score 1) 282
Maybe this will finally spur the abolishment of software patents.
Comment I'm a believer (Score 1) 544
I think technology is causing short/medium term unemployment. The problem is that the size of "displacements" is large and it's impacting skillsets people once thought were immune from automation. Manufacturing output in the U.S. is back to pre-recession levels, but manufacturing employment hasn't recovered at all. Companies are now second-level automating -- replacing the data entry jobs (and the "power-users") that once drove business processes with more yet more automation. But in the long run, people and economies will certainly adjust and new opportunities emerge. Not to mention that technology is also creating tons of new jobs, either directly in IT or by helping "old" industries find their way back to countries like the U.S.
Anti-Speed Camera Activist Buys Police Department's Web Domain 680
Brian McCrary just bought a website to complain about a $90 speeding ticket he received from the Bluff City PD — the Bluff City Police Department site. The department let its domain expire and McCrary was quick to pick it up. From the article: "Brian McCrary found the perfect venue to gripe about a $90 speeding ticket when he went to the Bluff City Police Department's website, saw that its domain name was about to expire, and bought it right out from under the city's nose. Now that McCrary is the proud owner of the site, bluffcitypd.com, the Gray, Tenn., computer network designer has been using it to post links about speed cameras — like the one on US Highway 11E that caught him — and how people don't like them."
Microsoft Shows Full 3D XNA Games On Windows Phone 70
suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has shown off XNA games running on Windows Phone; full 3D is a go. From Engadget: 'Microsoft just showed us a pair of 3D games running on its ASUS Windows Phone prototype and built with its brand new XNA Game Studio 4.0 9. The two titles are The Harvest, a good looking touch-controlled dungeon crawler with destructible environments, being developed by Luma Arcade; and Battle Punks. Microsoft spoke to the ease of its Direct3D development platform, which was built by the same folks responsible for the first-gen Xbox. What we saw of The Harvest was built in "two or three weeks," mostly from scratch, and folks who've already built games for XNA in VisualStudio shouldn't have much trouble with a port from the sound of things: "very, very easy," said Microsoft. Right now developers can do their testing in Windows, but there should be a Windows Phone 7 Series emulator out for devs eventually.'"
Comment No recreation leave in Antarctica (Score 1) 226
My favorite part:
"You will accrue recreation leave at the equivalent of 20 days for each full year worked. Please note that recreation leave is not available in Antarctica."
Comment Overbuilt & Aging Rapidly (Score 1) 52
I thought the main benefit of "elasticity" was remove "peak usage" as a primary buying factor. If you have a routine that can run, well whenever, then is EC2 any cheaper than using whatever is sitting around unused in your shop already?
The cloud may be a useful resource, but the size & speed of the cloudrush has been overestimated by the entire freakin' industry. By the time it gets sorted and a mature market develops, Microsoft, Amazon, and whomever else will be taking write-downs on all the obsolete kit they built-up in 2008-2009.
Comment It's a brilliant excuse for a late project... (Score 1) 691
If they're right, what's the point in further funding?
The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and Fate 691
Reader Maximum Prophet sends a piece from the NY Times by the usually reliable Dennis Overbye reporting on a "crazy" theory being worked up by a pair of "otherwise distinguished physicists": that the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson. Maximum Prophet adds, "This happened to the Superconducting Super Collider in the science fiction story Einstein's Bridge. Now Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, are theorizing that it's happening in real life." "I'm talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."
Comment Check out the Eco-section of the website... (Score 1) 359
It's like finding 'hypocrisy' in the dictionary:
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/environment/index.html
