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Privacy

Submission + - Oliver Stone: "The US has become an Orwellian State" (rt.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Americans are living in an Orwellian state argue Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick, as they sit down with RT to discuss US foreign policy and the Obama administration’s disregard for the rule of law. Both argue that Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and that people have forgiven him a lot because of the “nightmare of the Bush presidency that preceded him.” “He has taken all the Bush changes, he basically put them into the establishment, he has codified them,” Stone told RT. “It is an Orwellian state. It might not be oppressive on the surface, but there is no place to hide. Some part of you is going to end up in the database somewhere.” According to Kuznick, American citizens live in a fish tank where their government intercepts more than 1.7 billion messages a day. “That is email, telephone calls, other forms of communication.”
Advertising

Submission + - Empty Times Square Building generates $23 Million a Year from Digital Ads (rt.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: 'Advertising things at the right place is proving to be a cash cow, as electronic ads earn about $23mn each year for an empty building at One Times Square – the iconic tourist destination in the New York City. A 25-story Manhattan office building that has long been empty keeps on bringing in millions to its owner as a billboard. Michael Phillips, CEO of Atlanta-based Jamestown Properties, bought One Times Square through a fund in 1997 for $117 million, as the Wall Street Journal reports. Above 100mn pedestrians pass through the square each year, which is 90% more than 16 years ago, says the Times Square Alliance, a non-profit business improvement organization. And this is what makes a price tag for having a company’s name placed on the building the highest in the world, even above such crowded tourist destinations as Piccadilly Circus in London. Dunkin' Brands Group Inc. pays $3.6mn a year for a Dunkin' Donuts digital sign on the One Times Square building, with Anheuser-Busch InBev paying another $3.4mn a year for its advertisement. Sony and News America pay $4mn a year for a shared sign.'
Government

Submission + - Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email (allgov.com) 1

Submitted by davidwr
davidwr writes: Before passing the Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act, the Senate dropped an amendment which would require the feds to get warrants before looking at mail older than 6 months that is stored on a 3rd-party server.

This means the status quo, dating from the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, remains.

Submission + - Iranian TV Channels forcibly removed from 3 different TV Satellites (rt.com) 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The Islamic Republic of Iran used to be able to broadcast several of its state-run TV channels, including the Al Jazeera-like English language news channel "Press TV", using a number of international satellite TV providers. This allowed Iranians and other people living in territories like Europe, Asia and America to watch Iranian Television, and to be able to get an Iranian perspective on various things, particularly via the English-language "Press TV" news channel. Now, Iran's TV channels are being forcibly removed by one Satellite Operator after another, with vague "Sanctions" against Iran, agreed upon by the European Union, being cited as the reason. French Eutelsat has removed all of Iran's TV channels from its service. So has British satellite operator Arqiva. The latest Satellite operator to remove all of Iran's channels from its service has been Spain's Hispasat. Whether you like Iran as a country or not — it is a politically repressive and highly religious conservative country — it seems that the West is actively trying to silence & eradicate Iran's television presence in Europe and elsewhere. That raises an interesting question: How would the West react if a number of satellite operators suddenly threw out important Western channels like CNN, BBC, France 24, Deutsche Welle and others, and you couldn't watch these channels anywhere anymore? There would likely be tangible outrage and accusations of "Politically Motivated Censorship". Well, this precise course of action is being applied to Iran's television channels, and the fact that this is happening is barely even mentioned in Western news.
Movies

Submission + - Has 3D Film-Making had its Day? (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The BBC reports: 'It's three years since audiences around the world swarmed into cinemas to see James Cameron's Avatar. It rapidly became the biggest grossing film of all time, in part because of its ground-breaking digital 3D technology. But, in retrospect, Avatar now seems the high-point of 3D movie-making, with little since 2009 to challenge its achievement. Three years on, has the appeal of 3D gone flat? Nic Knowland has been a respected director of photography in Britain for 30 years. He's seen cinema trends and fads come and go, but never one for which he's had so little enthusiasm as 3D. "From the cinematographer's perspective it may offer production value and scale to certain kinds of film. But for many movies it offers only distraction and some fairly uncomfortable viewing experiences for the audience. I haven't yet encountered a director of photography who's genuinely enthusiastic about it." Nic Knowland's opinion of 3D is backed by another British cinematographer Oliver Stapleton, who has shot Hollywood movies such as The Cider House Rules and The Proposal. "3D is antithetical to storytelling, where immersion in character is the goal. It constantly reminds you you're watching a screen — and it completely prevents emotional involvement. Natural human vision bears no resemblance to 3D in the cinema. 2D doesn't reveal the smoke and mirrors of filmmaking in the same way. Of course that's partly because we're used to it, but also — it's not trying to mimic our vision. My goal as a cinematographer is to make the stitches in the cloth invisible. 3D says 'Look at me, I'm a picture!', 2-D simply says 'Once upon a time...'"'

Submission + - Instagram hit with Class-Action Lawsuit after TOS Changes (rt.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Russia Today reports: 'Instagram is facing a civil lawsuit as a result of the changes it introduced to its Terms of Service (TOS) last week, prompting user backlash, protests and many threats to quit the photo-sharing app. The lawsuit comes after Instagram announced changes to its TOS last week to include worrisome stipulations, such as the power to sell users’ photos without warning or compensation, and a mandatory arbitration clause, forcing users to waive their rights to participate in a class-action lawsuit except under very limited circumstances. Following public outrage, Instagram backpedaled on the announced changes by deleting some of the language about using photos for advertisements without compensation. However, the company retained the mandatory arbitration clause and kept the ability to place ads in conjunction with user content, indicating that “we may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such.” '

Comment This is a seriously bad idea I think... (Score 0) 204

by dryriver (#42382771) Attached to: FDA Closer To Approving Biotech Salmon
Not only does nobody know what kind of changes this genetically altered Salmon will affect in the ecosystem and food chain it is released into; We also won't know for sure, for maybe a decade or two, what eating this genetically modified FrankenSalmon will or won't do to a person's health. What if people eating this GM Fish suddenly start getting weird cancers and tumors in their bowels or elsewhere 10 years down the line? Who will be held accountable for this? And what if it takes years and years and dozens of cases before it can be demonstrated, conclusively, that this GM Fish causes the cancer? ---- I think that this whole thing smacks of putting profits before public health. Precisely _what_ is so wrong with regular Salmon that the world needs a FrankenSalmon that grows at twice the rate of the natural design? ----- What happens when eating this GM Fish starts killing people or making them sick? Will the "manufacturer" delve into the ecosystem and try to "recall" tens of thousands of GM Fish by catching them before someone eats them? ------ Some people will disagree with me, but the whole thing strikes me as an "extreme exercise in stupid", and "an accident waiting to happen". There is no way I would eat this FrankenSalmon, or let my kids eat it. Regular Salmon does just fine for me, thank you! ------

Submission + - Bee Venom has "Botox-like Effect", is worth 7 times as much as Gold (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The BBC reports that cosmetic products using Bee Venom as an ingredient are a new "hot seller" in the cosmetics market. Bee venom is said to have an effect on female skin similar to Botox injections, tightening the skin and making wrinkles and other signs of aging appear less pronounced than before. Unlike Botox, however, bee venom does not need to be injected, and can be absorbed through the skin naturally as an ingredient of cosmetic skin creme. Now comes the kicker: A special electrified device that causes bees to sting a synthetic membrane and release their venom can harvest about 1 gram of bee venom from 20 bee hives. That 1 gram of bee venom is worth a whopping 350 Dollars in the market. This makes Bee Venom almost 7 times more valuable than Gold, which, in comparison, is worth only about 53 Dollars per 1 gram. Cosmetics experts are still debating whether Bee Venom has any tangible, or positive effect on human skin at all. But the market for Bee Venom based cosmetics has taken off big time. And that, by itself, has made Bee Venom one of the most expensive substances, per gram, on earth.
Space

Submission + - Asteroid '2011 AG5' will miss Earth in 2040 (cnn.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: CNN reports: 'On a day when global doomsday predictions failed to pan out, NASA had more good news for the Earth: An asteroid feared to be on a collision course with our planet no longer poses a threat. Uncertainties about the orbit of the asteroid, known as 2011 AG5, previously allowed for a less than a 1% chance it would hit the Earth in February 2040, NASA said. To narrow down the asteroid's future course, NASA put out a call for more observation. Astronomers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa took up the task and managed to observe the asteroid over several days in October. "An analysis of the new data conducted by NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shows that the risk of collision in 2040 has been eliminated," NASA declared Friday. The asteroid, which is 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter, will get no closer to Earth than 890,000 kilometers (553,000 miles), or more than twice the distance to the moon, NASA said. A collision with Earth would have released about 100 megatons of energy, several thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II, according to the Gemini Observatory.'

Comment There is going to be a day when... (Score 3, Insightful) 354

by dryriver (#42352391) Attached to: Taking Sense Away: Confessions of a Former TSA Screener
... America wakes up to the fact that measures like intrusive TSA screenings are all about keeping the ordinary American scared of "bad guys", and not about improving security tangibly. There are many countries around the world that don't have the equivalent of the "TSA", yet manage to get through year after year without a major incident. Americans, however, are not supposed to wake up, ever. That's what you get when a handful of ill intentioned lobbyists and gatekeepers control virtually the entire media, most large corporations, and a lot of the government decisions and lawmaking in a country.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Prototyping a Realtime Video Processing Algorithm?

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Myself and 2 fellow programmers have written a video processing algorithm in C# that does some pretty useful things, but that, annoyingly, only runs at around 1 — 2 frames per second under .NET 4 (managed code). We now want to take a crack at creating a realtime version of our algorithm that can process a live video feed at 25 — 30 FPS, but we don't know where to start with this. Writing a GPU accelerated version using CUDA or OpenCL will be difficult and time consuming, since none of us have any prior experience with GPU programming. Same thing goes for using an FPGA or similar accelerator hardware. We have no experience programming for that. We keep thinking: "There must be some clever software environment that allows custom-written video processing algorithms to run in realtime." But we don't know what that software environment might be, or what it is called. We've googled around for such a solution, but haven't found anything usable so far. Does anybody in the Slashdot community know a clever software environment — possibly open source — that would let us create and run a 25 — 30 FPS realtime version of our video processing algorithm? We really need this to happen, as virtually all companies we have shown our algorithm to ask to see a realtime version of it running on live video, before they negotiate with us about commercializing our algorithm. Thanks very much in advance, fellow Slashdotters, for any advice given!
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Qatar Company to make $1 Billion Film about Prophet Mohammed (rawstory.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Qatar-based company Alnoor Holding has said it will raise the budget for a planned movie series on the life of the Prophet Mohammed to $1 billion dollars from the $150 million announced three years ago. The biopics will be produced as a series of “seven films — instead of three films as per an earlier announcement — with a total budget of $1 billion”. The company said “the team of experts has finished writing the scenario after overcoming numerous artistic and dramatic challenges.” The biggest practical challenge faced by Alnoor? Islam does not permit visual portrayals of the Prophet Mohammed. The prophet may not be depicted in drawings, images, paintings or on film, played by an actor. So one of the world's most expensive film series will revolve around a leading character — Islam's holy Prophet — who is never actually shown on screen. How you can make 7 films about a figure who cannot be depicted on screen is an interesting question that will only be answered when the films actually go into production...
Facebook

Submission + - How to Download Your Instagram Photos (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by AlistairCharlton
AlistairCharlton writes: If you are uncomfortable with new Instagram Terms of Service, we look at the easiest ways for you to download your Instagram photos, and how to delete your account details permanently.
Patents

Submission + - Defeat For Apple, US Judge Rejects It's Design Patents (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: In one of the most dramatic, controversial and written about court cases, judge Koh has denied Apple's motion for an injunction against Samsung devices. The judge says Apple has failed to prove Samsung caused any irreparable harm to the iPhone maker.

In sum, to the limited extent that Apple has been able to show that any of its harms were caused by Samsung’s illegal conduct (in this case, only trade dress dilution), Apple has not established that the equities support an injunction. Accordingly, Apple’s motion for a permanent injunction is DENIED.

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