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Submission + - Single European Copyright Title on the Horizon (dropbox.com)

Submitted by presroi
presroi writes: It has been 13 years after the last harmonization effort of copyright within the European Union and this period might soon be over. After the election of a new European Parliament in May this year, Jean-Claude Juncker has been nominated to become the new President of the European Commission. He has named a unified copyright his top priority, a statement repeated today at a hearing before the Greens/EFA group in the European parliament (transscript of the question by MEP Julia Reda and his answer in German, Video recording). These statements are coinciding with the upcoming release of a report by the General Directorate in charge of copyright, of which an advanced draft has been already leaked to the internet. The report analyzes four possible policy options, one of which is the introduction of a Single EU Copyright title.

Comment Inconvenient (Score 2) 497

Your post paints an overly simplistic view.

No, it does not. It is not a view, it is fact. When the Earth's atmosphere has a higher partial pressure of CO2 it retains more heat. That is the essential point under consideration, and the exact value of the partial pressure is irrelevant and was not mentioned. We're not talking about the political issues, or the history of the planet, only cold hard measurable facts about [a] the relationship between irradiance and re-radiation, and [b] the absorption spectrum of CO2.

However, on the separate subject you have noted, while we are indeed two orders of magnitude away from the highest CO2 levels, and the highest rates of emission, the previous atmospheric changes happened over the course of millions of years and are usually associated with mass extinctions. We've already been doing pretty well on the mass extinction front; this may not be a good time to rock the boat.

If, as I have been told, conservatives are against change, can we maybe try to not pollute every square inch of the planet? I'm from rural Alaska, and it's getting a bit melty up there. It's not a place that I really enjoy living, but the glaciers were fairly pretty, and have you seen what permafrost does when it melts? Clearly this isn't a problem where you live, but please let's not pretend that it isn't an issue elsewhere. Pollution of any sort is ugly.

Comment Re:translating for the athiests. (Score 1) 144

by swillden (#47416141) Attached to: Physicists Spot Potential Source of 'Oh-My-God' Particles

other particles we find similar to it could be given normal names like UHE particles, or super high energy rays but that doesnt secure grant funding in the theocratic Mormon state of Utah.

If the state of Utah is theocratic and makes funding decisions based on particle names, choosing blasphemous ones is not the path to big research bucks. Mormons take the prohibition against taking the name of deity in vain pretty seriously.

Submission + - The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test at Detecting AI (vice.com)

Submitted by meghan elizabeth
meghan elizabeth writes: If the Turing Test can be fooled by common trickery, it’s time to consider we need a new standard. The Lovelace Test is designed to be more rigorous, testing for true machine cognition. It was named it after Ada Lovelace, often described as the world's first computer programmer.

An intelligent computer passes the Lovelace Test only if it originates a “program” that it was not engineered to produce. The new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—can’t be a hardware fluke. Now here’s the kicker: The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program.

Comment Re:Cry Me A River (Score 1, Insightful) 608

by lgw (#47415437) Attached to: Normal Humans Effectively Excluded From Developing Software

Most of what was written in COBOL looked very much like any non-AJAX web app. Sure, there were the batch programs you describe, but mostly it was apps for terminals. Send a form, the terminal posts a reply, hit the database, send the result fields. Same-old same-old. But it was all server-side code.

There are a few WYSIWYG web editors out there, but for some reason they were never that popular. People seem to want to muck around with JavaScript and frameworks and otherwise dick around with the client side code, as if the bit that paints the screen were the important bit. That was the difference in the COBOL years - you wrote the server side and let the client take care of itself, instead of trying to do that backwards.

Submission + - DHS Mistakenly Releases 840-pages of Critical Infrastructure Documents (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Whoops! The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has mistakenly released hundreds of documents, some of which contain sensitive information and potentially vulnerable critical infrastructure points across the United States, in response to a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about a cyber-security attack.

The Operation Aurora attack was publicized in 2010 and impacted Google and a number of other high-profile companies. However, DHS responded to the request by releasing more than 800 pages of documents related to the 'Aurora' experiment conducted several years ago at the Idaho National Laboratory, where researchers demonstrated a way to damage a generator via a cyber-attack.

Of the documents released by the DHS, none were related to the Operation Aurora cyber attack as requested. Many of the 840 pages are comprised of old weekly reports from the DHS' Control System Security Program (CSSP) from 2007. Other pages that were released included information about possible examples of facilities that could be vulnerable to attack, such as water plants and gas pipelines.

When contacted by SecurityWeek, the DHS declined to comment about the situation.
The Courts

Climate Change Skeptic Group Must Pay Damages To UVA, Michael Mann 497

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the stop-trolling dept.
ideonexus (1257332) writes In January of 2014, the American Traditions Institute (ATI) sought climate scientist Micheal Mann's emails from his time at the University of Virginia, a request that was denied in the courts. Now the Virginia Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that ATI must pay damages for filing a frivolous lawsuit. Thus ends "Climategate." Hopefully.

Submission + - The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere (foreignpolicy.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: On July 3 the the entire F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fleet was being grounded after a June 23 runway fire.

The grounding could not have come at a worse time as costs have soared to an estimated $112 million per aircraft.

One thing the grounding won't do, however, is derail the F-35, a juggernaut of a program that apparently has enough political top cover to withstand any storm.

Part of that protection comes from the jaw-dropping amounts of money at stake. The Pentagon intends to spend roughly $399 billion to develop and buy 2,443 of the planes. However, over the course of the aircrafts' lifetimes, operating costs are expected to exceed $1 trillion. Lockheed has carefully hired suppliers and subcontractors in almost every state to ensure that virtually all senators and members of Congress have a stake in keeping the program — and the jobs it has created — in place.

"An upfront question with any program now is: How many congressional districts is it in?" said Thomas Christie, a former senior Pentagon acquisitions official.

Counting all of its suppliers and subcontractors, parts of the program are spread out across at least 45 states. That's why there's no doubt lawmakers will continue to fund the program even though this is the third time in 17 months that the entire fleet has been grounded due to engine problems.

Submission + - Even HHS auditors say ObamaCare enrollment numbers are unreliable (investors.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Buried in a largely overlooked government audit of the Obama-Care exchanges is a finding that casts still more doubt on the reliability of the 8 million enrollment number commonly cited by the administration and the press.

Comment Re:What happened to Scheme? (Score 1) 415

by jbolden (#47413783) Attached to: Python Bumps Off Java As Top Learning Language

I absolutely agree with you. I have some doubt though that SICP needs to be a first course.

Embedded, ROMs, low level OS components... is obviously the old paradigm. Most of an OS or VM though I'd say is going to be high level library manipulation. As for writing a library, I think it depends on the library. Most libraries today are highly dependent on other libraries.

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