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Comment adblock, flashblock, ghostery and noscript (Score 1) 353

i very much agree with GroeFaz, when the ads completely drown out everything else on my machine (whether it's a pc, tablet or phone) they have to be blocked. this is especially true of ads with annoying audio. on my pc if it's just a visual ad i can switch to another desktop and not be bothered, but when the ad contains audio, game over. someday enough people will be using ad blocking technology to where the the people paying for the ads will not see any return on their money. at that point, advertisers will begin to go away (or at least in my dreams they'll go away!)

Comment texas republicans oppose teaching critical thinkin (Score 2) 553

unbelievably this is actually true. in 2012 the texas republican party opposed teaching critical thinking skills to kids http://www.washingtonpost.com/.... right from the horse's mouth: "Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." and texas sets the standards for public school books as they buy the most books and schools throughout the nation follow their lead to get lower costs. the republicans say they want to "create jobs" but fail in preparing our kids for jobs. schleprock

Comment same pathetic unsupported excuse to abuse (Score 5, Insightful) 354

"Comey cited child-kidnapping and terrorism cases as two examples of situations where quick access by authorities to information on cellphones can save lives. Comey did not cite specific past cases that would have been more difficult for the FBI to investigate" of course he didn't cite specific cases because there are NONE. this is the same pathetic unsupported excuse that law enforcement has been rolling out to put fear in the lemmings of the USA. the founders of this country knew, from past experience with Britain, that the worst enemy of the public is their own government. they put in the constitution and amendments to the constitution laws that "should" prevent the government from persecuting the public. now that the public is finally getting the technology to combat an out of control law enforcement, these clowns are whining that it make their jobs harder. and then make up unsubstantiated stories about how this will "hurt" the general public. get off your butts and get a warrant if you want to invade someone's privacy. warrant-less invasion of privacy is unconstitutional, period.

Submission + - AMD Looking To Outsource Chip Development (itworld.com)

jfruh writes: AMD, once on the ropes in its uphill battle against Intel, is now riding high, especially after getting its chips into both the PlayStation 4 and the XBox One. But years of cost-cutting and layoff have hollowed out the company, particulary in its chipset division, and now AMD may be outsourcing chipset design to companies in Asia. Is AMD giving up one of its core competencies? As blogger Andy Patrizio puts it, "No one gets excited about new chipsets like they do over a CPU, but CPUs absolutely need chipsets to run."

Submission + - Japanese Researchers Create Joke-Telling Robot Comedian

rjmarvin writes: A robot in Japan with its own standup routine https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... KOBIAN, an emotionally expressive biped robot platform http://sdt.bz/71371 was developed by researchers at Japan's Waseda University. The robot looks like a cross between a ventriloquist dummy and The Joker and while some of its jokes are lost in translation, the platform is...an iffy comedian. The researchers trained KOBIAN using a comedic rulebook they developed and presented at the 2014 IEEE ICRA Conference http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom....

Submission + - AeroVelo Aims to Build World's Fastest Bike (gizmag.com)

Zothecula writes: Following its Sikorsky Prize-winning Atlas helicopter, Canada's AeroVelo now aims to set a new human-powered speed record during September's World Human-Powered Speed Challenge in Battle Mountain, Nevada, with a high speed bicycle named Eta. The current record stands at 83.1 mph (133.8 km/h), and was set at the event last year by a Dutch team of students with the VeloX3 bike.

Submission + - New Study Shows Feasibility of 19-Year-Old's Ocean Cleanup Array (inhabitat.com)

almda writes: One year ago 19-year-old Boyan Slat unveiled an Ocean Cleanup Array that he claimed could clean 7 million tons of plastic from the world's oceans. The design went viral and received it's share of criticism — however a newly released one-year feasibility study shows that the array would indeed work as planned. Slat claims that a single array could remove half the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just 10 years.

Submission + - New "Acandescent" Light Bulbs to Challenge LEDs and CFLs (finallybulbs.com)

braindrainbahrain writes: An outfit in Massachusetts is poise to offer — no, make that "is offering" — consumer light bulbs based on induction technology, challenging the market share of LED and CFL light bulbs. Induction lighting, long used in industrial applications, was invented by none other than Nikola Tesla, and said Massachusetts company has miniaturized the technology enough to fit an implementation in a standard light bulb size.

Submission + - 'Ballistic missile' floats into flooded Russian village (rt.com)

mpicpp writes: Only in Russia could a flood bring to your doorstep a huge intercontinental ballistic missile. Or at least that's what some Russian bloggers say, after a giant metal tube mysteriously appeared in an Altay village.

The discovery was made in the village of Malougrenyevo in Altay's Biysky region. The border region located in the south of Western Siberia is currently suffering from a serious flood.

The water brought the metal construction to the home of a local traffic policeman, leaving him and his neighbors puzzled over what exactly it was.

Different theories quickly circulated, with the most popular saying that its origin was stellar. Occasionally rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan fly over this region of Russia. Some village residents came to a conclusion that it must be a spent rocket stage, possibly from the botched May Proton-M launch.

Submission + - We're About To Find Out What Happens When A Social Network Meets Drones and Bots (businessweek.com)

pacopico writes: The start-up Fatdoor launched this week with a remarkably ambitious mission. As Businessweek reports, it's combining a social network for neighborhoods with a smartphone app, a quadcopter drone and an autonomous food delivery bot. It's like all of Silicon Valley's favored things rolled up into one. The story questions whether the company has any real chance of creating unifying ties between all these products, but it should be fun watching it try.

Submission + - Forget Software Vulnerabilities, Hardware Security Must Improve Soon (ibtimes.co.uk)

concertina226 writes: While it may not be a big deal if a cybercriminal hacks your smart fridge to send spam, the potential risks associated with maliciously taking control of a pace maker or a car, are obvious to all.

To combat this problem, computer scientists from the University of California have devised a new way to detect security problems, by testing hardware and how it integrates with software. Using Gate-level Information Flow Tracking, a team of scientists from UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara have invented a tool that can tag critical parts of a hardware's security system and then monitor how each part affects the system.

Currently, the security industry's focus on analysing software for potential security vulnerabilities is based on the assumption that the chip the software runs on is completely secure — when that is not always the case.

Hardware is made up of many interconnected blocks which share resources and perform complex interactions. At times, the way the hardware is designed can enable encrypted memory to be leaked, so it's crucial to look at how software and hardware interact.

Submission + - Did the Universe have a beginning at all? 1

StartsWithABang writes: For thousands of years, there were three known possibilities concerning the origin of the Universe: it had a moment at which it sprang into existence, it had always existed eternally into the past, or it was a cyclical, repeating entity. In the 20th century, observations appeared to vindicate the Big Bang theory as the origin of our Universe, but more recently, we've learned that the Hot Big Bang was preceded by a period of cosmic inflation, and wasn't the origin of time after all. So how did the Universe get its start? A great walk through what we know, and what the viable possibilities are.

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