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Comment Re:What they NEED to hear!? Goebbels quotation?? (Score 3, Funny) 396

by Smegly (#30932176) Attached to: Does Personalized News Lead To Ignorance?

Repeat with me... Corporations and Governments losing power to people is gooooooood.

Exactly. Todays youth have a much more balanced and informed opinion than any other time in history - now that the hierarchical control of information flow is breaking down. The ability to balance out corporate/government-MIC propaganda that has dominated News and print media almost since its inception with alternative points of view is a very good thing. From "New Media"

it has been the contention of scholars such as Douglas Kellner, Callum Rymer and James Bohman that new media, and particularly the Internet, provide the potential for a democratic postmodern public sphere, in which citizens can participate in well informed, non-hierarchical debate pertaining to their social structures. Contradicting these positive appraisals of the potential social impacts of new media are scholars such as Ed Herman and Robert McChesney who have suggested that the transition to new media has seen a handful of powerful transnational telecommunications corporations who achieve a level of global influence which was hitherto unimaginable.
Earth

Dinosaur Feather Color Discovered 219

Posted by timothy from the horsefeathers-still-a-mystery dept.
anzha writes "Do you remember being a kid and told we'd never know what colors the dinosaurs were? For at least some, that's no longer true. Scientists working in the UK and China have closely examined the fossils of multiple theropods and actually found the colors and patterns that were present in the fossilized proto-feathers. So far, the answer is orange, black and white in banded and other patterns. The work also thoroughly thrashes the idea that fossils might not be feathers, but collagen fibers instead. If this holds up, Birds Are Dinosaurs. Period. And colorful!"

Comment Re:How do we know it's not already in use? (Score 1) 393

by Smegly (#30834608) Attached to: Newly-Found Windows Bug Affects All Versions Since NT

It is not unthinkable that Microsoft has some (kind of) agreement with NSA with respect to not fixing these kind of security holes.

Your sooo flirting with the Trolls on that one - even whispering that idea is bound to rile up the Microsoft/Gov astroTurfers. You could be absolutely right - it would be the logical way to extraofficially backdoor your closed source operating system - but it would be almost impossible to either disprove or prove that it is/is not indeed a deliberate back door. When/if it is ever publicized then it can be shrugged off and downplayed as just another serious security flaw (despite it just happening to affect every version of your OS, for decades + be ignored when finally did come to light).
The Almighty Buck

Virtual Currency Becomes Real In South Korea 203

Posted by Soulskill from the license-to-print-money dept.
garylian writes "Massively is reporting that the South Korean Supreme Court has stated that virtual currency is the equivalent of real-world money. For those of you who might not be drawing the link, the core there is that selling in-game currency for real money is essentially just an exchange of currency and perfectly legal in South Korea. This could have sweeping implications for RMT operations the world over, not to mention free-to-play games and... well, online games in general. The official story is available online from JoongAng Daily."
Apple

Submission + - The Art of leaking news : Learning it from Apple (etiole.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The first thing i see when i log on to Digg.com is some Apple news. When i start reading articles in my RSS reader, all i see is Apple Rumors on all blogs. Who gives birth to these rumors? Why is everyone interested in Apple news? How does it spread so fast?

Submission + - How the Great Firewall Works, and Evading It (scitedaily.com) 1

Submitted by blee37
blee37 writes: This article describes the nuts and bolts of the Great Firewall of China. Surprisingly, it "censors" sites by sending TCP reset requests to the client and server and relies on these endpoint computers to comply with the reset request. It is shown that using a one line Unix command to ignore TCP resets defeats the Great Firewall. Original analysis done by Dr. Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge.
Patents

Submission + - U.S. patent legislation being forced upon world (erikjosefsson.eu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It looks like the American government is strong-arming even stricter responsibilities and liabilities to the EU and some other countries than is the current U.S. patent and copyright legislation in ACTA meeting in Mexico. ACTA is supposedly about product counterfeighting and piracy, but it looks like it will be specifically about patents and copyrights and the purpose is to get individual countries to sign treaties. In which case they are forced to harmonise their legislation. Amongst others MEP Heidi Hautala writes (http://translate.google.fi/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=fi&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heidihautala.fi%2F2010%2F01%2Facta-neuvottelujen-salailun-loputtava%2F&sl=fi&tl=en): This phenomenon is a case of policy laundering, laundering procedure. Such a, course of action logic is simple. In principle, be signed by the public is that international agreements are important, and countries will comply with them. In this case, governments are using this general acceptance of its advantage. The parties negotiate behind closed doors for itself the right of political agreement. When the names are in the paper, the agreement is a fait accompli that is a fait accompli. Then it is too late to make a noise of the basic rights of forgetting — after all, a jointly agreed upon internationally. Negotiations are the big winners in the film, disc and gaming companies. The losers are the citizens.
Movies

Submission + - SPAM: James Cameron on how 'Avatar' technology could kee

Submitted by Suki I
Suki I writes: "Sure, it’s terrific for turning human actors into big blue alien Na’vis. But the photorealistic CGI technology James Cameron perfected for Avatar could easily be used for other, even more mind-blowing purposes—like, say, bringing Humphrey Bogart back to life, or making Clint Eastwood look 35 again. “How about another Dirty Harry movie where Clint looks the way he looked in 1975?” Cameron suggests. “Or a James Bond movie where Sean Connery looks the way he did in Doctor No? How cool would that be?”"

The article goes on to quite James Cameron as saying you still need actors to play the roles and "bringing back" dead actors still requires someone to play them.
Link to Original Source
Google

Submission + - Why China is Making a Mistake with Google

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Daniel Gross has an interesting essay in Slate that explores the question: Can China continue to grow without allowing Google—and the next Googles of the world—free rein in China? For the last 30 years, China has been testing a new model writes Gross: economic development at a breakneck pace while retaining strict limits on personal liberty, a model that has wrenched the nation into the 21st century displacing the United States as the world's largest car market and longtime rival Japan as the second-largest economy. But much of China's extraordinary development has been based on moving peasants into manufacturing while the key to future growth will lie in the services sector. Going forward, it will become more difficult for a services-based economy to prosper with restraints on communication and expression says Gross. China faces a fundamental paradox, adds Damien Ma, an analyst at the Eurasia Group. "It needs to have fairly closed information flow for political stability purposes, but doing so stifles innovation." And that's the problem. "Any type of political system can produce excellent hardware. The Soviet Union, which ruled Russia when Google co-founder Sergey Brin was born there in 1973, managed to produce nuclear weapons and satellites," writes Gross. "But in the 21st century, a country needs great software in order to thrive. It has to have a culture that facilitates the flow of information, not just goods.""
Politics

Submission + - Fed up with the RIAA, a Senate candidate in MA (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Massachusetts software developer, Ken Takusagawa, fed up with the court decisions such as RIAA v. Tenenbaum and MGM v. Grokster, is mounting a independent write-in campaign for the Massachusetts special U.S. Senate election on Tuesday, using Lawrence Lessig's book "Free Culture" as the basis of his campaign platform.
Google

Submission + - Possibly Copyright Immunity For Google? (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by krou
krou writes: A proposed amendment to the UK Digital Economy Bill from Conservative Lord Lucas says that 'Every provider of a publicly accessible website shall be presumed to give a standing and non-exclusive license to providers of search engine services to make a copy of some or all of the content of that website, for the purpose only of providing said search engine services ... A provider of search engine services who acts in accordance with this section shall not be liable for any breach of copyright...'. If accepted this could 'give Google legal immunity with which to index News Corp content'. However, Lord Lucas has proposed a provision, which states: 'The presumption (of having an automatic license) may be rebutted by explicit evidence that such a licence was not granted. Such explicit evidence shall be found only in the form of statements in a machine-readable file to be placed on the website and accessible to providers of search engine services.' In other words, if you put up a robots.txt file blocking a search engine, you are withholding this right. I think Murdoch is about ready to deploy a nuke on Lord Lucas.
Science

Submission + - Aussie quantum experiment challenges Einstein (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by mask.of.sanity
mask.of.sanity writes: Australian scientists have completed ground-breaking research using quantum computing that will challenge, among scientific principles, the theory of quantum mechanics.

A joint experiment between the University of Queensland (UQ) and Harvard University, the first of its kind to apply quantum mechanics to chemistry to predict molecular reactions, could have huge implications for science. It used a 2 qubit (quantum bit), "toy" experiment that is expected to form the basis of experiments using hundreds of qubits — more than the entire computational capacity of the planet — inside of 50 years.

UQ physics professor Andrew White, a co-author of the project, said the existence of quantum computing means that either quantum mechanics is wrong, or the Church Turing Thesis, which underpins computer science, is flawed.

“If the Church Turing Thesis is wrong, that’s really big news; or it means that quantum computing will turn out to be impossible for a fundamental reason, or that a fast classical factoring algorithm exists,” White said, referring to a theory by MIT assistant professor Scott Aaronson that the only way to prove the probability of quantum mechanics is to build a quantum computer.

“If you asked [the inventors of the diode] what good they have done, they might have said they can shrink a computer to the size of a living room, but they would never have guessed what computers would become – this is where we are at."

Due to the nature of science, the ramifications of the experiment are essentially unknown, however, White postulates that it could be used to predict the outcome of chemical reactions, albeit without the inherent randomness that is absent in controlled computer simulations. White said a 300 qubit register can store more information than the number of particles in the universe.

Submission + - U.S. Coast Guard wants to kill LORAN-C (insidegnss.com)

Submitted by adaviel
adaviel writes: LORAN (Long Range Aids to Navigation) is an electronic navigation system using low-frequency radio, used by many boaters (including me) before GPS. It has an approximately 200m accuracy and is a functional replacement in case GPS fails or the US implements selective availability in time of war. The US Coast Guard intends to turn it off starting February 8.

Comment Re:Logic fail (Score 1) 234

by Smegly (#30709086) Attached to: The Gradual Erosion of the Right To Privacy

If this argument was "Well, all my neighbors steal cars, so it's okay if I steal cars too," people would immediately point out how broken that is. But when it's about privacy, suddenly that doesn't apply?

Exactly. It also does not apply when the majority of the neighbors all download content online - that makes them all evil thieving pirates. Because of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with the copyright laws and their never ending extension periods and stealing from the public domain without giving anything back.
Of course, loss of privacy suits the aims of the establishment, while downloading does not - you don't have to look very hard to find a large chunk of laws that serve the business interests of those who payed to have them put in place.

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