concealment - Slashdot User

Submission + - Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias (reuters.com)

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concealment

on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @04:20PM

concealment writes: "Of the 18,335 employment cases filed in 2010 with California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing, one-fifth cited age. That puts age below retaliation as a discrimination claim, but above racial discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual orientation.

Nationally, retaliation is also the most frequently cited discrimination claim, according to the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. But age comes much lower down on the national list, below race, sex, and disability.

The federal agency says age is cited in 26 percent of total complaints in California, compared to 22 percent in New York and 21 percent in Texas. Among large states, Illinois had the highest ratio of age-related complaints, at 37 percent."

Submission + - Red light cameras raise crash risk, cost (courierpostonline.com) 1

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concealment

on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @02:33PM

concealment writes: "A pilot program for red-light cameras in New Jersey appears to be changing drivers’ behavior, state officials said Monday, noting an overall decline in traffic citations and right-angle crashes.

The Department of Transportation also said, however, that rear-end crashes have risen by 20 percent and total crashes are up by 0.9 percent at intersections where cameras have operated for at least a year."

Submission + - Social Media Has A Black Friday (wsj.com)

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concealment

on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @11:47AM

concealment writes: "Given the amount of attention paid by brands and retailers to building up their buzz on social platforms, consumers don’t seem to clicking through and buying much: just 0.34% of all online sales on Black Friday came from referrals from social networks like Facebook FB -0.86%, Twitter and YouTube"

Submission + - Revealed: Google's manual for its unseen humans who rate the web (theregister.co.uk)

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concealment

on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @09:39AM

concealment writes: "Technology? Yes, but also toiling home-workers

Exclusive It's widely believed that Google search results are produced entirely by computer algorithms — in large part because Google would like this to be widely believed. But in fact a little-known group of home-worker humans plays a large part in the Google process. The way these raters go about their work has always been a mystery. Now, The Register has seen a copy of the guidelines Google issues to them."

Submission + - How Google Plans to Find the UnGoogleable (technologyreview.com)

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concealment

on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @09:34AM

concealment writes: "If Google is to achieve its stated mission to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible,” says Wiley, it must find out about those hidden needs and learn how to serve them. And he says experience sampling—bugging people to share what they want to know right now, whether they took action on it or not—is the best way to do it. “Doing that on a mobile device is a relatively new technology, and it’s getting us better information that we really haven’t had in the past,” he says.

Wiley isn’t ready to share results from the study just yet, but this participant found plenty of examples of relatively small pieces of information that I’d never turn to Google for. For example, how long the line currently is in a local grocery store. Some offline activities, such as reading a novel, or cooking a meal, generated questions that I hadn’t turned to Google to answer—mainly due to the inconvenience of having to grab a computer or phone in order to sift through results."

Submission + - Dual-identity smartphones could bridge BYOD private, corporate divide (networkworld.com)

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concealment

on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @09:30AM

concealment writes: "Late next year, consumers will be able to buy smartphones that either come with native hypervisor software or use an app allowing them to run two interfaces on the phone: one for personal use, one for work."

Submission + - Believe it or not, the smartphone is 20 years old (networkworld.com)

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concealment

on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @09:27AM

concealment writes: "The IBM Simon was rolled out on Nov. 23, 1992, at Comdex, though it was code-named “Angler” at the time. You likely couldn’t have fit it in your pocket, given that it was about the size of today’s Nexus 7, but then, at 18 ounces in weight, it probably would’ve made you walk funny anyway. It sported a 16MHz processor, 1MB of memory and 1MB of storage. Its operating system was a variant of DOS.

Its external app ecosystem consisted of exactly one program—a PC-to-Simon texting tool called DispatchIt, which cost $3000 for the PC software and an additional $300 for every Simon client. To be fair, however, it could do some things modern smartphones can’t, like accept fax transmissions."

Submission + - Federal officials take down 132 websites in 'Cyber Monday' crackdown (thehill.com)

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concealment

on Monday November 26, 2012 @03:36PM

concealment writes: "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and European officials seized 132 websites on Monday for allegedly selling counterfeit merchandise in a coordinated crackdown timed to coincide with the holiday shopping season.

It is the third straight year that the government has seized websites on "Cyber Monday" — the marketing term for the Monday after Thanksgiving, when many online retailers offer steep discounts and promotions."

Submission + - Will Google Go the Way of Microsoft? Ask the FTC (cio.com)

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concealment

on Monday November 26, 2012 @02:16PM

concealment writes: "The biggest threat to Google isn't Apple, Microsoft or Amazon — it's the U.S. government. Within the next several months, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission may sue Google for antitrust violations. If it does, Google will most likely end up like Microsoft after the government filed suit against it in the 1990s — distracted and unable to plan for the future.

The biggest potential antitrust issue is whether Google unfairly manipulates its search results to point at its own services rather than competitors'. So, for example, the suit might charge that Google manipulates search results to direct consumers to Google Places rather than Yelp or to Google Shopping rather than Pricegrabber or Shopzilla. Another potential issue is whether Google's AdWords marketplace discriminates against ads from services that compete with Google's services."

Submission + - Social-Media Shaming About A Dumb Photo Gets Dangerous (readwrite.com) 2

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concealment

on Monday November 26, 2012 @02:09PM

concealment writes: "Those participating in social-media shaming generally say they have done so to right a wrong. In this case, the wrong presumably would be disrespecting those whoâ€ve died defending the United States. In fact, itâ€s plainly obvious that Stone is comically trying to offend a sign.

The people memorialized at Arlington died defending our rights, including, significantly, free speech.

The busybodies went further than expressing their outrage. They defamed her on Facebook and harassed her out of a job."

Submission + - Facebook asking users to vote against right to vote (cnn.com)

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concealment

on Monday November 26, 2012 @01:58PM

concealment writes: "Facebook will hold a vote, possibly later this week, in which it will ask users to abolish their right to vote on changes to the social network's privacy policies."

Submission + - Hardware vendors sue Dutch government over copyright levies (itworld.com)

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concealment

on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @01:13PM

concealment writes: "Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Dell and Imation are suing the Dutch government over new levies on hard disks, smartphones, tablets and MP3 players that are meant to compensate the music and movie industries for losses caused by home copying.

"The companies now hold the State liable for all damages caused by the levies," the hardware vendors said in a joint news release on Wednesday. Trade association FIAR Consumer Electronics, which has as members companies such as Samsung, Sharp, Sony and LG, is also a party to the litigation. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the District Court of The Hague."

Submission + - Outrage in India over arrests for Facebook posts (chron.com)

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concealment

on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @01:08PM

concealment writes: "As India's financial capital shut down for the weekend funeral of a powerful politician linked to waves of mob violence, a woman posted on Facebook that the closures in Mumbai were "due to fear, not due to respect." A friend of hers hit the "like" button.

For that, both women were arrested.

Analysts and the media are slamming the Maharashtra state government for what they said was a flagrant misuse of the law and an attempt to curb freedom of expression. The arrests were seen as a move by police to prevent any outbreak of violence by supporters of Bal Thackeray, a powerful Hindu fundamentalist politician who died Saturday."

Submission + - How Intel's faith in x86 cost it the mobile market (theregister.co.uk)

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concealment

on Tuesday November 20, 2012 @09:17AM

concealment writes: "Intel executives continue to claim that the key benefit of x86 is compatibility: with Windows and with the vast library of application software already coded for the platform. Otellini banked on buyers wanting to run that software on their mobile devices too.

May be they do, though there’s no real evidence to show that that’s the case. Certainly, users have exerted little pressure on makers of ARM-based mobile devices to develop x86-based versions that can run Windows and Windows apps. Yes, Microsoft is offering an x86 version of its Surface tablet, but that’s as much about Redmond playing all the angles as a firm sense that some folk don’t want an ARM-based Surface."

Submission + - Why big data could sink Europe's "right to be forgotten" (gigaom.com)

Submitted by

concealment

on Tuesday November 20, 2012 @09:13AM

concealment writes: "Europe’s proposed ‘right to be forgotten’ has been the subject of intense debate, with many people arguing it’s simply not practical in the age of the internet for any data to be reliably expunged from history.

Well, add another voice to that mix. The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has published its assessment of the proposals, and the tone is sceptical to say the least. And, interestingly, one of the biggest problems ENISA has found has to do with big data."

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