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Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed Screenshot-sm 1352

Posted by samzenpus from the fair-balanced-and-simple dept.
A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!

Submission + - Governator Nukes Idiots (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Martin Hellman
Martin Hellman writes: Imagine the Terminator, reincarnated as the Republican governor of California, calling four Republican Senators "idiots" for opposing the New START Treaty. Well it happened. On returning from a visit to Moscow with Silicon Valley executives, Schwarzenegger declared support for the treaty in no uncertain terms: “There are those in America that are trying to flex their muscles and pretend they're ballsy by saying, ‘we've got to keep those nuclear weapons.’ it's an idiot that says that.” While not directly naming John Barrasso, James Risch, Roger Wicker, and James Inhofe, those four Republican Senators voted against START in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The treaty would reduce both the US and Russian nuclear stockpiles from 2,200 deployed warheads to 1,550 each. Hardly disarmament, but a step in the right direction.

1,550 nuclear weapons is far more than needed as noted in a statement I authored that has been endorsed by former NSA Director (and one-time nominee for Secretary of Defense) Adm. Bobby R. Inman, among others: "Russia and the United States each have thousands of nuclear weapons, whereas a few hundred would more than deter any rational actor and no number will deter an irrational one. Either side could therefore reduce its nuclear arsenal with little to no loss in national security, even if the other side did not immediately reciprocate. In light of the growing specter of nuclear terrorism, a reduced nuclear arsenal could even enhance national security by lessening the chance for theft or illicit sale of a weapon."

Submission + - Giant impact crater found in Australia (cosmosmagazine.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: One of the largest meteorite impacts in the world has been discovered in the South Australian outback by geothermal researchers. It may explain one of the many extinction events in the past 600 million years, and may contain rare and exotic minerals. The crater is said to have been "produced by an asteroid six to 12 km across" — which is really big!
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - The economic fallacy of 'zombie' Japan (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by Paul Fernhout
Paul Fernhout writes: Steven Hill writes in an post critical of Paul Krugman: "Japan has been getting a raw deal from the so-called economic experts. Consider this: in the midst of the great recession, the United States is suffering through nearly 10% unemployment, rising inequality and poverty, 47 million people without health insurance, declining retirement prospects for the middle class and a general increase in economic insecurity. Various European nations also are having their difficulties, and no one knows if China is the next bubble due to explode. How, then, should we regard a country that has 5% unemployment, the lowest income inequality, healthcare for all its people and is one of the world's leading exporters? This country also scores high on life expectancy, low on infant mortality, is at the top in numeracy and literacy, and is low on crime, incarceration, homicides, mental illness and drug abuse. It also has a low rate of carbon emissions, doing its part to reduce global warming. In all these categories, this particular country beats both the US and China by a country mile. Doesn't that sound like a country from which Americans and others might learn a thing or two about how to get out of the hole in which we're stuck? Not if that place is Japan. ... The era of US-style trickle-down economies is over for wealthy countries because trickle-down is neither economically sound nor ecologically sustainable. The developed nations must lead the way towards a different path of development. This is not an easy challenge, yet it is the course that Japan and Germany have chosen. Americans would be wise to learn from them. If the US didn't have such a trickle-down economy that has produced so much inequality — if it was, in fact, better at sharing its wealth — perhaps it wouldn't need so much fiscal stimulus and growth." See also a knol I put together related to this general issue of structural unemployment and a jobless recovery.
Businesses

Submission + - ACLU Says Net Neutrality Necessary for Free Speech (aclu.org)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: The ACLU has recently identified Network Neutrality a key free speech issue and said in a lengthy PDF report: 'Freedom of expression isn't worth much if the forums where people actually make use of it are not themselves free. And the Internet is without doubt the primary place where Americans exercise their right to free expression. It's a newspaper, an entertainment medium, a reference work, a therapist's office, a soapbox, a debating stand. It is the closest thing ever invented to a true "free market" of ideas.' The report then goes on to argue that ISPs have incentive and capability of interfering with internet traffic. And not only that but the argument that it is only 'theoretical' are bogus given they list ten high profile cases of it actually happening. If the ACLU can successfully argue that Net Neutrality is a First Amendment Issue then it might not matter what businesses (who fall on either side of the issue) want the government to do.
Red Hat Software

Submission + - It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore (glgroup.com)

Submitted by AlexGr
AlexGr writes: This article by Jeff Gould is causing quite a stir. A recent Red Hat marketing newsletter sternly instructs Red Hat channel partners that customers who choose not to renew their RHEL subscriptions "must de-install Red Hat Enterprise Linux software from the servers with the expired subscriptions." Is this acceptable under the tenets of open source? Or does Red Hat have every right to control use of "their" brand of Linux?

Submission + - Mining EXIF data from camera phones

Submitted by emeitner
emeitner writes: Folks at the ISC wrote scripts which harvested 15,291 images from Twitpic and analyzed the EXIF information. They state: "399 images included the location of the camera at the time the image was taken, and 102 images included the name of the photographer. ... The iPhone is including the most EXIF information among the images we found. ... It not only includes the phone's location, but also accelerometer data showing if the phone was moved at the time the picture was taken and the readout from the build in compass showing in which direction the phone was pointed at the time." While mining EXIF data from images is nothing new, how many people would allow this data to leave their cell phone if they knew what it contained? The source code for the scripts is also available from the article.
Science

Submission + - Yale Physicists Measure 'Persistent Current' (yale.edu)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Current processors rely on wires mere nanometers wide and Yale physicists have successfully measured a theoretical 'persistent current' that flows through them when they are formed into rings. They also predict that this will help us understand how electrons behave in metals — more specifically the quantum mechanical effect that influences how these electrons move through metals. Hopefully this work will shed new light on what dangers (or uses) quantum effects could have on classical processors as the inner workings shrink in size. The breakthrough was rethinking how to measure this theoretical effect as they previously relied on superconducting quantum interference devices to measure the magnetic field such a current would create — complicated devices that gave incorrect and inconsistent measurements. Instead, they turned to nothing but mechanical devices known as cantilevers ('little floppy diving boards with the nanometer rings sitting on top') that yielded them a shocking full magnitude of precision in their measurements."

Comment Ins't this obvious? (Score 3, Informative) 232

by emeitner (#28493989) Attached to: The Internet Helps Iran Silence Activists
On with the tinfoil hats...and the cynical socks...

The power of technology from a government's perspective is to have the subjects of your suspicion(citizenry) freely and enthusiastically enter all their beliefs( micro/macro blogging), the topology of their personal relations(social networking sites), and their personal communications(gmail) into the databases of private corporations for the easy mining of the data by the keepers of all the keys(NSA, MI5, and others). Then is is a simple matter to assemble an n-dimentional database of relationships into a large net. Then they need only to pull a single knot(a person) of this net and see all others strings and knots which are pulled also. With this tool the government can intercept and neutralize any waxing movement, meme, or influential person.

...off with the tinfoil hat and back to my coffee.
Power

Submission + - What to do with 700 used 9V batteries

Submitted by
Dunkirk
Dunkirk writes: "At our medium-sized church, we have 7 Shure wireless microphones. Five are newer, SLX-based models, which use 2 AA batteries. Two are older, UC-based models, which use a single 9V. The SLX's are very easy on their batteries. They can go several weeks before needing to be replaced. The UC's only last one week before losing enough voltage that they'll start dropping signal. Now, I don't want to just throw the 9V's in the trash, for fear that their contacts will touch, the batteries will heat up, and they'll cause a fire, so I've collect many hundreds of batteries, all connected in a chain, 2 batteries wide, with all of their opposing contacts connected. (I got my hands across one of those chains once. I'm always cautious around them now...) I thought about recycling them, but the only place I could find wants to charge me about $60/pound for the "privilege." It's been suggested that we could recharge these things with newer, alkaline rechargers, but that idea has a bad reputation from my youth. Have times changed? Can we recharge them, knowing that we need the _voltage_ to drive the signal? (It has to get them back to their 1.5V+ level.) Or is this a waste of time, and someone can point me to a place that actually recycles this stuff, gets some value out of it, and doesn't charge me for that service?"
Space

Girl Who Named Pluto, At 11, Dies At 90 158

Posted by kdawson from the no-phair dept.
notthepainter notes the passing of the woman who, as an 11-year-old girl, named Pluto. "Frozen and lonely, Planet X circled the far reaches of the solar system awaiting discovery and a name. It got one thanks to an 11-year-old British girl named Venetia Burney, an enthusiast of the planets and classical myth. On March 14, 1930, the day newspapers reported that the long-suspected 'trans-Neptunian body' had been photographed for the first time, she proposed to her well-connected grandfather that it be named Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld. Venetia Phair, as she became by marriage, died April 30 in her home in Banstead, in the county of Surrey, England. She was 90. ... More vexing to Mrs. Phair was the persistent notion that she had taken the name from the Disney character. 'It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way around,' she told the BBC. 'So, one is vindicated.' " Venetia's great-uncle Henry, who was a housemaster at Eton, had successfully proposed that the two dwarf moons of Mars be named Phobos and Deimos.
Security

Man Arrested For Taking Photo of Open ATM 1232

Posted by kdawson from the i-will-tackle-you dept.
net_shaman writes in with word of a Seattle man who was arrested for taking a photo of an ATM being serviced. "Today I was shopping at the downtown Seattle REI. I was about to buy a Thule hitch mount bike rack. They were out of the piece that locks the bike rack into the hitch. So I was in the customer service line to special order one. It was a long line and while I was waiting, I saw two of guys (employees of Loomis, as I later learned) refilling the ATM. I walked over and took a picture with my iPhone of them and more interestingly of the open ATM. I took the picture because I'm fascinated by the insides of things that we don't normally get to see. ... That was when Officer GE Abed (#6270) spun me around and put handcuffs on me."

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