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Submission + - Advertising industry lashes out at Mozilla over 3rd-party cookie blocking. (iab.net)

Submitted by preflex
preflex writes: Unsurprisingly, Interactive Advertising Bureau president Randall Rothenburg is up in arms over Mozilla's decision to block third-party cookies in upcoming versions of Firefox and has issued the following statement:

"The Interactive Advertising Bureau strongly opposes the scheme by Mozilla to block third-party cookies by default in upcoming releases of its Firefox browser, and we vigorously encourage both the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its for-profit subsidiary the Mozilla Corporation, which is reconfiguring the Firefox browser, to abandon this proposed change. This move will not put the interest of users first. Nor does it promote transparency or “move the web forward,” as Mozilla claims in its announcement. It will not advance Mozilla’s objective, as stated in its bylaws, of “promoting choice and innovation on the Internet,” but will, instead, impede both. If Mozilla follows through on its plan to block all third-party cookies, the disruption will disenfranchise every single internet user. All of us will lose the freedom to choose our own online experiences; we will lose the opportunity to monitor and protect our privacy; and we will lose the chance to benefit from independent sites like RightWingNews.com LiberalOasis.com, MotherhoodWTF.com, and SuburbanDaddy.com because thousands of small businesses that make up the diversity of content and services online will be forced to close their doors. ..."

He even manges to sneak in a Think-of-the-children argument:

"It is also the third-party cookie that enables urgent messages like AMBER Alerts and weather emergencies to be delivered to relevant, localized audiences."

Comment Re:Um.. They didn't exactly deny it. (Score 1) 198

by Ransak (#41183013) Attached to: Microsoft Denies Windows 8 App Spying Via SmartScreen
I'd hardly call it irrelevant, think about it for a moment. Let's say the authorities (pick your country) decided that anyone installing a specific application (for example, the Bitcoin wallet app, or even a specific political party app if you're more inclined to believe in conspiracies) is a 'person of interest'. It doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to picture what a little data mining could do from there.
Education

Can Anyone Catch Khan Academy? 190

Posted by Soulskill from the khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan dept.
waderoush writes "Even as name-brand universities like MIT and Harvard rush to put more courses on the Web, they're vying with an explosion of new online learning resources like Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, Dabble, Skillshare, and, of course, Khan Academy. With 3,200 videos on YouTube and 4 million unique visitors a month, Sal Khan's increasingly entertaining creation is the competitor that traditional universities need to beat if they want to have a role in inspiring the next generation of leaders and thinkers. Lately Khan's organization has been snapping up some of YouTube's most creative educational-video producers, including 'Doodling in Math Class' creator Vi Hart and Smarthistory founders Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. Universities are investing millions in software for 'massive online open courses' or MOOCs, but unless they can figure out how to make their material fun as well as instructive, Khan may have an insurmountable lead." The Chronicle of Higher Education has a related article about the above-mentioned Coursera, and how they plan to make money off of free courses. A contract the company signed with the University of Michigan suggests they aren't quite sure yet.
Businesses

Ask Slashdot: Is Outsourcing Development a Good Idea? 403

Posted by timothy from the is-vi-better-than-emacs? dept.
New submitter penmanglewood writes "I am a developer at a small IT company, and we primarily make software and games for the education market. I used to work with a team of developers, but for reasons outside the scope of this question, my boss and I are the only ones left. My boss says that our new strategy is to use outsourced developers to do the 'monkey work' for us. To me, this sounds like a bad idea. Do we give the developers access to our internal libraries? How will they be able to work on parts of our product without having access to our repository. I could think of a hundred more objections, but maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Is there a smart way to outsource development, or is it just a bad idea?"
Earth

Methane Producing Dinosaurs May Have Changed Climate 264

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-getting-hot-in-here dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that huge plant-eating dinosaurs called sauropods may have produced enough greenhouse gas by breaking wind to alter the Earth's climate. Scientists believe that, just as in cows, methane-producing bacteria aided the digestion of sauropods by fermenting their plant food. 'A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate,' says study leader Dr Dave Wilkinson. 'Indeed, our calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methane than all modern sources — both natural and man-made — put together.' The key factor is the total mass of the animals which included some of the largest animals to walk the Earth, such as Diplodocus, which measured 150 feet and weighed up to 45 tons. Medium-sized sauropods weighed about 20 tons and lived in herds of up to a few tens of individuals per square kilometer so global methane emissions from the animals would have amounted to around 472 million tons per year, the scientists calculated. Sauropods alone may have been responsible for an atmospheric methane concentration of one to two parts per million (ppm), say the scientists and studies have suggested that the Earth was up to 10C (18F) warmer in the Mesozoic Era. ''The Mesozoic trend to sauropod gigantism led to the evolution of immense microbial vats unequaled in modern land animals. Methane was probably important in Mesozoic greenhouse warming. Our simple proof-of-concept model suggests greenhouse warming by sauropod megaherbivores could have been significant in sustaining warm climates.'"

Comment Didn't this kill Mars exploration for years? (Score 1) 61

by Ransak (#39823085) Attached to: BOLD Plan To Find Mars Life On the Cheap
After all of the newspaper headlines reading 'MARS IS DEAD, NO LIFE FOUND!' killed public interest of Mars back during the 70s after the Viking probes' questionable experiments, I'm not sure firing six small static probes at a sizable planet to look for DNA is a good idea. If history is any indicator it seems like a big risk to the entire exploration effort.
Programming

Software Engineering Is a Dead-End Career, Says Bloomberg 738

Posted by Soulskill from the commiserate-with-middle-age-actresses dept.
An anonymous reader sends this quote from an opinion piece at Bloomberg: "Many programmers find that their employability starts to decline at about age 35. Employers dismiss them as either lacking in up-to-date technical skills — such as the latest programming-language fad — or 'not suitable for entry level.' In other words, either underqualified or overqualified. That doesn’t leave much, does it? Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40. Employers have admitted this in unguarded moments. Craig Barrett, a former chief executive officer of Intel Corp., famously remarked that 'the half-life of an engineer, software or hardware, is only a few years,' while Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has blurted out that young programmers are superior."

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