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Comment As Successful as the Kellogg-Briand Pact (Score 1) 138

by Nova Express (#46954697) Attached to: The Struggle To Ban Killer Robots

You know, the pact to outlaw war. Signed in 1928.

Didn't work out so well.

And even if it were signed by a significant number of nations, we could be sure the non-democratic ones would be violating the ban before the ink was even dry.

Unenforceable treaties are actually worse than worthless: they constrain good actors without deterring bad ones.

Comment A Solution (Score 1) 255

>such as mandatory criminal record checks, vehicle inspections and insurance

Allow drivers to send those in via taking pictures of them with their phones. Have the drivers maybe pay a small fee to get some kind of background check on their driving records which the DMV should have anyway (instead of a criminal background check, which does't seem relevant). Problem solved.
Earth

US Climate Report Says Global Warming Impact Already Severe 627

Posted by Soulskill from the but-it-was-cold-yesterday dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Darryl Fears reports in the Washington Post on the U.S. government's newest national assessment of climate change. It says Americans are already feeling the effects of global warming. The assessment carves the nation into sections and examines the impacts: More sea-level rise, flooding, storm surge, precipitation and heat waves in the Northeast; frequent water shortages and hurricanes in the Southeast and Caribbean; more drought and wildfires in the Southwest. 'Residents of some coastal cities see their streets flood more regularly during storms and high tides. Inland cities near large rivers also experience more flooding, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Insurance rates are rising in some vulnerable locations, and insurance is no longer available in others. Hotter and drier weather and earlier snow melt mean that wildfires in the West start earlier in the spring, last later into the fall, and burn more acreage. In Arctic Alaska, the summer sea ice that once protected the coasts has receded, and autumn storms now cause more erosion, threatening many communities with relocation.' The report concludes that over recent decades, climate science has advanced significantly and that increased scrutiny has led to increased certainty that we are now seeing impacts associated with human-induced climate change. 'What is new over the last decade is that we know with increasing certainty that climate change is happening now. While scientists continue to refine projections of the future, observations unequivocally show that climate is changing and that the warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.'"

Comment Blindsight (Score 1) 105

by Nova Express (#46925749) Attached to: Computer Game Reveals 'Space-Time' Neurons In the Eye

Visual information controlling physical action without conscious thought. Think of it as a higher level of autonomous nervous system.

Peter Watts wrote a very depressing novel involving the idea which explores the possibility that consciousness is not necessary for intelligent life, and, indeed, may ultimately turn out to be an evolutionary dead end...

Comment Re:Relocate the bloody thing (Score 1) 865

by neonfrog (#46924681) Attached to: Did the Ignition Key Just Die?
Terrible location for the keyhole. Drinks get spilled into it all the time. I knew people that owned older Saabs. Terrible to start in the dead of winter. Water in the keyhole could freeze and break it. Soda in the keyhole made it a sticky gooey mess. I'll pass on that one.
Earth

Let's Call It 'Climate Disruption,' White House Science Adviser Suggests (Again) 568

Posted by timothy from the let's-just-settle-on-nuclear-winter dept.
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "First there was 'global warming.' Then many researchers suggested 'climate change' was a better term. Now, White House science adviser John Holdren is renewing his call for a new nomenclature to describe the end result of dumping vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into Earth's atmosphere: 'global climate disruption.'"

Comment Re:need to get over the "cult of macho programming (Score 2) 231

by Ckwop (#46911721) Attached to: How To Prevent the Next Heartbleed

I actually agree with both of you. The Open SSL guys gave out their work for free for anybody to use. Anybody should be free to do that without repercussions. Code is a kind of literature and thus should be protected by free speech laws.

However, if you pay peanuts (or nothing at all) then likewise you shouldn't expect anything other than monkeys. The real fault here is big business using unverified (in the sense of correctness!) source for security critical components of their system.

If regulation is needed anywhere, it is there. People who develop safety and security critical stuff should be certified and businesses with a turn over $x million dollars should be required to use software developed only by the approved organisations.

There is nothing in this definition that prevents an open source implementation. In fact, there's an argument to say that any such verified implementation must be open source precisely so it can be inspected. But it is quite a lot of work and people need to be paid to do that work. You can't expect to get this level of quality assurance for free.
Earth

VA Supreme Court: Michael Mann Needn't Turn Over All His Email 348

Posted by Soulskill from the what-did-you-have-for-lunch-when-you-wrote-those-papers dept.
RoccamOccam sends news that the Virginia Supreme Court has ruled that Michael Mann, a climate scientist notable for his work on the "hockey stick" graph, does not have to turn over the entirety of his papers and emails under Freedom of Information laws. Roughly 1,000 documents were turned over in response to the request, but another 12,000 remain, which lawyers for the University of Virginia say are "of a proprietary nature," and thus entitled to an exemption. The VA Supreme Court ruled (PDF), "the higher education research exemption's desired effect is to avoid competitive harm not limited to financial matters," and said the application of "proprietary" was correct in this case. Mann said he hopes the ruling "can serve as a precedent in other states confronting this same assault on public universities and their faculty."

Comment Re:Putin actually speaks the truth (Score 1) 396

Indeed! Russia also requires all telcoms and ISPs, at their expense, to install monitoring equipment of the internet and telephones, This project is called SORM (wikipedia entry for SORM). The system was put into place around 1996-2000, but it has been used as recently as the Winter Olympics (source). It is explicitly a mass-surveillance system, so either Putin is lying or he is bending the truth: Russia doesn't pay for it... but by law the telcoms have to pay it. They don't do illegal wiretapping because it is explicitly legal. And you're right, they might not have the ability to store all that data for long periods of time, but you can be sure they are targeting people. And you can be sure they are targeting foreign governments too (of course). Heck, there were several diplomatic leaks at the beginning of the Crimean crises in order to strain US-EU ties. You can be sure that's due to Russia's intelligence services.

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