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Comment Naturalistic Fallacy (Score 1) 1127

The deer, otherwise left alone, could go on to do his own thing, have babies of his own, get eaten by wolves, whatever. That's Nature.

Why is it worse to be eaten by a person than eaten by a wolf? Prey animals are literally devoured alive, their tendons cut so they cannot run and their entrails ripped out of their still-struggling bodies. As the relative of human hunters, I am sure you know that the ability to kill cleanly is considered a minimum competence. It's natural for prey animals to die exhausted and in terror. That doesn't mean it's good. Sometimes -- a lot of the time -- unnatural is better.

I do not hunt. But if I did, I would do it humanely, with a gun.

Submission + - Kim Jong-il Is Dead (the-diplomat.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Kim Jong-il is dead. But what comes next is a mystery. After all, Western media has previously relied on a former sushi chef for information on the presumed successor, Kim Jong-un.
Encryption

Submission + - Do Slashdotters encrypt their email? 3

An anonymous reader writes: Many years ago when I first heard of PGP, I found an add-on that made it fairly simple to use PGP to encrypt my email. Despite the fact that these days most people know that email is a highly insecure means of communication, very few people that I know ever use any form of email encryption despite the fact that it is pretty easy to use. This isn't quite what I would have expected when I first set it up. So, my question to fellow Slashdotters is 'Do you encrypt your email? If not, 'Why not?' and 'Why has email encryption using PGP or something similar not become more commonplace?' The use of cryptography used to be a hot topic once upon a time.

Comment Re:"Empathy Tests" (Score 1) 200

You're apparently using "selfish" to mean "acting in accordance with a motivation", which is not a particularly useful description (especially if you are including involuntary processes in this), and is certainly not consistent with the general use of the word.

The difference between altruism and selfishness isn't whether or not you like what you're doing, but what sorts of things you like to do.

Comment Re:No CarrierIQ? (Score 1) 133

I do take issue with the concept of having to pay more to not have a keylogger on my phone.

It makes sense to me that company might offer a cheaper-but-spyware-riddled version of a phone. It's not much different from adware, which is often free or cheaper than other software of its type. Whether you cast it as "paying a premium for privacy" or "getting a discount for giving up privacy", it's the same idea as long as the company is upfront about the spyware (if they aren't, then they're just crooks).

Iphone

Submission + - Siri hack turns your car into K.I.T.T. from Knight (discovery.com)

AmyVernon writes: OK, it doesn't turn it into a Trans Am (nor you into the Hoff), but that's probably a good thing. But if your car has a Viper SmartStart module, the php script will allow you to auto-start your car using voice commands, as well as open the doors and the trunk.
Security

Submission + - The Problem with Current Malware Metrics (net-security.org)

Orome1 writes: When security companies say that there was an X number of infections from a particular type of malware in the past month or year, or that an Y number of variants of a piece of malware was detected, these numbers mean something to other researchers and to marketing departments, but very little to individual consumers. David Perry from Trend Micro talks about why the currently used malware measurements are not up to the task and about the need to stop sharing with the users statistics that are effectively useless to them.
Medicine

Submission + - Childbirth-predicting Software Warns of Difficult (gizmag.com)

Zothecula writes: In the United States, approximately one-third of all births are performed via cesarean-section. Here's another statistic: emergency C-sections are six to seven times more likely to result in death or harm to the infant, than are planned C-sections. Therefore, if a significant percentage of the emergency cesareans could instead be planned, that would potentially save a lot of babies. That's where PREDIBIRTH comes in. Developed by Dr. Olivier Ami and a team of researchers from France's Université Paris Sud, the software can accurately predict the likelihood of difficult births, based on MRIs of pregnant women's bellies.
Games

Submission + - Game Creator for Tablet Devices (internetgumshoe.com)

GLBasic writes: "Game producer "Dream Design Entertainment" released a tool G.A.C.K. (Gaming App Construction Kit) where users can create games right on their tablet device.
Creators do not need any programming knowledge at all. The whole process is done by tapping a few options with your fingers. The games range from shoot-em-up to jump&run games, but with clever tweaking also other games can be achieved.
The useage is so easy, that even kids can build their own games. It's stated that a desktop app will soon be available that allows to pack the projects into standalone apps for various stores or web distribution.
So far the HP Touchpad and Android tablets are supported."

The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Certified IT Job Pay Declining (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder reports on a potentially troubling trend for IT pros attempting to leverage tech certifications in today's job market. 'The market for IT jobs has not just bottomed out, it's stronger than it has been in several years. There is, however, a catch: The premium pay for jobs requiring the typical certifications that many IT pros work toward has continued its plunge and now is at the lowest point in 12 years,' Snyder writes. The chief driver of this trend? 'Business skills are more and more in demand, but they don't show up on a certification test.'"
AI

Submission + - Developers create iPad-game to crowd-source develo (ahsumnimity.com)

W2dV writes: "Creating good Bayesian Networks (probabilistic knowledge models represented as directed acyclic graphs) is difficult (NP-Hard). They are either created by experts who develop the models by consciously reasoning about the underlying phenomena (at the risk of being blind or biased with regard to certain effects), or have to be learnt from data by machine learning algorithms. Machine learning requires thousands of datapoints even for only a few variables, and often falls apart when more than 10 or 20 variables are involved because it requires hundreds of thousands of measurements and no general, strong heuristics are currently known.

We (two Artificial Intelligence students from the Netherlands) have developed a puzzle game for iPad in which we are looking at the capabilities of the human mind to solve this problem. Players are presented with puzzles that show them measurements on variables in arbitrary domains at varying frequencies, and are rewarded when they are successful at developing strategies to determine the conditional (in-)dependencies that exist between the variables in the puzzle.

The game, 'The Magic Portals of Ahsum Nimity', is not your average scientific experiment, but an awesome (all-Dutch) production with completely handcrafted artwork and specially composed music. The game is available in Apple's AppStore for free, because we will need thousands of active players in order to measure anything useful from the collective player base."

Android

Submission + - Carrier IQ: Which phones are infected, and how to (extremetech.com)

MrSeb writes: "The Carrier IQ debacle is quickly spiralling out of control: First it was confirmed that Android devices on Sprint and AT&T had the keylogging software installed, and then late last night it emerged that CIQ is also buried deep within iOS. Since then, other manufacturers such as RIM and Nokia, and carriers like Verizon, have confirmed that Carrier IQ never goes anywhere near their devices. If you're stuck with an Android or iOS phone with Carrier IQ installed, though, here's how to remove it — or at least disable it."

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