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Submission + - Judge Orders Porn Suspect to Decrypt His Hard Drives 2

An anonymous reader writes: After having first decided against forcing a suspect to decrypt a number of hard drives that were believed to be his and to contain child pornography, a U.S. judge has changed his mind and has now ordered the suspect to provide law enforcement agents heading the investigation with a decrypted version of the contents of his encrypted data storage system, or the passwords needed to decrypt forensic copies of those storage devices. Jeffrey Feldman, a software developer at Rockwell Automation, has still not been charged with any crime, and the prosecution initially couldn't prove conclusively that the encrypted hard drives contained child pornography or were actually Feldman's, which led U.S. Magistrate Judge William Callahan to decide that forcing him to decrypt them would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Submission + - In Soviet Russia, Mammoth Clones You! (rt.com)

kodiaktau writes: While uncovering an adult female mammoth carcass, scientists discovered a baby Mammoth Elephant that still contains traces of blood and intact DNA. Interestingly the blood was still flowing at -10C. The discovery brings up the debate of cloning DNA and reproducing a mammoth in a laboratory setting.

Submission + - New best way to nuke a short-notice asteroid (space.com)

doug141 writes: A scientist proposes the best way to deal with an asteroid on short notice is to hit it with an impacter, followed by a nuke in the crater. Delta 4 rockets could do the job. Grant money has been awarded and study is underway.

Comment Where Wilson is coming from (Score 1) 276

Is his book, The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson takes droves of biologists to task for espousing the theory of kin selection to explain altriusm, accusing them of both torturing their "relatedness" math and also essentially back-solving from a desired result. Wilson makes the case that the theory of group selection (one social group besting a neighboring social group) explains altruism more simply, and occam's razor applies.

Comment Grades grammar not content. A.I. not ready yet. (Score 5, Informative) 253

"A director of writing at MIT Les Perelman says that because these robo-graders work according to an algorithm, it is not hard to find out what it values and thus beat the system. He found that if you write long essays with big words, even if they are nonsensical, you will score high. The algorithm does not like short sentences or paragraphs or sentences that begin with ‘and’ or ‘or’ nor is it enamored of sentence fragments. In other words, all the little rules that good writers will break to create a particular effect will cause your essay to be marked down.

Perelman gives an example of how you can get a high score. The most interesting feature of the algorithm is that it doesn’t care about substance or even truth. It will ignore such trivialities as saying that the war of 1812 began in 1945, provided you say it grammatically. The substance of an argument doesn’t matter, he said, as long as it looks to the computer as if it’s nicely argued.

For a question asking students to discuss why college costs are so high, Mr. Perelman wrote that the No. 1 reason is excessive pay for greedy teaching assistants. “The average teaching assistant makes six times as much money as college presidents,” he wrote. “In addition, they often receive a plethora of extra benefits such as private jets, vacations in the south seas, starring roles in motion pictures.”

E-Rater gave him a [top score of] 6. He tossed in a line from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” just to see if he could get away with it. He could."

http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2012/05/03/how-to-fool-a-computer-grader/

Comment Wish I had a mod point for you. (Score 4, Interesting) 310

When XP was introduced, I switched to windows for the games. I have happily paid for newer versions of Windows since because they are very usable and I don't want to learn linux. Now, there's no good new version of windows to switch to, based on what I'm reading about windows 8. Apparently valve and steam are making gaming on linux easier than ever. I'm at risk of trying it and finding I like it. The real threat to Microsoft may be their own vision with Windows 8.

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