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Comment Re:So... (Score 2, Insightful) 596

Clearly, banning children from the internet is unenforceable and preposterous.

The idea here is that instead of understanding the technology and applying the old laws to the new medium, legislators feel the need to write overly broad laws that make every Canadian who's ever participated in a flamewar on youtube a potential sex offender / felon.

At the very least, passing a law like this would make parents responsible for whatever distress/harm came to their unaccompanied children while they surfed the net, something many here would agree with.

Businesses

Comcast to Buy 51% of NBC, GE Goes After 49% 258

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Comcast and General Electric announced a joint venture yesterday to control NBC Universal, with Comcast coming out with the controlling interest. Comcast's hopes seem to be on succeeding in a marriage of distribution and content, where Time Warner failed. "The deal was approved by the companies' boards, and is subject to regulatory approval. GE said it expects the deal to go through in the third quarter of 2010. Congress has already said it will hold a hearing to investigate whether Comcast will gain 'undue advantages' from the deal that gives it access to programming."

Comment Re:Really now (Score 1) 320

All of the author's cited works were written after the cryptographers had their go, presumably she has access to better information than the 1950s sleuths.

For a little bit of alphabetical shuffling and simple puzzle solving to provide a solution to a 400 year old mystery does seem outrageous though, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Hopefully an actual linguist will take a few minutes to look at the manuscript and see if there's any truth to this claim.

Comment Re:The equivalent... (Score 4, Insightful) 125

I think a part of the reason developers ignore the challenges disabled gamers face is because there are so many different types of disability, each of which raises very specific challenges that a non-disabled developer might not have the time or inclination to understand and work around.

When you add that to the normal considerations - storyline objectives, gameplay objectives, internal politics, budgetary concerns, etc., it's not surprising that the disabled are completely marginalized and occasionally screwed by silly decisions like the one you've described.

I think if the disabled want games to have a "mode" of gameplay specifically for them, they need to demonstrate that they are a viable market whose demands are easily met. The gaming review site is excellent - it raises awareness, but disabled gamers might be better off soliciting the ADA or some other organization to set up a system for determining a game's viability for different types of disabled gamers, ultimately placing a label on the packaging with this information.

Comment Re:Kind of Fitting (Score 3, Informative) 387

Flash objects store cookies in a location that is not covered by browser privacy controls.

These cookies stick with you even after you uninstall/reinstall the plugin, and can only be managed through a web interface on the flash website. So you're correct - flash bypasses traditional browser controls and provides advertisers a more persistent method of following a user across multiple domains.

Comment Re:1. memorize a fake birthday (Score 5, Insightful) 144

This does not indemnify you against information uploaded by unwitting friends, relatives, acquaintances, or colleagues. The more people come to rely on the internet as a venue for socializing, the less control any individual will have over their personal information or their privacy. As information collecting becomes more automated, AR will become more useful and hence more commonplace, possibly bringing some of the issues raised by the article to the fore.

I think it's important to recognize that even though AR introduces additional risks to *your* security and privacy, it has the exact same effect on a *criminal's* security and privacy. I'll throw a hypothetical scenario out there - say you enabled a service at the supermarket that automatically emails you a copy of your receipt whenever you make a purchase. If your identity thief makes a purchase at one of these supermarkets, you have an incriminating email containing unrecognizable foodstuffs and a credit account you never opened, which can be used to spearhead an investigation pulling CCTV footage from that supermarket to compare to a facial recognition database, resulting in the identification and arrest of the identity thief.

Given this scenario, I think that rather than rebel against the erosion of our privacy, we need to accept that privacy in its current incarnation will never exist again, and instead work towards ensuring that no single group of people is allowed to exempt themselves or abuse this new information.

Comment Re:Society Expands Up to Constraints of the System (Score 5, Informative) 452

Starvation is a geopolitical problem, not a resource problem. Grain production has consistently outpaced population growth for the past 30 years. Even during last year's food crisis, resource shortfalls were not an issue.

more here: http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm

Comment Re:How would that work (Score 5, Insightful) 550

What gives the police the right to compel a person to say or do anything?

The way I see it, the police know this exec is going to walk away with a clean record- after all, he's done nothing wrong. The consequence of this mess is that the average person will be more likely to comply when an illegal demand is made by the police, because the average person can't afford the same legal representation as a corporate executive.

Earth

New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century 746

jamie writes with this snippet from the UK's Independent: "The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. ... [The study] found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available. On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010."
The Courts

Federal Judge Says Corps of Engineers Liable For Katrina Damage 486

Hugh Pickens writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that a federal judge has ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers — and thus the US government — is liable for a big chunk of the damage caused when hurricane Katrina pushed ashore on August 29, 2005 by failing to stop the natural widening of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet canal (aka Mr. Go) causing it to eventually bump up against the shore of Lake Borgne, on the city's east side. 'It is the court's opinion that the negligence of the corps, in this instance by failing to maintain the MR-GO properly, was not policy, but insouciance, myopia, and shortsightedness,' wrote US District Court Judge Stanwood Duval. Judge Duval said he believed it was the failure to shore up the outlet that 'doomed the channel to grow to two to three times its design width' allowing waves on Lake Borgne to enter the Mr. Go and travel into the east side of the city, battering the levees to a degree to which they were not designed. 'One of the greatest catastrophes in the history of the US' was both predictable and preventable, testified veteran Louisiana geologist Sherwood Gagliano, a former Corps consultant."

Comment Re:Do I get at least a pair of rubber gloves? (Score 3, Insightful) 135

You pull that server out of the farm and let other servers pick up the slack while you make repairs.

It's hype, based on the assumption that every server on the planet will be virtualized by 2019, and that the separation of hardware from the software that runs on it will allow IT departments ample time to offload work into "the cloud" while they swap out RAM.

Either that or it's made for large datacenters with multiple redundancies and enormous cooling costs. :)

Comment Skepticism may be warranted, here. (Score 2, Interesting) 105

They say the first thing you hear about research or technology is the best thing you will ever hear about it.

I'm not so sure "neutralizing" this kinase-C will result in any miracle cures, as the protein happens to have a lot of other uses in the body, per wikipedia:

"Recurring themes are that PKC is involved in receptor desensitization, in modulating membrane structure events, in regulating transcription, in mediating immune responses, in regulating cell growth, and in learning and memory"

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