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Math

Submission + - Patent all scientific discoveries urges mathematician (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: All new scientific theories (and all new software) should be patented in the United States argues David Edwards, a retired associate professor of mathematics, writing in the current edition of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Edwards cites General Relativity as the sort of theory that could have been patented in the past.
Media

Submission + - The Largely Unknown Success Story of Afghanistan's Television Network (vice.com)

Submitted by
Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: "I met Orner at South by Southwest, where she was hustling her latest film, The Network. The Network features a brighter side of Afghanistan's brighter side: the story of its television revolution. In Orner's opinion, it's a narrative that runs contrary to our common conceptions of a country that has spent decades in a state of war and instability.

She followed Saad Mohseni, a media guru and founder of Afghan media firm Moby Group, who is credited for jump starting the nation's media transformation. Sometimes referred to as the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan, Mohseni, an Afghan expat and entrepreneur, explains how he and his siblings returned to Kabul from Australia in 2001, amidst the war shifting into gear. First, they launched a radio station, and by 2004 they'd shifted to television with Tolo TV, quickly turning Moby Group into the largest media conglomerate in the nation.

DS: I heard about 10 percent of Afghanistan has internet access, I saw ...

EO: No, I don't think that's accurate, I actually don't have the figures, I don't address them in the movie. I think the mobile phone capabilities are super high. A lot of people have Internet, they don't have it at home so much; they have it at work. Facebook is huge there. Twitter is not because a lot of them have phones, but they're not connected to the Internet, because it's really expensive to have mobile internet, but that will change very quickly.

From a country that 12 years ago was about 300 years back in time and had no interest in anything but water, was wanton to get to where it is now, which you'll see in the film is the change. It's been extraordinary. Just the change in life expectancy has gone up from about 46 to 64 in the last 10 years. The illiteracy rate, which is between 60 and 70 percent is falling rapidly. The average age of the population is 24. That's a really young country. They want to be connected, they want to be tech-savvy and they want to know what's going on in the rest of the world. They never want to go back to where they were 12 years ago."

Submission + - Big Eyes Using Too Much Brain Power Got Neanderthals Extinct

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Bigger eyes and a corresponding greater allocation of the brain to process visual information is the most recent theory about the reasons that led to the extinction of Neanderthals, our closest relatives, brought forward in a new study. Neanderthals split from the primate line that gave rise to modern humans about 400,000 years ago. This group then moved to Eurasia and completely disappeared from the world about 30,000 years back. Other studies have shown that Neanderthals might have lived near the Arctic Circle around 31,000 to 34,000 years ago.
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - The Pirate Bay's Oldest Torrent is "Revolution OS" (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "After nearly 9 years of seeding The Pirate Bay’s oldest working torrent is still very much alive. Interestingly, the torrent is not a Hollywood classic nor is it an evergreen music album. The honor goes to a pirated copy of “Revolution OS”, a documentary covering the history of Linux, GNU and the free software movement."
Education

Submission + - Duolingo language learning working (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: This week's New Scientist reports that Duolingo, a free online langauge learning service that also aims to translate the web is showing positive reults — with students taking 34 hours to reach the same level of proficiency in Spanish as first semester University students. The site is certainly easy to use and makes some bold claims about its values and aims — worth a second look, for sure.
Moon

Submission + - Death of the last great amateur scientist (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: The death of amateur astronomical legend Sir Patrick Moore surely marks the end of the era when amateurs could make an impact on science that would rival the professionals. Though many of Moore's ideas were disproved by space-borne probes, his impact on planetary astronomy was deep and profound, while his efforts at popularising astronomy were unmatched.
Education

Submission + - Should we teach 11 year olds to write mobile apps? (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
00_NOP
00_NOP writes: "New proposals, commissioned by the UK government from the British Computing Society (BCS) for a computing (ICT) curriculum for schools in England have been published and they are a huge step forward from the existing teaching, now widely discredited, of how to use various "office" products.
But there is some confusion about what they actually contain: the formal proposals do not contain some of the ideas that have been spun to the media. Most eye-catchingly, this morning's reports suggest 11 year olds will be taught how to write apps for cell phones but no such proposal is in the paper from the BCS — are we about to see a new form of corporate lock-in with Google, Apple and Microsoft battling to get their technology adopted even while the real world moves on to completely new multicore paradigms?"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft accuses webkit of breaking standards and becoming the next IE 6 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: In a bizaare, yet funny and ironic move, Microsoft warned web developers that using webkit stagnated open standards and innovation on the web. Microsoft is espcially concerned in the mobile market where many mobile sites only work with Android or IOS with -webkit specific extensions on its call to action in their Windows Phone Developer Blog. Their examples include W3C code such as radius-border, which are being written as -webkit-radius-border instead on websites. In the mobile market Webkit has a 90% marketshare, while website masters feel it is not worth the development effort to test against browsers such as IE. Microsoft's solution to the problem of course is to use IE 10 for standard compliancy and not use the proprietary (yet opensource) webkit. Is webkit in both Android, Chrome, and iOS really that proprietary is it all hot air from someone who fell from grace?
Crime

Submission + - Officials "used malware to spy on opposition" (civil.ge)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Senior officials in the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia have been charged with using malware to use computer cameras and microphones to spy on a wide range of opposition politicians and organisations. The charges follow a particularly brutal election campaign — lost by the previous ruling party — which was dominated by secretly filmed recordings of abuse of prisoners (damaging to the then government) and of opposition politicians supposedly considering cutting deals with criminal families. Electronic spying is nothing new in Georgia but previously it seemed to be confined to more "old-school" techniques of hidden microphones and cameras.

Comment Re:New criteria for government action (Score 2, Interesting) 184

by 00_NOP (#41727985) Attached to: Amazon Overcharging Publishers For Tax

Because they are actively selling goods they must know to be unfit for purpose.
What if a retailer sold you something they said was wine when it was simply water? Would you not think that was an issue even if they did it thousands of times and refused to stop when the problem was pointed out to them?
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Time to stand up against Amazon (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by
00_NOP
00_NOP writes: "Amazon are taking fire in the UK for insisting that publishers pay them for 20% VAT (sales tax) when in fact the online retailer is only paying 3% VAT. Given that the Kindle is rubbish at displaying maths and science and that Amazon are as dangerous a monopoly as Microsoft ever was, is it not time that regulators and consumers stood up to them?"
AI

Submission + - Unreal Tournament to highlight AI breakthrough (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
00_NOP
00_NOP writes: "This coming week is to see AI researchers battle it out through the medium of Unreal Tournament and hopes are high that researchers at Imperial College in London have built a bot that is sufficiently human like that it will, in effect, pass the Turing Test and win a $7000 prize at the IEEE's Conference of Computational Intelligence and Games in Grenada, Spain.
Interestingly, the breakthrough, if proven, comes not from ever greater computational processing of the environment, but in discriminating between less and more important stimuli. In Alan Turing's centenary year one of the points he was ridiculed for in his lifetime — that machines could match human behaviour and 'thought' may be on the point of decisive vindication."
Wikipedia

Submission + - When a primary source isn't good enough- Wikipedia (newyorker.com) 4

Submitted by unixluv
unixluv writes: Evidently, Wikipedia doesn't believe an author on his own motivations when trying to correct an article on his own book, claiming they need "secondary sources". I'm not sure where you would go to get a secondary source when you are the only author of a work.

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