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Comment Re:how to do it (Score 2, Insightful) 299

Equating paying for an entry and being able to comment on it is just not on. A lot of people don't read the comments and the comments are not given nearly the same weight. The Pepsi scientists are given equal weighting with all the other things they're reporting despite clear motivations for fraud.

Comment Re:Another faulty argument? (Score 1) 664

Higher saturation of women's rights in a culture doesn't necessarily mean sexual abuse will go down. Correlation doesn't imply causation, you're right, but I think these studies have shown that the correlating data are availability of pornography and sexual abuse. Other factors don't correlate so closely.

Comment Re:Here's a better idea (Score 1) 562

Of course, you should also do this to the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and every other religion hotspots. While Jewish people do have to deal with a lot of ridicule and derision (chiefly from Christians, don't you know), Christians do not. In modern western society they are the chief reason we do not hold religious beliefs up to the same standard as our non-religious beliefs. While many say that this should apply to all religion (and many probably do believe this) a significant percentage do not, and take this as carte blanche to trash any and every other religion and not have to take any kind of criticism themselves. Christianity didn't learn a damned thing hundreds of years ago. Christianity failed to suppress it and has just recently started to accept this now. Crusades were a Christian holy war - and we lost all but the first which is probably a contributing factor to the lack of crusades today. In many ways modern Christians act very similar to Muslims - chiefly intolerance of other ways of thinking and behaving. The Islam faith mandating the wearing of burqa's is just as bad as forbidding Muslims to wearing them (as France has done). Another culture thinks us primitive savages for one thing and we see them the same way for another. It's not a valid way of thinking. We have our own 'extremists' and 'terrorists' that do very similar things for reasons poor or valid.

Submission + - World's tallest couple buy iPad in bridal attire (wired.co.uk)

Lanxon writes: This is the weirdest iPad launch day photo you'll see. At the London launch of Apple's iPad, the world's tallest couple, dressed as bride and groom, are amongst the first in the UK to emerge from the Apple Store with iPads. Stephen Fry also showed up, though sadly not as their minister. Also, believe it or not, this was the first UK iPad buyer. Seriously.
News

Submission + - Why the boom laid by BP is a useless PR stunt 1

boombaard writes: "Remember seeing all those nice pictures of coastline "protected" by boom laid by BP? Started wondering why it seems to have so little effect yet? Sadly, the reason is that the boom, as it is being laid out by BP, is being laid out in a way that makes the entire effort pointless. As this booming expert describes it in the video (skip ahead to 1:48 if you want the content), BP has been willfully negligent in preparing for this type of disaster, by not having enough boom ready for any type of accident, and, more importantly, because its own drilling — as opposed to production — employees aren't forced to attend booming school, which they think is for pussies, is allowing all the boom to be laid in ways that are known to be useless by everyone who knows how to properly lay booms. As she describes it, boom laid in single, straight lines, without catch basins anywhere, is little more than a PR trick meant to make the media and congresscritters believe that they are doing "their jobs".
Quoting her (I've removed some of the flourishes): "Boom is not meant to contain oil; boom is meant to divert oil. Boom must always be at an angle to the prevailing wind, wave action, or surface current. Boom, at this angle, must always be layered, in an overlapped sort of way, with another string of boom. Boom must always divert oil to a catch basin or another kind of container from where it can be removed from the fucking area. Looks kinda involved, doesn't it? But if done properly, you can prevent most to almost all of the oil from ever touching the shoreline, and you can do it day after day, week after week, month after month. A week after it stops coming, nobody will be able to tell that there ever was an oil spill."

That is, without catch basins, booms provide a 3-minute respite before all the oil flows either under or over the boom, at which point all the hard work laying it was for nothing. But nobody has, apparently, picked up on this yet, and nowhere along the entire coastline are we seeing footage of oil properly being contained. Yet while the coast guard knows this, all you hear from Thad Allen is that 'BP is doing the best it can'. How can this be?"
Privacy

Submission + - Privacy theater - new term by Ed Felten (freedom-to-tinker.com)

cheros writes: Commenting on Facebook, Ed Felten has come up with a new term to describe the current attitudes to privacy that is brilliant in its simplicity: privacy theater.

It builds on the term Bruce Schneier defined to identify pretend security measures such as most of TSA's efforts: they don't do anything to make you safer, it makes you feel better. Ditto for your privacy, "privacy theater" describes measures that appear to do something for your privacy, while they are actually aimed at stopping you complaining about it.

Brilliant — so far, the best new expression for 2010..

Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Flash Destroyer Tests Limit of Solid State Storage (dangerousprototypes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: We all know that flash and other types of solid state storage can only endure a limited number of write cycles. The open source Flash Destroyer prototype explores that limit by writing and verifying a solid state storage chip until it dies. The total write-verify cycle count is shown on a display, watch a live video feed and guess when the first chip will die. This project was inspired by the inevitable comments about flash longevity on every Slashdot SSD story, like these from earlier this week. Design files and source are available at Google Code.
Microsoft

Submission + - Steve Ballmer to present at Apple's WWDC? (barrons.com)

gyrogeerloose writes: According to Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research, a portion of Steve Jobs' keynote has been set aside for--wait for it--Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft! Ballmer will reportedly be talking about Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 development package. According to Chowdhry, the new version of Visual Studio will allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS. Currently, developers may only create iPhone and Mac OS applications from within Apple's own Xcode development suite which only runs on Macs.
Microsoft

Submission + - Lazy Admins Stay On IE6 To Block Facebook (zdnet.com.au) 1

bennyboy64 writes: Businesses that want to block access to social networking sites such as Facebook are not upgrading to the latest version of Internet Explorer (IE), according to Microsoft's Australian chief security adviser Stuart Strathdee, ZDNet reports. '[Companies are] happy to stay with IE6 because ... a lot of the social networking sites and the sites that they deem are unnecessary for work purposes, they're not going to render and function properly within [older versions of] IE,' Strathdee said. Are there any IT admins out there harassing IE6 for this purpose?

Submission + - Teen pregnancies in Canada plummet 40% (parentcentral.ca)

voislav98 writes: In not so "news for nerds" the Toronto Star reports that teen pregnancy rates in Canada dropped 36.9 per cent between 1996 and 2006, according to research released Wednesday by the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada. Although socio-economic inequality has been identified as the key factor influencing teen pregnancy rates, high-quality sex education in schools and easy access to health services were also found to be important. The Sex Information and Education Council of Canada receives funding from the makers of Trojan condoms. Incidentally, US pregnancy rates only dropped 25% over the same period, widening the teen-pregnancy gap between the two countries to 32.4 per 1000 women (27.9 vs 60.3). Both countries are yet to catch up to the 0.03 per 1000 women of the Slashdot nation.

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