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Submission + - Wikileaks video depects 2 journalists killed (collateralmurder.org) 1

Anonymous writes: The video that was getting wikileaks into trouble with the US State department and CIA has finally been released. The video shows a helicopter pilot misidentify a camera as a rocket propelled grenade, and then open fire on a group of Iraqi civilians and 2 Reuters journalists. The pilot then requests and receives permission to open fire on a van picking up one of the wounded journalists. In the van were two young children, who were also seriously wounded.

Submission + - iPad and the Cloud Increase Your Carbon Footprint (greenpeace.org)

blitzkrieg3 writes: A common advatage advantage cited for cloud computing is energy savings, through the use of technologies like geothermal energy, sea water cooling, virtualization, and smart stretch clusters. Then why is Greenpeace, on the eve of the iPad release, worried about energy consumption in the cloud? They report that datacenters will account for 1,963 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2020, a 3 fold increase. And a lot of this energy will come from coal, such as the new datacenter Facebook is building in Prineville, Oregon.

Comment Re:False report (Score 1) 270

For anyone who wants to know the actual numbers

Apparently, in 2008 in the NHS Tees area (Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, Redcar and Cleveland) there were fewer than 10 cases of syphilis - so few that, under data-protection rules, the NHS can't give out the exact number.
But in 2009, 30 cases of heterosexual syphilis were notified to the NHS. So, yes: a four-fold increase, but a very small sample from which to drawn any very big conclusions.

Long story short, they noticed an increase, asked the patient where they got the disease. The patient said they met partners on the internet, which gets translated into Facebook. I'd put my money on it being Craigslist, as someone mentioned earlier.

Hardware Hacking

Balloon and Duct Tape Deliver Great Space Photos 238

krou writes "With a budget of £500, Robert Harrison used cheap parts, a weather balloon, some duct tape, a digital camera, and a GPS device to capture some great photos of the earth from space that resulted in NASA calling him to find out how he had done it. 'A guy phoned up who worked for NASA who was interested in how we took the pictures,' said Mr Harrison. 'He wanted to know how the hell we did it. He thought we used a rocket. They said it would have cost them millions of dollars.' The details of his balloon are as follows: he used 'an ordinary Canon camera mounted on a weather balloon,' 'free software' that 'reprogrammed the camera to wake up every five minutes and take eight photographs and a video before switching off for a rest.' He also ensured the camera was 'wrapped in loft insulation' to make sure it could operate at the cold temperatures. The GPS device allowed him to pinpoint the balloon's location, and retrieve the camera when it fell down to earth attached to a small parachute."

Comment Re:Well, what did they expect? (Score 1) 667

But the problem is the same govermnental departments that make that argument are also incredibly secretive themselves (CIA, NSA, FBI). It's a double standard. You can't have it both ways. It makes complete sense to say that when when the NSA wants to listen to my international phone calls, but then when the President wants to squelch the release of torture photos, we're told that the photos really aren't that bad, and that it's a matter of national security.

Comment Re:Google needs China, not the other way around (Score 3, Insightful) 533

Human rights have nothing to do with it. Google was hacked. If people can't trust the contents of their GMail inbox to remain out of the hands of Chinese intelligence, and Google can't ensure that some Chinese entity isn't stealing proprietary code, Google's profits will suffer. Pulling out of China will make this less of a threat. It's a cost-benefit analysis, and that's how it would be presented to the shareholders.

Comment Re:Oh really? (Score 1) 533

If Google pulls out, the Chinese will still have censored search results, but from an inferior search provider.

Except that Baidu already dominates search in in China. If Google pulls out, most people won't notice. For the few Google users, they'll move to Baidu and search like everyone else.

Comment Re:You have friends (Score 1) 171

But yeah, people shouldn't be surprised that publicly documenting every facet of your life results in less privacy, for you, and for everyone you know.

That isn't the surprise. The surprise is that even if you go out of your way to not publicly document some things (such as high school), this information can be found out through your friends list.

The Almighty Buck

Scientists Develop Financial Turing Test 184

KentuckyFC writes writes to share a new online test that is being touted as the "financial Turing test." The web-based exercise asks users to distinguish between real and randomly generated financial data. "Various economists argue that the efficiency of a market ought to be clearly evident in the returns it produces. They say that the more efficient it is, the more random its returns will be and a perfect market should be completely random. That would appear to give the lie to the widespread belief that humans are unable to tell the difference between financial market returns and, say, a sequence of coin tosses. However, there is good evidence that financial markets are not random (although they do not appear to be predictable either). Now a group of scientists have developed a financial Turing test to find out whether humans can distinguish real financial data from the same data randomly rearranged. Anybody can take the test and the results indicate that humans are actually rather good at this kind of pattern recognition."

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"The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment." -- Richard P. Feynman

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