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Comment Re:Wrong issue (Score 1) 290

Due process is meaningless as far as limiting behavior. It sorta means "customary" or "expected". Secret charges and secret courts and secret prisons have been permanently established in this country following due process. Process just rubber-stamps whatever the madhouse wants to do. The real dichotomy is what is illegal versus what is immoral or just plain wrong. Rules are morally neutral.

Comment Re:With taxes you buy civilization, remember? (Score 1) 290

The people in this country cannot be trusted. The police are just an expression of the common culture. Given a choice, people prefer fascism, under whatever name you like. What was it Terry Pratchett said through the Patricican... what people want, what they really want, is that tomorrow be pretty much like today. They want stability and a perception of safety. To that end, they know no limits in restricting the efforts of their neighbors to not-be-like-every-else. From surveillance, to secret police and secret arrests, they support conformity and the Others getting their heads kicked in by the guards. The police are civilians, and they have no special belief system not held by the people they sometimes admit they work for... our culture likes authoritarian thugs (for use against troublemakers), so our police likes being authoritarian thugs when necessary.

Google

Google Thinks the Insurance Industry May Be Ripe For Disruption 238

HughPickens.com writes: The insurance industry is a fat target — there's were about $481 billion in premiums in 2013, and agents' commissions of about $50 billion. Now Conor Dougherty writes in the NYT that the boring but lucrative trade has been attracting big names like Google, which has formed a partnership with Comparenow, an American auto insurance comparison site that will give Google access to insurers in Comparenow's network. "A lot of people are waking up to the fact that it's a massive industry, it's old-fashioned, they still use human agents and the commissions are pretty big," says Jennifer Fitzgerald. It may seem like an odd match for Google, whose projects include driverless cars, delivery drones and a pill to detect cancer, but the key to insurance is having lots of data about people's backgrounds and habits, which is perhaps the company's greatest strength. "They have a ton of data on where people drive, how people drive," says Jon McNeill. "It's the holy grail of being able to price auto insurance correctly."

People in the industry and Silicon Valley say it is only a matter of time before online agencies attack the armies of intermediaries that are the backbone of the trade, and Google could present formidable competition for other insurance sellers. As many as two-thirds of insurance customers say they would consider purchasing insurance products from organizations other than insurers, including 23 percent who would consider buying from online service providers such as Google and Amazon. Google Compare auto insurance site has already been operating in Britain for two years as a search engine for auto insurance prices.
Communications

FBI Seeks To Legally Hack You If You're Connected To TOR Or a VPN 385

SonicSpike writes The investigative arm of the Department of Justice is attempting to short-circuit the legal checks of the Fourth Amendment by requesting a change in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. These procedural rules dictate how law enforcement agencies must conduct criminal prosecutions, from investigation to trial. Any deviations from the rules can have serious consequences, including dismissal of a case. The specific rule the FBI is targeting outlines the terms for obtaining a search warrant. It's called Federal Rule 41(b), and the requested change would allow law enforcement to obtain a warrant to search electronic data without providing any specific details as long as the target computer location has been hidden through a technical tool like Tor or a virtual private network. It would also allow nonspecific search warrants where computers have been intentionally damaged (such as through botnets, but also through common malware and viruses) and are in five or more separate federal judicial districts. Furthermore, the provision would allow investigators to seize electronically stored information regardless of whether that information is stored inside or outside the court's jurisdiction.
Cellphones

Moscow To Track Cell-phone Users In 2015 For Traffic Analysis 63

An anonymous reader links to this story at The Stack (based on this translated report) that "The Moscow authorities will begin using the signal from Muscovites' cell-phones in 2015 to research patterns of traffic and points of congestion, with a view to changes in travel infrastructure including roads, the Moscow metro and bus services. The tracking, which appears to opt all users in unilaterally, promises not to identify individual cell-phone numbers, and will use GSM in most cases, but also GPS in more densely-constructed areas of the old city. The system is already in limited use on the roads, but will be extended to pedestrians and subway users in 2015. The city of 11.5 million people has three main cell providers, all of whom cooperate fully with authorities' request for information. A representative of one, Beeline, said: "We prepare reports that detail where our subscribers work, live, move, and other aspects."
Medicine

Regular Exercise Not Enough To Make Up For Sitting All Day 348

An anonymous reader writes: Toronto researchers have found the amount of time a person sits during the day is associated with a higher risk of disease and death, regardless of regular exercise. The paper, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine (abstract), found that prolonged sedentary behavior was associated with a 15 to 20 per cent higher risk of death from any cause; a 15 to 20 per cent higher risk of heart disease, death from heart disease, cancer, death from cancer; and as much as a 90 per cent increased risk of developing diabetes, said Alter. And that was after adjusting for the effects of regular exercise. ... Engaging in 30 to 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous daily exercise does not mean it's OK to then "sit on your rear" for the rest of the day.
Japan

Japanese Nobel Laureate Blasts His Country's Treatment of Inventors 191

schwit1 writes: Shuji Nakamura won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics (along with two other scientists) for his work inventing blue LEDs. But long ago he abandoned Japan for the U.S. because his country's culture and patent law did not favor him as an inventor. Nakamura has now blasted Japan for considering further legislation that would do more harm to inventors.

"In the early 2000s, Nakamura had a falling out with his employer and, it seemed, all of Japan. Relying on a clause in Japan's patent law, article 35, that assigns patents to individual inventors, he took the unprecedented step of suing his former employer for a share of the profits his invention was generating. He eventually agreed to a court-mediated $8 million settlement, moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and became an American citizen. During this period he bitterly complained about Japan's treatment of inventors, the country's educational system and its legal procedures. 'The problem is now the Japanese government wants to eliminate patent law article 35 and give all patent rights to the company. If the Japanese government changes the patent law it means basically there would no compensation [for inventors].'"

There is a similar problem with copyright law in the U.S., where changes to the law in the 1970s and 1990s have made it almost impossible for copyrights to ever expire. The changes favor the corporations rather than the individuals who might actually create the work.

Comment Re:How to influence the innumerate with CS Ed stat (Score 1) 335

Thank you for correcting spelling mistake. English is not my first language.

You're welcome. Nether is it mine. Nor is it my second language.
Buorre Beaivi!

s/carrier/career/g
Anything else that I can do for you?

Save cycles and don't use the g option when not needed. With sed not being my first scripting language, I propose: /^w/s/carri/a caree/1 ;)

Comment Re:How to influence the innumerate with CS Ed stat (Score 4, Insightful) 335

The very best engineers, programmers and wizards are not school taught - they are autodidact.
To the point that many have a CS education, that is only pro-forma so they fulfill employment requirements.

Anyone who takes CS to learn CS is already behind. If you actually learned something you didn't already know, you probably didn't have much of an interest or a knack in the first place.

To get more [insert favorite minority] into STEM/CS, the members of [insert favorite minority] have to take an interest in it. Schools can't teach you the drive and curiosity that makes you worth keeping as an employee. They can only teach you what you can pick up in a fraction of the time by reading and playing around.

To expect to be a successful engineer because your parents sent you to UCB is as silly as expecting to be a successful musician because you took music classes. Without an inner drive and interest, it won't do much good.
And the problem is that women in general don't take a personal interest in maths, science, engineering or similar. That has to come first.

Comment Re:iOS (Score 2) 63

Yep, this. iOS is second to none in terms of accessibility support.

I'm not too sure. Are there, for example, any Braille readers for iOS, like there is for both Windows and Linux? Or haptic mice? How about something as simple as bitmap fonts at large sizes instead of scalable fonts?
How about text-to-speech or speech recognition in other languages than the most common ones?
Or on-screen keyboards that understand more than one language at a time?

I'd say that Apple's accessibility support is superb as long as you belong to the 80% most common group. But their support of the remaining 20% is abysmal compared to the competition. The one-shoe-fits-all principle doesn't work well. With accessibility, it's better to add something that sucks but can be used than to nix it because it's not good enough. And that's unfortunately what Apple does.

Comment Re:Terry Pratchett say... (Score 1) 578

We see things through rose tinted glasses.
When we use a language where "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo" is a valid sentence, you got to wonder.

English, as She is Spoken, also has a low information density, in part due to the vowel falloff. Most languages have far more vowels, and distinguish I and Y sounds, and O and deep O sounds, and also allow stress on more than one syllable, or intonation distinguishing between words.

In writing, well, I think English is losing because of IMspeak. We're degenerating into a written language that's more ambiguous than precise. Punctuation is being replaced by the universal punctuation symbol "lol", case is disappearing, and abbreviations (sorry, I mean "abbrevs") are more and more used, quite often incorrectly. I'm just waiting for newspapers to pick up with articles like"us sk8 ftw lol us >> finl& lol".

But as long as Hollywood can churn out movies, English, or at least the American version, will still be strong around the world.

Comment Re:Not all of his ashes.. (Score 1) 108

Hell, personally, I'd have settled with just a plaque, but if a few grams of ash has more emotional value with some people, why not?

Because it's an endorsement of superstition, and sets precedents.

There is something after death: the lives of everybody who didn't die that day, and their descendants. The possibility that what you did in your life might have a positive impact on your survivors, that they might even remember you or your work, is the real life after death.

I partially agree. A positive impact on the future we don't get to see is a reason to live our lives well. Along with sowing our oats. But remembering me? I'd rather they spent the time on pursuing worthwhile endeavors, because no matter what people think of me, I won't know it, and it won't make a grain of difference.
Some cultures have a taboo against speaking of the dead, and I can't say I've read anything about that causing problems.

Comment Re:Autonomous vehicles (Score 1) 162

Strange that the google car seems not to be able to detect pedestrians reliable (police officer waving was an example in the link)

When an autonomous car fails to obey a police officer waving it to the side or waving it on, that's the day when autonomous cars start dying.

I expect the first police protests to be there within days, and the first fatal shooting of people in an autonomous car to be within weeks.

But the final nail in the coffin will be when a senator is stuck in traffic and misses an important flight or meeting, and discover that the reason was an autonomous car that stopped for a shoe[*] and refused to drive over it or cross the double yellow line to get around it.

[*]: It's almost always the left shoe. But it could be a teapot.

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