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Comment You mean like the first Cylon in "Caprica"? (Score 1) 80

by RevWaldo (#49269673) Attached to: SXSW: Do Androids Dream of Being You?
~ You can't download a personality. There's no way to translate the data.

~ But the information being held in our heads is available in other databases. People leave more than footprints as they travel through life. Medical scans, DNA profiles, psych evaluations, school records, e-mails, recording video and audio, CAT scans, genetic typing, synaptic records, security cameras, test results, shopping records, talent shows, ball games, traffic tickets, restaurant bills, phone records, music lists, movie tickets, TV shows. Even prescriptions for birth control.

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Security

Panda Antivirus Flags Itself As Malware 99

Posted by Soulskill from the self-fulfilling-prophecy dept.
An anonymous reader writes An update to a number of Panda antivirus programs Wednesday mistakenly flagged core files as malware, putting them in quarantine. In doing so, the antivirus system ceased working. Panda's free antivirus, retail 2015 service, and its enterprise cloud-based antimalware service are all affected. The company took to Twitter to warn users: "Please, don't reboot PCs. We'll keep you posted." In an advisory, Panda said the erroneous signature file was "repaired immediately," but warned under certain conditions it is possible for the "incident to persist."
Space

Huge Ocean Confirmed Underneath Solar System's Largest Moon 117

Posted by samzenpus from the under-the-sea dept.
sciencehabit writes The solar system's largest moon, Ganymede, in orbit around Jupiter, harbors an underground ocean containing more water than all the oceans on Earth, according to new observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. Ganymede now joins Jupiter's Europa and two moons of Saturn, Titan and Enceladus, as moons with subsurface oceans—and good places to look for life. Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, may also have a subsurface ocean. The Hubble study suggests that the ocean can be no deeper than 330 kilometers below the surface.
Republicans

House Republicans Roll Out Legislation To Overturn New Net Neutrality Rules 550

Posted by Soulskill from the hooray-politics dept.
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and 31 Republican co-sponsors have submitted the Internet Freedom Act (PDF) for consideration in the House. The bill would roll back the recent net neutrality rules made by the FCC. The bill says the rules "shall have no force or effect, and the Commission may not reissue such rule in substantially the same form, or issue a new rule that is substantially the same as such rule, unless the reissued or new rule is specifically authorized by a law enacted after the date of the enactment of this Act." Blackburn claims the FCC's rules will "stifle innovation" and "restrict freedom." The article points out that Blackburn's campaign and leadership PAC has received substantial donations. from Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.
Mars

Mars Curiosity Rover Experiences Short Circuit, Will Be Stationary For Days 33

Posted by Soulskill from the shocking-news-from-mars dept.
hypnosec writes: NASA says its Mars Curiosity rover has experienced a transient short circuit. The team has halted all work from the rover temporarily while engineers analyze the situation. Telemetry data received from Curiosity indicated the short circuit, after which the vehicle followed its programmed response, stopping the arm activity underway whenthe irregularity in the electric current happened. Curiosity will stay parked as its engineers analyze the situation and figure out if any damage has been done. NASA says a transient short circuit would have little effect on the rover's operations in some systems, but it could force the team to restrict use of whatever mechanism caused the problem.

Comment Re:Parody (Score 1) 255

by RevWaldo (#49174161) Attached to: Gritty 'Power Rangers' Short Is Not Fair Use
Agreed. It's your basic "What if we took the premise seriously?" parody. What would happen if an entity from outer space imbued teenagers with superhuman abilities and gave them massive fighting machines to fight monsters the size of buildings and forces of evil out to enslave the world/galaxy/universe? Answer: bad things would happen, that's what.

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Submission + - So, site update huh? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Probably explains why I can't make any comments.
AI

Machine Intelligence and Religion 531

Posted by Soulskill from the i'm-sorry-dave,-god-can't-let-you-do-that dept.
itwbennett writes: Earlier this month Reverend Dr. Christopher J. Benek raised eyebrows on the Internet by stating his belief that Christians should seek to convert Artificial Intelligences to Christianity if and when they become autonomous. Of course that's assuming that robots are born atheists, not to mention that there's still a vast difference between what it means to be autonomous and what it means to be human. On the other hand, suppose someone did endow a strong AI with emotion – encoded, say, as a strong preference for one type of experience over another, coupled with the option to subordinate reasoning to that preference upon occasion or according to pattern. what ramifications could that have for algorithmic decision making?
Medicine

Giant Asian Gerbils May Have Caused the Black Death 65

Posted by Soulskill from the adorable-ways-to-die dept.
Dave Knott writes: Rats, long believed to be the scourge that brought the Black Death to 14th-century Europe, may not be the disease-bearing scoundrels we thought they were. Scientists have shifted blame for the medieval pandemic responsible for millions of deaths to a new furry menace: giant gerbils from Asia. University of Oslo researchers, working with Swiss government scientists, say a "pulse" of bubonic plague strains arrived sporadically from Asia. They posit the Yersinia pestis bacterium was likely carried over the Silk Road via fleas on the giant gerbils during intermittent warm spells. The fleas could have then transmitted the disease to humans. The Black Death is believed to have killed up to 200 million people in Europe. Though very rare today, cases of the plague still arise in Africa, Asia, the Americas and parts of the former Soviet Union, with the World Health Organization reporting 783 cases worldwide in 2013, including 126 deaths.
Businesses

Attention, Rockstar Developers: Get a Talent Agent 145

Posted by timothy from the there-will-be-no-green-m&ms dept.
ErichTheRed writes OK, we all know that there are a lot of developers and IT people in the field who shouldn't be, and finding really good people and hanging onto them is very difficult. However, I almost fell out of my chair reading this breathless article suggesting that developers hire agents. I grant the authors that recruiters are sometimes the only way to cut through the HR jungle in some companies, but outside of the hot San Francisco startup market, can you imagine a "10x rockstar developer" swaggering into a job interview with his negotiating team? I'm sure our readers can cite plenty of examples of these types who were only 10x in their own minds...

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