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Submission + - China's State Press Calls for 'Building a de-Americanized World'

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Businessweek reports that as nations around the world fret over the US budget impasse according to a not-so-subtle commentary published by China’s official Xinhua News Agency "it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world". Key among its proposals: the creation of a new international reserve currency to replace the present reliance on US dollars, a necessary step to prevent American bumbling from further afflicting the world. “The cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising the debt ceiling has again left many nations’ tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonized,” says Xinhua. “The world is still crawling its way out of an economic disaster thanks to the voracious Wall Street elites." The commentary calls for a greater role for developing-market economies in both the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and adds that “the authority of the United Nations in handling global hot-spot issues has to be recognized. That means no one has the right to wage any form of military action against others without a UN mandate." The commentary concludes that "the purpose of promoting these changes is not to completely toss the United States aside, which is also impossible. Rather, it is to encourage Washington to play a much more constructive role in addressing global affairs."

Comment Cultural Participation (Score 1) 158

by h4nk (#45110257) Attached to: Read Better Books To Be a Better Person
Literature, as a form of art, really is about the culture from which it originates from and that culture which is the subject. Any personal "enrichment" by a reader, regardless of the material, is based on their subjective experience. Whether the take-away experience positively or negatively affects the reader... I can't see how any valid generalization can be made beyond, "it may or may not happen, and to the degree and quality, that is indeterminate." The only thing we can really verifiably say is that the reader participated in the cultural narrative.

Submission + - Read better books to be a better person (wordpress.com) 1

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: Researchers from the New School for Social Research in New York have demonstrated that if you read quality literary fiction you become a better person, in the sense that you are more likely to emphasise with others. Presumably we can all think of books that have changed the way we feel about the world — so this is, in a sense, a scientific confirmation of something fairly intuitive.

Submission + - Hillary Clinton: "We Need To Talk Sensibly About Spying" (theguardian.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The Guardian reports: Hillary Clinton has called for a "sensible adult conversation", to be held in a transparent way, about the boundaries of state surveillance highlighted by the leaking of secret NSA files by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. In a boost to Nick Clegg, the British deputy prime minister, who is planning to start conversations within government about the oversight of Britain's intelligence agencies, the former US secretary of state said it would be wrong to shut down a debate. Clinton, who is seen as a frontrunner for the 2016 US presidential election, said at Chatham House in London: "This is a very important question. On the intelligence issue, we are democracies thank goodness, both the US and the UK. We need to have a sensible adult conversation about what is necessary to be done, and how to do it, in a way that is as transparent as it can be, with as much oversight and citizens' understanding as there can be."

Submission + - Patriot Act Author Introduces Bill to Limit Use of Patriot Act (dailydot.com)

Submitted by wjcofkc
wjcofkc writes: In an ironic but welcome twist, author of the Patriot Act, Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), is introducing the USA FREEDOM Act, a bill specifically aimed at countering the portions of the Patriot Act that were interpreted to let the NSA collect telephone metadata in bulk. The congressman has been a vocal opponent of the NSA's interpretation and misuse of the Patriot Act since Edward Snowden first leaked evidence of the program in June. On Wednesday, he wrote to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that the “collection of a wide array of data on innocent Americans has led to serious questions about how government will use—or misuse—such information.”

Submission + - Gene Variant Can Cause Nattering Nabobs Of Negativity (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Researchers from the University of British Columbia, Cornell University and Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health report in the journal Psychological Science that a gene variant can cause individuals to perceive the negative side of every situation. UBC Prof. Rebecca Todd said the ADRA2b deletion variant influences not only emotional memory, which was previously known, but also amplifies a person's real-time perception of events, for better or for worse. "Some individuals are predisposed to see the world more darkly than others," Todd said. "What we found is that a previously known genetic variation causes some individuals to perceive the world more vividly than others and, particularly, negative aspects of the world."

Submission + - EU court holds news website liable for readers' comments (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: Seven top European Union judges have ruled that a leading Internet news website is legally responsible for offensive views posted by readers in the site's comments section. The European Court of Human Rights found that Estonian courts were within their rights to fine Delfi, one of the country's largest news websites, for comments made anonymously about a news article, according to a judgment.

Submission + - Qualcomm to design and manufacture neural processing units next year

Submitted by Bismillah
Bismillah writes: At the MIT Technology Revivew EmTech conference, Qualcomm announced that the company and partners will design and make neural processing units or NPUs starting next year.

NPUs mimic the neural structures and how the brain processes information in a massively parallel way, while being extremely power efficient, and may end up in self-learning devices.

Submission + - The business case for Hadoop

Submitted by Bismillah
Bismillah writes: For all of its potential benefits, Hadoop can be an uncomfortable fit within many IT environments. It challenges traditional approaches to data warehousing architecture, to the way in which IT projects are funded, and in some cases — can even threaten jobs.

On that basis, selling a Hadoop-based analytics project into a business is not as straightforward as a back-of-the-envelope cost calculation might suggest. Here are a few hints and tips on how to do it.

Submission + - BBC Unveil Newly Discovered Dr.Who episodes (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by BigBadBus
BigBadBus writes: Putting paid to months of speculation, the BBC announced at a press conference today that it had recovered 9 previously lost episodes of Dr.Who, from the Patrick Troughton era (1966-69). The episodes complete "The Enemy of the World" and almost complete "The Web of Fear" (leaving one episode outstanding). The episodes were found in a relay station in Nigeria by Phillip Morris; previously Nigeria had been checked and had returned 6 lost episodes in 1984. The episodes are now available from UK and US iTune stores and can be for pre-ordered from Amazon.co.uk

Submission + - Vinyl records fight digital death (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: GZ Media located in the central area of the Czech Republic, has been in the vinyl record business for 61 years and says it is now the world's biggest vinyl record producer, working for industry giants like Sony Music and Universal Records. Vinyl sales continue to resist the threat posed to them by digital music. In fact Nielsen SoundScan says nearly 3 million vinyl LPs have been sold in the U.S. in 2013.

Submission + - GoDaddy Pulls Lavabit's Security Creds Because The FBI Got Ahold Of Its Encrypti (forbes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The FBI complained. Levison got hit with a $5,000/day contempt of court charge, and handed over the keys in digital form two days later after being charged $10,000. He also shuttered his site, making the keys useless for future communication interception. Today, the Lavabit site is still up, simply to solicit funds for Lavabit's legal defense. Levison says he's received over $200,000, but has already spent $100,000 of it; Lavabit is currently appealing the contempt charge and arguing that asking a site to turn over its encryption keys — imperiling the security of its business — is unconstitutional. But if you try to access the secure version of Lavabit's site — https://www.lavabit.com/ — you'll find that it's down. "Peer's Certificate has been revoked," says the error message.

That's thanks to GoDaddy — Lavabit's domain name provider — which apparently saw the news coverage about Levison handing his encryption keys over to the FBI.

"We're compelled by industry policies to revoke certs when we become aware that the private key has been communicated to a 3rd-party and thus could be used by that party to intercept and decrypt communications,â says GoDaddy spokesperson Elizabeth L. Driscoll, in response to an inquiry about Lavabit's keys being revoked.

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