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Comment "Better safe than sorry" right?? (Score 5, Insightful) 134

Recently there was a video going around of a racist beating up a child. With some searching I was curiously unable to find the raw video so here is a news article about it. This video was banned from Youtube for "encouraging bullying". When you're claiming presentation of evidence is encouraging the crime you've gone one step too far. It becomes censorship. If we don't see it it hasn't actually happened? The only reason I know about this at all, given youtube taking it down, is the wide news reporting on it. Imagine it were something even more controversial: "senator kicks kitten". Would any news organization report it? Sure if enough people found out about that hypothetical video for the Streisand effect to kick in it would be all over the chans but besides that. And how many of you go to the chans for news anyway? I know I don't.

The point of all this is that anything sufficiently sufficiently controversial is getting censored in the name of protecting our fragile little minds with a very real, very strong chilling effect. It will be a sad day when I have to make my own website mirrored on Tor to proactively report on anything that might get censored but I can see that day coming.

Comment Why wasn't this done sooner? (Score 2) 221

by Iamthecheese (#49255789) Attached to: World's 1st Penis Transplant Done In South Africa
Serious question:

Besides the "ick" factor why aren't there trans people walking around with donated penises? Even doing organ swaps where a male-to-female trades with a compatible female-to-male? I realize tissue rejection can be a bitch but I can't imagine the artificial organs they make from the patient's own cells are particularly useful.

Comment Ring around the rosie... (Score 4, Interesting) 99

by Iamthecheese (#49250983) Attached to: Panda Antivirus Flags Itself As Malware
The way it crashed was to halt and quarantine every running process. This lead to endless individual program crashes and attempts to run programs throwing "perimeter incorrect", which looks just like what happens with ransomware. Another possible side effect (one that I experienced) is a "This copy of Windows is not valid" on reboot and failed Windows updates. Anyone not running Panda will laugh but this mistake resulted in a LOT of lost man-hours for a lot of people out there. Because I trust the company I, for one, lost four weeks of work due to not backing up properly and using an encryption program that kept Windows Repair from working properly. I'm still running Panda: I think they'll learn from the mistake. But one more fuckup and I won't. Also I'm no longer recommending the program.

Submission + - Behind the White House's claim of 545,000 unfilled IT jobs (computerworld.com)

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: The data comes from Burning Glass Technologies, which analyzes help-wanted ads.

This means that the administration's 545,000 unfilled IT jobs figure is based on the Burning Glass analysis. It arrived at this by counting the number of jobs over a 90-day period leading up to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Jan. 20, according to Dan Restuccia, chief analytics officer at Burning Glass.

Burning Glass's approach draws concerns from Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University, who studies the science and engineering workforce. "They claim they deduplicate, but they don't publish their methodology; there is no external verification," he said.

Submission + - In Historic Turn, CO2 Emissions Flatline in 2014, Even as Global Economy Grows (forbes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: A key stumbling block in the effort to combat global warming has been the intimate link between greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth. When times are good and industries are thriving, global energy use traditionally increases and energy-related carbon dioxide emissions also go up. Only when economies stumble and businesses shutter — as during the most recent financial crisis — does energy use typically decline, in turn bringing down planet-warming emissions.

But for the first time in nearly half a century, that synchrony between economic growth and energy-related emissions seems to have been broken, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, prompting its chief economist to wonder if an important new pivot point has been reached — one that decouples economic vigor and carbon pollution.

The IEA pegged carbon dioxide emissions for 2014 at 32.3 billion metric tons — essentially the same volume as 2013, even as the global economy grew at a rate of about 3 percent.

“This gives me even more hope that humankind will be able to work together to combat climate change, the most important threat facing us today,” the IEA’s lead economist, Fatih Birol, said in a statement accompanying the findings.

Whether the disconnect is a mere fluke or a true harbinger of a paradigm shift is impossible to know. The IEA suggested that decreasing use of coal in China — and upticks in renewable electricity generation there using solar, wind and hydropower — could have contributed to the reversal. The agency also cited the ongoing deployment of energy-efficiency and renewable power policies in Europe, the U.S. and other developed economies as additional factors.

Submission + - Flash bug exploited to hold gamers to ransom

Submitted by Andy Smith
Andy Smith writes: In 30 years of computing the only virus I've ever had was sneaked on to a Windows machine through a vulnerability in Adobe's Acrobat PDF reader. Now gamers worldwide are behind held to ransom by a virus that encrypts their saved game files until they pay $500. The virus gets on to their machines through a vulnerability in Adobe's Flash player.

Submission + - University of Illinois' Molecular 3D Printer Can Print Billions of Compounds

Submitted by ErnieKey
ErnieKey writes: University of Illinois Researchers have created what may end up being the future of 3D printing. The device, called a Molecular-Machine, basically manufactures on the compound level. Martin Burke, the lead researcher on this project says that they are already able to synthesize over a billion different compounds with the machine, compounds which up until now humans have not been able to synthesize. The impact on the pharmaceutical industry could be staggering.

Submission + - Panda antivirus flags itself as malware .. (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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. It's not clear how many machines are affected.

Submission + - Rendering a Frame of "Deus Ex: Human Revolution"

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Video games are among the most computationally intensive applications. The amount of calculation achieved in a few milliseconds can sometimes be mind-blowing.
This post about the breakdown of a frame rendering in "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" takes us through the different steps of the process.
It explains in detail the rendering passes involved, the techniques as well as the algorithms processed by a computer — 60 times per second.

Submission + - LAPD Police Claim Helicopters Stop Crimes Before They Happen

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: True Angelenos don't even bother to look up when one of the LAPD's 17 helicopters rattles their windows searching for a car-jacked Camry or an assault suspect hiding under a jacaranda but few doubt that more bad guys would get away without the nation's largest police helicopter fleet to help chase them. Now the LA Times reports that data shows that LA's helicopters are stopping crimes before they happen. Tapping into the data-driven policing trend, the department uses heat maps, technology and years of statistics to identify crime "hot spots." Pilots then use their downtime to fly over them, on the theory that would-be criminals tend to rethink their nefarious plans when there's "ghetto birds," as Ice Cube calls them, hovering overhead. Months of data show that the number of serious crimes reported in the LAPD's Newton Division in South L.A. fell during weeks when the helicopters conducted more flights. During the week of Sept. 13, when the helicopter unit flew over Newton 65 times, the division recorded 90 crimes. A week later, the number of flights dropped to 40 and the number of reported crimes skyrocketed to 136, with rises seen among almost all types of crime, including burglary, car theft and thefts from vehicles. "It's extremely cutting edge," says Capt. Gary Walters, who heads the LAPD's air support unit. "It's different. It's nothing that we've ever done before with this specificity."

But Professor Geoffrey Alpert. a policing expert who has studied the use of police helicopters in Miami and Baltimore, says the choppers can deter crime in the short-term but criminals will likely return when they're not around (PDF). "You are deterring the criminals but you aren't getting rid of them and their intent. Those criminals could strike in a different time and place," says Alpert. "I mean that’s the whole thing about random patrol. You see a police car and it’s the same thing. You hide, he goes around the block and you go back to your breaking and entering.”

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