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Comment Re:One should be careful on the logic here (Score 2) 155

...But then, one has to understand that every position - no matter how altruistic your motivation - has a consequence. If your local group is protesting anything based on funding from Putin (or the Koch Brothers, or George Soros, etc) understand that as well-intentioned as your protests may be, you are being used as a convenient pawn.

Put you faith in ideas, not persons. Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while.

Submission + - Governments Shouldn't Auction More Spectrum (saasintheenterprise.com)

Submitted by dkatana
dkatana writes: The FCC recently raised more than $34 billion for six blocks of airwaves, totaling 65 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is good news for the treasury coffers, but government auctions threaten the ability of the FCC and similar agencies to manage the spectrum, impose net neutrality rules, and allow new businesses to compete.

Carriers and internet companies who won the auction might believe the spectrum is theirs to do as they please, blocking access or charging huge fees to others. Issues such as speed throttling and preferential access come to mind.

If governments insist in auctions of the newly available frequencies, it could hurt the industry and potentially destroy any possibility of negotiating universal access and net neutrality.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Can a felon work in IT? 10

Submitted by Lesrahpem
Lesrahpem writes: I'm a felon with several prior misdemeanor convictions from an immature time in my life. I've since cleaned up my act, and I want to go back into the IT sector. I keep running into potential employers who tell me they'd like to hire me but can't because of my past record (expunging won't work, I'm in Ohio). Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Should I just give up and change careers?

Submission + - AT&T prepares for war on net neutrality.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: AT&T has hired Republican polling company Call Research to conduct a national poll this week on net neutrality. In no way even-handed, the poll misrepresents what net neutrality is and what will happen if it becomes law. This is 'Obamacare for the Internet' they claim, a government takeover of the Internet which will stifle innovation of the Internet, the greatest private sector invention for decades, grant the government greater surveillance powers, threaten liberty and will cause America to lose the moral high ground against authoritarian countries like China. Regulation will cost consumers more to access the net and do to the Internet what regulation has done to the poor power and water companies. It's supported by Obama and opposed by the Tea party and the wonderful companies who provide you the Internet like Comcast and Verizon. On and on for twenty minutes it continues.

The results of this poll will no doubt be used to convince politicians what a bad idea net neutrality is, as the respondents seem to be falling for it.

I apologize for posting as AC but I'm violating my NDA and I need this job.

Submission + - Black Friday: E-commerce Pages Were 20% Slower On Desktop, 57% Slower On Mobile

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Black Friday news kicked off this weekend quite early when Best Buy was hit with a massive outage, but it turns out that was only half the story. The top 50 e-commerce websites were slower overall this year compared to last, suggesting customers were frustrated even if they could get to their favorite shopping site. Web performance monitoring company Catchpoint Systems looked at aggregate performance this weekend and compared it to the same timeframe in 2013. The results are notable: desktop webpages were 19.85 percent slower, while mobile webpages were a whopping 57.21 percent slower.

Submission + - Game Theory Analysis Shows How Evolution Favors Cooperation's Collapse (upenn.edu)

Submitted by Ugmug
Ugmug writes: Last year, University of Pennsylvania researchers Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B. Plotkin published a mathematical explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature. Using the classical game theory match-up known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, they found that generous strategies were the only ones that could persist and succeed in a multi-player, iterated version of the game over the long term.

But now they’ve come out with a somewhat less rosy view of evolution. With a new analysis of the Prisoner’s Dilemma played in a large, evolving population, they found that adding more flexibility to the game can allow selfish strategies to be more successful. The work paints a dimmer but likely more realistic view of how cooperation and selfishness balance one another in nature.

Submission + - 10-Year-Old Runs for Job of Town Council Chief (yle.fi)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: A little girl with red eyeglasses has applied for job of town council chief in Finland. The application deadline for the job of leader of Kemijärvi municipality passed on Friday last week, and among the candidates vying for the top spot was 4th grader Mili Kasurinen. If she gets the post, half of her day would be dedicated to her municipal tasks, and the other half attending school. In the name of fairness, she would thus also accept a part-time salary. Mili says she holds environmental issues close to her heart. "If the town's kept clean, tourists are likely to be happier here", she says, and adds that fishing is a great way for visitors to enjoy their time in the town. She also believes old people deserve respect. Her granny lives nearby and they have a nice time together. So is she worried about missing out on the job because of her age? "Yes it's a worry, but I'm not going to start complaining about it", she says. "I would get on and do my job, and I definitely wouldn't let the town down", she insists.

Submission + - A survey of RAND's contributions to computer science

Submitted by lpress
lpress writes: RAND Corporation was formed after World War II to do research and development for the Air Force. Perhaps the first "think tank," RAND was instrumental in many computer science developments. They did important early work on communication satellites, artificial intelligence and operations research and RAND's JOHNNIAC was one of the first stored program (Von Neumann architecture) research computers. IPL, the first list processing language, the SIMSCRIPT simulation programming language and JOSS, one of the first interactive time-sharing systems, were developed at RAND. The RAND tablet was the great grandfather of the iPad and its graphical input language (GRAIL) featured object-oriented drawing and character recognition. Paul Baran's work on the design and feasibility of large, distributed, packet-switched networks was RAND's most important theoretical work — leading to the ARPANET.

In 1957, RAND spun off its research division, creating the System Development Corporation (SDC) to build the SAGE air-defense system. SAGE was the first computer network and a huge project that trained most of the system programmers in the US. Those programmers invented many programming and project management techniques and went on to productive careers. SDC also developed the most advanced time-sharing and software development system of its time, which was used in dozens of man-machine research projects.

Submission + - Renewables are now Scotland's biggest energy source 2

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Government figures revealed that Scotland is now generating more power from "clean" technologies than nuclear, coal and gas. The combination of wind, solar and hydroelectric, along with less-publicised sources such as landfill gas and biomass, produced 10.3TWh in the first half of 2014. Over the same period, Scotland generated 7.8TWh from nuclear, 5.6TWh from coal and 1.4TWh from gas, according to figures supplied by National Grid. Renewable sources tend to fluctuate throughout the year, especially in Scotland where the weather is notoriously volatile, but in six-month chunks the country has consistently increased its renewable output.

Submission + - Mathematicians Study Effects of Gerrymandering on 2012 Election 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Gerrymandering is the practice of establishing a political advantage for a political party by manipulating district boundaries to concentrate all your opponents votes in a few districts while keeping your party's supporters as a majority in the remaining districts. For example, in North Carolina in 2012 Republicans ended up winning nine out of 13 congressional seats even though more North Carolinians voted for Democrats than Republicans statewide. Now Jessica Jones reports that researchers at Duke are studying the mathematical explanation for the discrepancy. Mathematicians Jonathan Mattingly and Christy Vaughn created a series of district maps using the same vote totals from 2012, but with different borders. Their work was governed by two principles of redistricting: a federal rule requires each district have roughly the same population and a state rule requires congressional districts to be compact. Using those principles as a guide, they created a mathematical algorithm to randomly redraw the boundaries of the state’s 13 congressional districts. "We just used the actual vote counts from 2012 and just retabulated them under the different districtings," says Vaughn. "”If someone voted for a particular candidate in the 2012 election and one of our redrawn maps assigned where they live to a new congressional district, we assumed that they would still vote for the same political party."

The results were startling. After re-running the election 100 times with a randomly drawn nonpartisan map each time, the average simulated election result was 7 or 8 U.S. House seats for the Democrats and 5 or 6 for Republicans. The maximum number of Republican seats that emerged from any of the simulations was eight. The actual outcome of the election — four Democratic representatives and nine Republicans – did not occur in any of the simulations. "If we really want our elections to reflect the will of the people, then I think we have to put in safeguards to protect our democracy so redistrictings don't end up so biased that they essentially fix the elections before they get started," says Mattingly. But North Carolina State Senator Bob Rucho is unimpressed. "I'm saying these maps aren't gerrymandered," says Rucho. "It was a matter of what the candidates actually was able to tell the voters and if the voters agreed with them. Why would you call that uncompetitive?"

Submission + - Carly Fiorina considering run for US President (Seriously!) (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Fired HP CEO (http://it.slashdot.org/story/05/02/09/1352218/hp-ceo-carly-fiorina-to-step-down) and failed Republican Senate candidate ((http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2010/11/fiorina-concedes-defeat-in-senate-race-.html) Carly Fiorina "is actively exploring a 2016 presidential run. Fiorina has been talking privately with potential donors, recruiting campaign staffers, courting grass-roots activists in early caucus and primary states and planning trips to Iowa and New Hampshire starting next week." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/carly-fiorina-actively-explores-2016-presidential-run-but-faces-gop-critics/2014/11/25/b317b1a2-74b3-11e4-bd1b-03009bd3e984_story.html)

Submission + - New Snowden Docs: GCHQ ties to Telcos gave Spies Global Surveillance Reach (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: According to a report in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless—now a subsidiary of Vodafone—“actively shaped and provided the most data to GCHQ surveillance programs and received millions of pounds in compensation.” The relationship was so extensive that a GCHQ employee was assigned to work full time at Cable & Wireless (referred to by the code name “Gerontic” in NSA documents) to manage cable-tap projects in February of 2009. By July of 2009, Cable & Wireless provided access to 29 out of the 63 cables on the list, accounting for nearly 70 percent of the data capacity available to surveillance programs.

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