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Comment Even regular sonar wreaks havoc on marine life (Score 4, Informative) 272

When sonar is used, it can create sound pressure levels of 140dB 300 miles from the source . The sound is so excruciating that whales will surface too fast and get the bends, and/or beach themselves, just to escape the sound.

Yup, let's rape our irreplaceable planet some more while torturing innocent, intelligent creatures. After all, they aren't human, and our comfort, convenience, and entertainment are so much more important than their lives.

Submission + - Google, CNN Leaders in "Advertising Pollution" 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it," writes longtime ad guy Ken Segall in The Relentless (and annoying) Pursuit of Eyeballs. "Unfortunately, for some this is simply license to abuse. Let's call it what it is: advertising pollution." CNN's in-your-face, your-video-will-play-in-00:25-seconds approach, once unthinkable, has become the norm. "Google," Segall adds, "is a leader in advertising pollution, with YouTube being a showcase for intrusive advertising. Many YouTube videos start with a mandatory ad, others start with an ad that can be dismissed only after the first 10 seconds. Even more annoying are the ad overlays that actually appear on top of the video you're trying to watch. It won't go away until you click the X. If you want to see the entire video unobstructed, you must drag the playhead back to start over. Annoying. And disrespectful." Google proposed using cap and trade penalties to penalize traditional polluters — how about for those who pollute the Internet?

Submission + - TSA don't know nothing about geography (kirotv.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Does this make you feel safer? A TSA agent did not recognize a District of Columbia drivers license and did not know it is part of the United States.

When Gray handed the man his driver’s license the agent demanded to see Gray’s passport. Gray told the agent he wasn’t carrying his passport and asked why he needed it. The agent said he didn’t recognize the license. Gray said he asked the agent if he knew what the District of Columbia is, and after a brief conversation Gray realized the man did not know.

What was unfortunate for this particular agent was that the individual he questioned also happened to be a television news reporter.

Compliments to the American ejukashunal system.

Submission + - Here's a way to store energy. In bags. Of Air. Underwater.

Submitted by IMissAlexChilton
IMissAlexChilton writes: As described in IEEE Spectrum: Canadian startup Hydrostor thinks it has a solution to offshore wind power's intermittency problem: giant underwater bags. "Using electricity from Toronto Hydro’s grid to run a compressor, it will fill the bags with air. Later, when the utility needs electricity, the air will be emptied from the bags and run through a turboexpander." This will be the world’s first commercial facility for underwater compressed-air energy storage. To be sure, though, you'll need an awful lot of air-filled energy bags to back up a large wind farm. Disclosure: I am the author of the Spectrum article and a staff editor for same.

Comment Re:Jobs aren't future proof, skills are (Score 1) 509

by jenningsthecat (#47460303) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Future-Proof Jobs?

I excel at problem solving, and have excellent verbal and written English communication and comprehension skills. Abstraction, (except for the mathematical kind), is a primary mode of thinking for me. I'm also versatile; I've been successful at analog, digital, and RF hardware design, authored and delivered well-received technical trainings, performed well in tech support, and have lots of troubleshooting and repair experience under my belt.

I also can't find employment beyond casual repair work. For me, even solid skills and a good track record haven't enabled me to get a job. YMMV.

Submission + - Comcast Customer Service Rep Just Won't Take No For An Answer

Submitted by RevWaldo
RevWaldo writes: The Verge and other sources post how AOL's Ryan Block ultimately succeeded in cancelling his Comcast account over the phone, but not before the customer service representative pressed him for eight solid minutes (audio) to explain his reasoning for leaving "the number one provider of TV and internet service in the country" in a manner that would cause a character in Glengarry Glen Ross to blanch. Comcast has as of now issued an apology.

Submission + - CISA, SIFMA, and the public-private cyber war council

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: CISA: The Banks Want Immunity and a Public-Private War Council

A group of privacy and security organizations have just sent President Obama a letter (PDF) asking him to issue a veto threat over the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act passed out of the Senate Intelligence Committee last week. It’s a great explanation of why this bill sucks, and doesn’t do what it needs to to make us safer from cyberattacks. It argues that CISA’s exclusive focus on information sharing — and not on communications security more generally — isn’t going to keep us safe.

It seems that Keith Alexander has convinced SIFMA to demand a public-private cyber war council, involving all the stars of revolving door fearmongering for profit.

This is not — contrary to what people like Dianne Feinstein are pretending — protecting the millions who had their credit card data stolen because Target was not using the cyberdefenses it put into place. Rather, this is about doing the banksters’ bidding, setting up a public-private war council, without first requiring them to do basic things — like limiting High Frequency Trading — to make their industry more resilient to all kinds of attacks, from even themselves.

If you oppose CISA, now would be a good time to contact your senators and tell them so. Some of them are up for reelection this year, so you might be able to catch them on the road.

Submission + - White House won't back Tesla's Direct Sales Initiative (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by neanderslob
neanderslob writes: Last Friday, the whitehouse rejected a whitehouse.gov petition to "allow Tesla Motors to sell directly to consumers in all 50 states." The rejection, written by Dan Utech, stated: "as you know, laws regulating auto sales are issues that have traditionally sat with lawmakers at the state level." The letter went on to defend the administration by citing their initiatives "in promoting vehicle efficiency."

In response, Tesla is firing back, blasting the whitehouse for a lack of leadership on the issue and stating:

"138,469 people signed the petition asking the White House to allow Tesla Motors to sell directly to consumers in all 50 states. More than a year later, at 7.30pm EST on Friday as most of America prepared for the weekend, the White House released its disappointing response to those people. Rather than seize an opportunity to promote innovation and support the first successful American car company to be started in more than a century, the White House issued a response that was even more timid than its rejection of a petition to begin construction of a Death Star,"O’Connell said. "Instead of showing the sort of leadership exhibited by senior officials at the Federal Trade Commission who declared their support for consumer freedom of choice, the White House merely passed the buck to Congress and trumpeted its advances in promoting vehicle efficiency. Given the economic and environmental principles at stake, we would have hoped for stronger leadership and more action."

Submission + - The last three months were the hottest quarter on record

Submitted by NatasRevol
NatasRevol writes: The last three months were collectively the warmest ever experienced since record-keeping began in the late 1800s. http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...

Taken as a whole, the just-finished three-month period was about 0.68 degrees Celsius (1.22 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th-century average. That may not sound like much, but the added warmth has been enough to provide a nudge to a litany of weather and climate events worldwide. Arctic sea ice is trending near record lows for this time of year, abnormally warm ocean water helped spawn the earliest hurricane ever recorded to make landfall in North Carolina, and a rash of heat waves have plagued cities from India to California to the Middle East.

Also, it puts to bed the supposed 'fact' that there's been a pause in temperature increase the last 17 years. Raw data here shows it's still increasing. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...

Submission + - The NSA Is Becoming Skynet By Monitoring Tor Nodes

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: Tor is the backbone of the anonymous Internet, and the NSA is turning the proxy network into Skynet by monitoring and even running its own Tor nodes http://sdt.bz/content/article..... A German news outlet has released a scathing report http://daserste.ndr.de/panoram... on just how the NSA monitors Tor traffic. Specifically, the NSA is tagging IP addresses that come to Tor nodes and watches them. They're especially watching anyone who knows about XKeyscore, a tool built at the NSA to do deep packet analysis of monitored traffic.the NSA has, effectively, built a huge stack of offensive intrusion tools that can be automatically triggered by something like searching for information about XKeyscore, and is the beginning of the end of Internet freedom.

Submission + - The Placebo Effect occurs with Computer Applications too

Submitted by vrml
vrml writes: In medicine, it is well-known that sugar pills sometimes produce the same effects as real drugs (Placebo Effect). But could that happen with computers too? Can it be that the things a computer application claims to do are “all in our mind” and the app is actually a sham? The first scientific study of the Placebo Effect in computing, just published by the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies , gives an affirmative answer. The experiment considered affective computing, that is those fancy applications that claim to know user’s emotions by detecting physiological parameters with sensors. Researchers took two well-known affective computing systems and used them to control in real-time the state of an avatar that looked more and more nervous as users’ stress level increased, and more and more relaxed as it decreased. But they also considered a third system in which, unbeknown to users, the sensors were disconnected from the computer and the avatar state was controlled by a random stream of physiological data instead of the real user’s data. Results show that participants believed that the sham application was able to display their stress level. Even worse, only one of the two (costly) affective computing systems produced better results than the placebo. This suggests that evaluations of such novel computer applications should include also a placebo condition, as it is routinely done in medicine but not yet in computer science.

Comment The only way to combat NSA masturbation fantasies (Score 2) 244

by jenningsthecat (#47455859) Attached to: German NSA Committee May Turn To Typewriters To Stop Leaks

Poison the well. Everybody, anywhere in the world, whether it be a government, corporation, or individual, needs to become skilled at disinformation. If everybody's default behaviour is to muddy the waters by generating all kinds of contradictory data, the background noise level becomes so high that discerning fact from fiction is very difficult. Governments and corporations already use this tactic against the population; I consider much of Prime Time and 'reality' television to be propaganda, a kind of cultural disease vector.

Given that the genie is out of the bottle and privacy is dead, it would be best for everybody to know everything about everybody else, until the data becomes meaningless because of its sheer volume and commonness. If all possible information about what's going on is available to everyone everywhere, then it becomes essentially worthless. But the TLAs and corporations won't let that happen - they'll always be one up on mere citizens when it comes to info gathering. So maybe it's time for everyone to start sowing disinformation. That would make the world really, really suck; but it would probably suck a lot less than it will if the ultimate goals of Big Brother are achieved.

Submission + - Massive Job Cuts Are Reportedly Coming For Microsoft Employees

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Microsoft Corp is planning its biggest round of job cuts in five years as the software maker looks to integrate Nokia Oyj's handset unit, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the company's plans. The reductions, expected to be announced as soon as this week, could be in the Nokia unit and the parts of Microsoft that overlap with that business, as well as in marketing and engineering, Bloomberg reported. The restructuring may end up being the biggest in Microsoft history, topping the 5,800 jobs cut in 2009, the report said.

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