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Comment Re:Perhaps not (Score 1) 598

by emm-tee (#45688345) Attached to: UK Men Arrested For Anti-Semitic Tweets After Football Game

But where do you draw the line? If the government has the authority to arrest someone for hating Jews, then why can't they also arrest you for hating Republicans?

They don't have the authority to arrest someone for hating Jewish people. They have the authority to arrest someone for inciting hatred against Jewish people (or any other ethnic group).

"Where do you draw the line?" is a reasonable question, but you can't use it as shorthand for "this is a stupid law": You can be arrested for killing somebody, so why can't you be arrested for looking at me funny? Where do you draw the line?

Obviously, Republicanism is a political alignment, which can be debated and will change during your lifetime. Your ethnic background simply depends who your parents were and is eternal.
Wireless Networking

What Wi-Fi Would Look Like If We Could See It 120

Posted by samzenpus from the looking-behind-the-curtain dept.
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Artist Nickolay Lamm, a blogger for MyDeals.com, decided to shed some light on the subject. He created visualizations that imagine the size, shape, and color of wi-fi signals were they visible to the human eye. 'I feel that by showing what wi-fi would look like if we could see it, we'd appreciate the technology that we use everyday,' Lamm told me in an email. 'A lot of us use technology without appreciating the complexity behind making it work.'"
Encryption

Most US Drones Still Beam Video Unencrypted 138

Posted by timothy from the hey-it-beats-satellite-piracy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Four years after discovering that militants were tapping into drone video feeds, the U.S. military still hasn't secured the transmissions of more than half of its fleet of Predator and Reaper drones, Danger Room has learned. The majority of the aircraft still broadcast their classified video streams 'in the clear' — without encryption. With a minimal amount of equipment and know-how, militants can see what America's drones see."

Comment Re:Socialist agenda on full display tonite (Score 2, Insightful) 529

by emm-tee (#41735899) Attached to: Third 2012 US Presidential Debate Tonight: Discuss Here
The rich in the US are only interested in their own wealth, and not the longterm wealth of their country. So they don't want to ensure that all citizens have a good education and are able to get healthcare they need. This results in the US having one of the worst social mobility ratings in the developed world. Land of the opportunity for the filthy rich to become even richer, and most of the rest to rot.

Comment Re:NEVER (Score 2) 398

by emm-tee (#41135879) Attached to: Tata Intends To Sell Air-Powered Car In India

I don't disagree with your comment per se, but I think you missed the point of Nursie's comment.

sanman2 said "India's poor" are "turning their noses up" at the Nano.

However, 32.7% of Indians live in poverty. Because of this, Nursie rightly pointed out that "India's poor" probably have bigger concerns than which car to buy.

If sanman2 had said "members of India's lower middle class are already turning their noses up at the Nano" there would be no argument here.

I have been to India several times in the last 10 years and seen huge numbers of people sleeping on the streets and in shanty towns.
Books

One Sci-Fi Author Wrote 29 of the Kindle's 100 Most-Highlighted Passages 239

Posted by Soulskill from the precise-but-not-necessarily-accurate dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Today Amazon announced that a science fiction writer has become the Kindle's all-time best-selling author. Last June Suzanne Collins, who wrote the Hunger Games trilogy, was only the fourth author to sell one million ebooks, but this month Amazon announced she'd overtaken all her competition (and she also wrote the #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks this Christmas). In fact, 29 of the 100 most-highlighted passages on the Kindle were written by Collins, including 7 of the top 10. And on a separate list of recent highlights, Collins has written 17 of the top 20 most-highlighted passages." It's pretty interesting to go through the top-100 list and look at the passages people think are worth highlighting. Taken out of context, many of them could be patched together and re-sold as a self-help book. None are quite so eloquent as #18 in the recent highlights.
Transportation

Rearview Car Cameras Likely Mandated By 2014 652

Posted by Soulskill from the reflects-poorly-on-drivers dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Every year around 17,000 people are injured and over 200 die in backover accidents involving cars, trucks and SUVs. Now the Chicago Tribune reports that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will send Congress a proposal mandating a rearview camera for all passenger vehicles starting in 2014. 'Adoption of this proposal would significantly reduce fatalities and injuries caused by backover crashes involving children, persons with disabilities, the elderly and other pedestrians,' says NHTSA in its proposal. But the technology won't come cheap. In its study, the NHTSA found that adding a backup camera to a vehicle without an existing visual display screen will probably cost $159 to $203 per vehicle, shrinking to between $58 and $88 for vehicles that already use display screens. Toyota of Albany Sales manager Kelvin Walker says he believes making backup cameras standard on cars made after 2014 is a good idea. 'If you want to get a backup camera with a mirror in it now, it may cost you $700 to $800 as an additional dealer option or you have to purchase a navigation which is about $1,500 to $1,600. So $1,600 compared to $200? You do the math.'"
Government

Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found On SUV 761

Posted by Soulskill from the take-two-they're-small dept.
jcombel writes with this excerpt: "As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in a case Tuesday that could determine if authorities can track U.S. citizens with GPS vehicle trackers without a warrant, a young man in California has come forward to Wired to reveal that he found not one but two different devices on his vehicle recently. The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car. Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man."
Medicine

Stroke Victim Stranded At South Pole Base 264

Posted by Soulskill from the i-saw-this-episode-of-house dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Renee-Nicole Douceur, the winter manager at the Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole, was sitting at her desk on August 27 when she suffered a stroke. 'I looked at the screen and was like, "Oh my God, half the screen is missing."' But both the National Science Foundation and contractor Raytheon say it would be too dangerous to send a rescue plane to the South Pole now, since Douceur's condition is not life-threatening. Douceur's niece Sydney Raines has set up a Web site that urges people to call officials at Raytheon and the National Science Foundation. However, temperatures must be higher than -50 degrees F for most planes to land at Amundsen-Scott or the fuel will turn to jelly. While that threshold has been crossed at the South Pole recently, the temperature still regularly dips to 70 degrees below zero. 'It's like no other airfield in the U.S.,' says Ronnie Smith, a former Air Force navigator who has flown there about 300 times. A pilot landing a plane there in winter, when it is dark 24 hours a day, would be flying blind 'because you can't install lights under the ice.' The most famous instance of a person being airlifted from the South Pole for medical reasons was that involving Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, a doctor who diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer. Using only ice and a local anesthetic, she performed her own biopsy with the help of a resident welder. When she departed on October 16, 1999, it was the earliest in the Antarctic spring that a plane had taken off."
Microsoft

.NET Programmers In Demand, Despite MS Moves To Metro 319

Posted by timothy from the lagging-indicator dept.
mikejuk writes "Are you a newbie programmer looking for a job? It seems your best bet is to opt for .NET. According to technical jobs website Dice.com, companies in the U.S. have posted more than 10,000 positions requesting .NET experience — a 25 percent increase compared to last year's .NET job count. So Microsoft may want us to move on to Metro but the rest of the world seems to want to stay with .NET."

Comment Andromeda Strain? (Score 1) 90

by emm-tee (#37560506) Attached to: Mercury Turns Out To Be a Weird Little World
It reminds me of the superb 1971 film The Andromeda Strain directed by Robert Wise. The virus in the film came from space and under a microscope is seen to grow. The new image of Mercury in the National Geographic article looks eerily like the growing virus... Sadly I can't find an image for this at the moment.
Spam

Malicious Spam Spikes To 'Epic' Level 130

Posted by samzenpus from the whack-a-mole dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "There has been a huge spike in spam volume in the last few days, including a massive amount of malicious spam with infected attachments, and researchers say that levels of junk mail are now far higher than they were before the takedown of the notorious Spamit affiliate program last fall. The huge spike comes at a time when spam should, in fact, be dropping because of the takedown of the Rustock botnet, the Spamit network and other botnets. 'From the beginning of August, we have observed a huge surge of malicious spam which far exceeds anything we have seen over the past two years, including prior to the SpamIt takedown last October. The majority of the malicious spam comes from the Cutwail botnet, although Festi and Asprox are among the other contributors,' M86 researcher Rodel Mendrez said."
Entertainment

Spiderman's Politically Correct Replacement 608

Posted by samzenpus from the taking-it-in-a-different-direction dept.
jbarr writes "In the latest Marvel Comic series 'Ultimate Fallout,' Miles Morales replaces Peter Parker who has been killed off by the Green Goblin. Morales is a half-black, half-Latino teen, and the creators haven't ruled out that he might be gay. From the article: 'Marvel's editor in chief Axel Alonso denied that having a black Spider Man was a publicity stunt. 'What you have is a Spider-Man for the 21st century who's reflective of our culture and diversity. As someone who grew up on a steady diet of Luke Cage, Hero For Hire and Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu, I am personally invested,' he said. "

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