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Submission + - FCC Website Hobbled by Comment Trolls Incited by Comedian John Oliver

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a recent segment of his new HBO show, Last Week Tonight, comedian John Oliver delivered a commentary on the current net neutrality debate. He ended the segment by calling on all internet comment trolls to take advantage of the FCC's open comments section on the topic. 'We need you to get out there and for once in your lives focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction,' he said. 'Seize your moment, my lovely trolls, turn on caps lock, and fly my pretties! Fly! Fly! Fly!' While the true impact of John Oliver's editorial cannot be confirmed, the FCC nevertheless tweeted shortly after it aired that its website was experiencing technical difficulties due to heavy traffic. They accept comments via email as well at openinternet@fcc.gov.

Submission + - US-EU Trade Agreement Gains Exaggerated, Say 41 Consumer Groups, Economist

Submitted by Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody writes: The main claims about likely economic gains from concluding the US-EU trade agreement TAFTA/TTIP, billed as a "once-in-a-generation prize", are increasingly under attack. BEUC, representing 41 consumer organizations from 31 European countries, has written a letter to the EU Trade Commissioner responsible for the negotiations, Karel De Gucht, complaining about his "exaggeration of the effects of the TTIP", and "use of unsubstantiated figures regarding the job creation potential". In a blog post entitled "Why Is It So Acceptable to Lie to Promote Trade Deals?", Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, has even harsher words: "Implying that a deal that raises GDP by 0.4 or 0.5 percent 13 years out means 'job-creating opportunities for workers on both continents' is just dishonest. The increment to annual growth is on the order of 0.03 percentage points. Good luck finding that in the data." If the best-case outcome is just 0.03% extra growth per year, is TAFTA/TTIP worth the massive upheavals it will require to both US and EU regulatory systems to achieve that?

Submission + - AMD, Nvidia, and developers weigh in on GameWorks controversy (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Dputiger
Dputiger writes: Since Nvidia debuted its GameWorks libraries there's been allegations that they unfairly disadvantaged AMD users or prevented developers from optimizing code. We've taken these questions to developers themselves and asked them to weigh in on how games get optimized, why Nvidia built this program, and whether its an attempt to harm AMD customers.

Submission + - QA Testing at EA and Netflix (acm.org)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: To millions of gamers, the position of QA (quality assurance) tester at Electronic Arts must seem like a dream job. But from the company's perspective, the overhead associated with QA can look downright frightening, particularly in an era of massively multi-player games. Hence the appeal of automated QA testing, which has the potential to be faster, more cost-effective, more efficient, and more scalable than manual testing. While automation cannot mimic everything human testers can do, it can be very useful for many types of basic testing. Still, it turns out the transition to automated testing is not nearly as straightforward as it might at first appear. Joining the discussion is Jafar Husain, a lead software developer for Netflix. Previously he worked at Microsoft, where one of his tasks involved creating the test environment for the Silverlight development platform.

Submission + - Scientists Building Sperm-Size Robots To Deliver Drugs Inside The Human Body (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: One of the difficulties of treating certain diseases is that it's necessary to deliver tiny amounts of medicine to very specific parts of the human body. Dutch scientists are hoping that the tiny robots they're building, inspired by sperm cells, can help. In addition to delivering drugs, the sperm-bots could clean arteries or (appropriately) assist with in vitro fertilization.

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