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Comment Re:The Onion had it right (Score 1) 118

by bill_mcgonigle (#50225431) Attached to: Ebola Vaccine 100% Successful In Guinea Trial

Hey, the malaria vaccine that was proven safe and effective in the 90's just finally got out of UK regulatory hell last week. About a million kids a year die from malaria. In the time they were bickering about the typeface on the label about 330,000 kids died from malaria. But we need that kind of officiousness and palaces and such for "civility". Those kids weren't white anyway.

Now it goes WHO regulatory hell, but if we're "lucky" the bureaucrats there will only let a quarter million kids die while they get their paperwork in order.

Oh, but a rival gang leader kill three hundred kids in Africa and Twitter loses its shit.

Comment Re:So much stupid (Score 4, Interesting) 111

by bill_mcgonigle (#50220963) Attached to: Germany Won't Prosecute NSA, But Bloggers

How do these writers make it to mainstream media.

Uh, that's a skill required in mainstream media. "The Officer's pistol discharged." Obfuscate and decline to the passive voice. Don't rock the boat and always demur to power. Keep the corporation highly profitable.

It's indy media that says, "yet another cop shot an innocent fucking black man in the head," not establishment.

Submission + - How the Media and You Are Misled by False Data (thefiscaltimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Edward Morrissey writes at the Fiscal Times, "The most obfuscating and misleading arguments made in debate of any kind usually begin with the words, “Studies say .” People passionately arguing for a favored position will resort to these citations of assumed authority, and will often fail to comprehend the scope or underlying data ... Even on line, where writers usually link to the source data, the studies either prove to be limited in application, poorly researched, or entirely wrong. Sometimes that has serious consequences. A study published in the British medical journal Lancet more than a decade ago started a panic about a supposed causal connection between vaccinations and autism. It fueled an anti-vaccination movement that has resulted in the return of diseases once thought stamped out in the West ... The study was later exposed as a fraud, based on only twelve subjects handpicked by its author ... with the data even further manipulated. The Lancet later withdrew the study and admitted it was “an elaborate fraud.” By then, it was far too late to undo the damage done to uncounted children over several years. Most questionable studies, and questionable claims made from them involve less malice and intent to defraud but matter nonetheless for public policy. ... Claims of support from “studies” for extraordinary and yet oh-so-convenient claims need much more careful scrutiny – and perhaps much more pointed skepticism."

Submission + - The weird history of the Microsoft Windows Start button (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Gamoid
Gamoid writes: Windows 3.1 was so complicated that even a Boeing propulsion scientist couldn't figure out how to open a word processor. A behavioral scientist, who once worked with BF Skinner at Harvard, was brought in to Microsoft to figure out what was going wrong — and he came to the Start button, for which he holds the patent today. It's a weird and cool look at how simple ideas aren't obvious.

Comment Re: Bravo (Score 4, Interesting) 184

by bill_mcgonigle (#50217285) Attached to: Samsung Finds, Fixes Bug In Linux Trim Code

Yeah, the outcome is great. I just wonder why they waited more than a year to look into it. Maybe this will set a good example for the industry that with a little bit of effort you can take care of your customers and sell more product.

If this were the 80's and a hard drive vendor had more than two reports of data loss under, say VMS, there would have been engineers on a plane to DEC by morning to get it solved by the coming weekend.

Now we have thousands of users with reports and millions of units sold, and a wealthy vendor, and it's all crickets, leaving some kernel hackers to half-ass a blacklist. It's not like this is BeOS - there are millions of servers running in the target market. I don't mean to absolve the bad troubleshooting by kernel devs, but want to know what drove the apathy at Samsung (and other vendors behaving poorly). It's obviously not profit motive.

Submission + - Judge rules research chimps are not 'legal persons' (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A state judge in New York has dealt the latest blow to an animal rights group’s attempt to have chimpanzees declared “legal persons.” In a decision handed down this morning, New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe ruled that two research chimps at Stony Brook University are not covered by a writ of habeas corpus, which typically allows human prisoners to challenge their detention. The Nonhuman Rights Project, which brought the lawsuit in an attempt to free the primates, has vowed to appeal.

Submission + - Critical BIND denial-of-service flaw could disrupt large portions of Internet (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Attackers could exploit a new vulnerability in BIND, the most popular Domain Name System (DNS) server software, to disrupt the Internet for many users. The vulnerability affects all versions of BIND 9, from BIND 9.1.0 to BIND 9.10.2-P2, and can be exploited to crash DNS servers that are powered by the software. The vulnerability announced and patched by the Internet Systems Consortium https://www.isc.org/blogs/cve-... is critical because it can be used to crash both authoritative and recursive DNS servers with a single packet.

Submission + - Oldest rock crystals point to ancient magnetic shield for Earth (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Faint remnants of ancient Earth’s magnetic field have been found imprinted on the oldest rock crystals in the world—evidence that the magnetic dynamo in our planet’s core was alive and kicking more than 4 billion years ago, more than half a billion years earlier than scientists had thought. An early dynamo would have helped life gain a fingerhold: Earth’s magnetic field shields it from the solar wind, a stream of energetic particles from the sun that could strip the planet’s atmosphere of water vapor and other gases necessary for life. “If we know when the magnetic field starts, we have a good sense of how long the Earth has been habitable,” says Rory Cottrell, a paleomagnetist at the University of Rochester (U of R) in New York.

Submission + - Cameron tells pornography websites to block access by children or face closure (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: David Cameron is to give pornography websites one last chance to produce an effective voluntary scheme for age-restricted controls on their sites or he will introduce legislation that could see them shut down.

At the election the then culture secretary, Sajid Javid, said the party would act to ensure under-18s were locked out of adult content and the Conservative election Facebook page in April promised legislation to achieve this.

It followed a Childline poll that found nearly one in 10 12-13-year-olds were worried they were addicted to pornography and 18% had seen shocking or upsetting images.

In a consultation to be launched in the autumn, the government will seek views on how best to introduce measures to further restrict under-18s’ access to pornographic websites.

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