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Comment Newsflash! (Score 0) 109

by ZorglubZ (#48285895) Attached to: China Completes Its First Lunar Return Mission
Finally, and China got in before India!
The government - if that is the word - of the middle Northern American country, colloquially known as the Americas [sic?], has decided to refrain from participating in any so-called "Moon race" because it "reminds them too much of the novel 'The Stand'", and any reference to 'The Trash-Can Man' does NOT refer to "the National Aero-Spatial Agent... - What do you mean that's not what it's.. Turn off that micr."

Comment Re: Classification (Score 1) 219

by ZorglubZ (#48285611) Attached to: Most Planets In the Universe Are Homeless
(1) A "planet" [1] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) <b>has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.</b>
Does this mean that Neptune is not a planet, since Pluto, Charon et al are still bothering it!?

Submission + - The sexual threats against Emma Watson are an attack on every woman (vox.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: This is an important read. If the speech that Emma Watson gave to the United Nations gathering on September 21st can cause such misogyny, then the very act of women speaking will cause it (which seems to be the case when it comes to the internet). 'Emma Watson makes a wonderful UN Goodwill Ambassador. If the campaign she champions is successful, she will have done tremendous good in the world. There is nothing about her private, consensual sexual life that has any bearing on the value of her work, the validity of her feminist views, or her integrity as a person. If her stolen nude photos are leaked on the internet in retaliation for her work, that will not mean that she was irresponsible or reckless, it will mean that she is brave. Regardless of whether any photos are released, the threats against Watson are already an attack on all of us. And we should all take it personally.'

Submission + - The Challenges and Threats of Automated Lip Reading (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Speech recognition has gotten pretty good over the past several years. it's reliable enough to be ubiquitous in our mobile devices. But now we have an interesting, related dilemma: should we develop algorithms that can lip read? It's a more challenging problem, to be sure. Sounds can be translated directly into words, but deriving meaning out of the movement of a person's face is much more complex. "During speech, the mouth forms between 10 and 14 different shapes, known as visemes. By contrast, speech contains around 50 individual sounds known as phonemes. So a single viseme can represent several different phonemes. And therein lies the problem. A sequence of visemes cannot usually be associated with a unique word or sequence of words. Instead, a sequence of visemes can have several different solutions." Beyond the computational aspect, we also need to decide, as a society, if this is a technology that should exist. The privacy implications extend beyond that of simple voice recognition.

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