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Comment Comcast's Cards are Corruption (Score 2) 131

To reiterate Roodvlees' point, the giving of the cards and the receiving of the cards is corruption. It may not be obvious what the dollar value is immediately, but if you count up the time saved by the politically-connected recipients when they get expedited service, then it almost certainly would exceed Federal standards for gifts.

Submission + - Pizza Hut Tests New "Subconscious Menu" That Reads Your Mind

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Allison Griswold reports at Slate that Pizza Hut wants to help you order your food subconsciously with a new product that is being tested at 300 locations across the UK that uses eye-tracking technology to allow diners to order within seconds using only their eyes. The digital menu shows diners a canvas of 20 toppings and builds their pizza based on which toppings they look at longest. To try again, a diner can glance at a "restart" button. "Finally the indecisive orderer and the prolonged menu peruser can cut time and always get it right," a Pizza Hut spokesperson said in a statement, "so that the focus of dining can be on the most important part — the enjoyment of eating!" According to news release from Tobii Technology, the Subconscious Menu can determine which ingredients your mind and eyes have been looking at longest in exactly 2.5 seconds. The menu then uses a powerful mathematical algorithm to identify, from 4896 possible ingredient combinations, the customer’s perfect pizza. "Tests on the Subconscious Menu have been incredibly positive with 98% of people, recommended a pizza with ingredients they love."

Submission + - ISPs Must Take Responsibility For Sony Movie Leaks, UK MP Says (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As the fallout from the Sony hack continues, who is to blame for the leak of movies including Fury, which has been downloaded a million times? According to the UK Prime Minister's former IP advisor, as "facilitators" web-hosts and ISPs must step up and take some blame.

Mike Weatherley MP, the recent IP advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, has published several piracy reports including one earlier in the year examining the advertising revenue on pirate sites. He believes that companies with no direct connection to the hack or subsequent leaks should shoulder some blame.

“Piracy is a huge international problem. The recent cyber-attack on Sony and subsequent release of films to illegal websites is just one high-profile example of how criminals exploit others’ Intellectual Property,” Weatherley writes in an email to TF.

“Unfortunately, the theft of these films – and their subsequent downloads – has been facilitated by web-hosting companies and, ultimately, ISPs who do have to step-up and take some responsibility.”

Weatherley doesn’t provide detail on precisely why web-hosts and ISPs should take responsibility for the work of malicious hackers (possibly state-sponsored) and all subsequent fall out from attacks. The theory is that “something” should be done, but precisely what remains elusive.

Submission + - Get Ready for Some Law Schools to Close

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Elizabeth Olson reports at the NYT that financially wobbly law schools face plunging enrollment, strenuous resistance to five-figure student debt and the lack of job guarantees — in addition to the need to balance their battered budgets. Nine months after graduating, only 57 percent of the 2013 class had full-time jobs that required passing the bar. Law schools are left in the unenviable position of trying to allay students’ fears that they will not be able to find a job that pays enough to repay $150,000 to $200,000 in education loans. With the declining interest, law schools have been working hard behind the scenes to trim their operations and to expand their offerings of joint degrees in, say, law and medicine. Still they are trying to avoid wholesale cuts in faculty or degrees, steps that would publicly eviscerate their business model and reputation. “I don’t get how the math adds up for the number of schools and the number of students,” says Professor Rodriguez of Northwestern, who is also president of the Association of American Law Schools. “We all know it’s happening, and we are all taking steps that urgent, not desperate, times call for.”

The history of another graduate school bust suggests what may be in store for the nation's 204 ABA accredited law schools. After peaking in 1979, dental-school enrollments precipitously collapsed (the reasons why included “improved dental health from fluoridation, reductions in federal funding, high tuition costs and debt loads,” among others). By the mid-1980s, they were down by about one-third. Then, over the next several years, six private universities closed their dental schools, including Emory University and Georgetown University, which had been the largest program in the country. Given there were only about 60 dental schools to begin with, this amounted to a pretty enormous bust. "The point is that law schools are facing similar pressures," says Jordan Weissmann. "Many institutions opened law schools precisely because they were supposed to be cash cows and won’t be particularly psyched to suddenly start subsidizing them. "

Submission + - DARPA looks to connect complex security dots and wipe out malicious cyberwar (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The researchers at DARPA think its time for a change in the way security is handled in such systems and later this month will detail a program they call Transparent Computing (TC) they says “will develop technologies to record and preserve the provenance of all system elements/components (inputs, software modules, processes, etc.); dynamically track the interactions and causal dependencies among cyber system components; assemble these dependencies into end-to-end system behaviors; and reason over these behaviors, both forensically and in real-time.”

Submission + - Solar heat ray experiment boils water and melts coins (oproot.com)

Submitted by Operator 1
Operator 1 writes: My dangerously effective solar heat ray experiment was built with a lens from an old big screen projector television. Temperatures in excess of 787 degrees Fahrenheit (419.4 degrees Celsius) were generated with the Fresnel lens in the sun. The experiment boils water and melts coins.

Submission + - MasterCard rails against Bitcoin's (semi-)anonymity (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: MasterCard has used a submission to an Australian Senate inquiry to argue for financial regulators to move against the pseudonymity of digital currencies such as Bitcoin. "Any regulation adopted in Australia should address the anonymity that digital currency provides to each party in a transaction," the company's told the inquiry into digital currencies. MasterCard believes that "all participants in the payments system that provide similar services to consumers should be regulated in the same way to achieve a level playing field for all."

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