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IT

Submission + - Duo to tackle Fraud (varindia.com)

Varindiaitmagazine writes: "SAS has joined platinum partner Capgemini to help government agencies reduce revenue losses from tax and welfare fraud, and improper payments. Together, SAS and Capgemini provide an end-to-end offering in revenue fraud and improper payment protection to public sector organizations in Europe, Brazil, India and Asia-Pacific.
"There is a need for cutting-edge business analytics in the public sector. These products apply intelligent business rules and advanced predictive analytics to help governments identify subtle clues to uncover fraud in large amounts of data. Also important is end-to-end capability from data integration through detection through investigation management that can be deployed across the enterprise to address many fraud and improper payments issues on a single platform. SAS working with Capgemini is going to have dramatic impact in assisting government agencies," said Stu Bradley, Sr. Business Director, Fraud & Financial Crimes Practice, SAS.
"Governments in developed countries are under pressure to reduce spending and governments in emerging economies struggle to enforce compliance. This creates compelling reasons for tax and welfare agencies worldwide to adopt more sophisticated approaches to protecting tax revenues and tackling benefits fraud and improper payments. Working with SAS allows us to address the needs of governments more completely and bring the best available technologies to their business problems – wherever they are in the world and whatever the level of maturity of their tax and welfare operations," said Ian Pretty, Global Tax & Welfare Lead, Capgemini."

Submission + - Paul Ryan Defends Cutting Food Stamps For The Poor (thinkprogress.org)

POUXEN writes: "We want to have people go from welfare back to work. That’s why we conjoined in our budget the job training programs, consolidate the 47 different job training programs spread across 9 different agencies to scholarships to go to people so they can get new training, so under the bill we’re moving right now through Congress, food stamps will have increased something like 260 percent over the last decade instead of 270 percent."
Science

Submission + - Mini mammoth once roamed Crete (nature.com)

ananyo writes: Scientists can now add a 'dwarf mammoth' to the list of biological oxymorons that includes the jumbo shrimp and pygmy whale. Studies of fossils discovered last year on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea reveal that an extinct species once thought to be a diminutive elephant was actually the smallest mammoth known to have existed — which, as an adult, stood no taller than a modern newborn elephant (abstract). The species is the most extreme example of insular dwarfism yet found in mammoths.
United Kingdom

Submission + - US self-defence expert banned from entering UK (bbc.co.uk)

TheGift73 writes: "An American expert in violent self-defence has been excluded from entering the UK by the Home Office.
Tim Larkin tried to board a plane from his home in Las Vegas on Tuesday, but was given a UK Border Agency letter saying "his presence here was not conducive to the public good"."

Submission + - LazyTruth hunts down urban myths in your inbox (gizmag.com)

cylonlover writes: LazyTruth is an inbox widget that works by searching through your received messages, looking for specific phrases associated with some of the most common viral emails that make bogus claims. When it finds one, it composes an email rebuttal, which includes links to sources that refute the content of the offending message. Those sources include fact-checking and/or urban myth websites such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org.

Submission + - New W3C Proposal could end the CSS Prefix Madness (webmonkey.com)

Pieroxy writes: The W3C is proposing a set of new rules for CSS prefixing by Browser vendors. This would greatly mitigate the problem caused today where vendor specific prefixing is seeing its way through production sites. The problem is so bad that some vendors are now tempted to support other browsers prefixing. The article also has a link to an email from Mozilla’s Henri Sivonen that does a nice job of addressing many potential issues and shortcomings of this new proposal.
Space

Submission + - White House Threatens Veto Over NASA Commercial Crew Funding (space.com)

FleaPlus writes: This week the White House issued a veto threat over the Commerce/Justice/Science spending bill currently being debated by the House of Representatives, in large part due to its cut to commercial crew funding. The current House bill decreases NASA's overall budget and commercial crew spending while increasing spending on the shuttle-legacy SLS rocket. Language in the House bill also tells NASA to end the ongoing milestone-based competitive development in the commercial crew program, and to instead switch to a single provider using 'traditional government procurement methods.'
Twitter

Submission + - Looking At The World Through Twitter Data (mit.edu)

An anonymous reader writes: Social data seems to be really valuable these days. Two MIT undergraduates created a website, similar to google analytics for search (http://hackhub.mit.edu/word_count_view), which lets you play with historical twitter data. Furthermore, they have some insights of their own (http://arashd.scripts.mit.edu/blog/?p=34) on interesting trends they discovered.
Games

Submission + - Company of Heroes 2 announced. (thq.com)

Black Parrot writes: THQ announced Monday that the long-awaited Company of Heroes 2 is scheduled for release next year. The initial offering is designed from the perspective of the Soviet Army, which never made an appearance in the original game or its add-ons.
Education

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Getting a head start on Mechanical Engineering (asme.org)

TremorAcePV writes: "I am about to enter my 3rd year of college life, and my decided major is Mechanical Engineering. What would Slashdot suggest I study over the summer to prepare for my "major oriented" education considering that I never experienced nor understood a trigonometry class beyond the concepts of right triangles, Sine, Cosine, & Tangent, and radians. I ask because I realize how far behind I am in my major's required learning."
Australia

Submission + - Australian government backs OLPC (techworld.com.au)

angry tapir writes: "One Laptop Per Child Australia had a win in the recent Australian budget, receiving federal government funding for the first time. OLPC Australia will benefit from $11.7 million of funding, which will be used to purchase 50,000 laptops to distribute to students. The organisation recently launched a new initiative that builds an educational ecosystem around the laptops, to help integrate them into the learning process (Slashdot discussed it not that long ago.)"
Politics

Submission + - GOP blocks Senate debate on Dem student loan bill (usnews.com)

TheGift73 writes: "Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic bill Tuesday to preserve low interest rates for millions of college students' loans, as the two parties engaged in election-year choreography aimed at showing each is the better protector of families in today's rugged economy."
Science

Submission + - Gamma-Ray Bending Opens New Door for Optics (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: Lenses are a part of everyday life—they help us focus words on a page, the light from stars, and the tiniest details of microorganisms. But making a lens for highly energetic light known as gamma rays had been thought impossible. Now, physicists have created such a lens, and they believe it will open up a new field of gamma-ray optics for medical imaging, detecting illicit nuclear material, and getting rid of nuclear waste.

Submission + - A boost for quantum reality (nature.com)

Eponymous Hero writes: FTA: "The philosophical status of the wavefunction — the entity that determines the probability of different outcomes of measurements on quantum-mechanical particles — would seem to be an unlikely subject for emotional debate. Yet online discussion of a paper claiming to show mathematically that the wavefunction is real has ranged from ardently star-struck to downright vitriolic since the article was first released as a preprint in November 2011."

Comment Re:how about no (Score 2) 487

The comment was not dumb. You are paving over some important terrain here. Solutions for commerce will arise from commerce itself. Any decent e-tailer has a password system which eliminates the problem you describe. Also, they rely heavily upon a presumption of good-enough security in the credit card system. Regulating commerce is not the same as shoe-horning it into slow-moving, inflexible government mandated solutions to problems that go away long before the "solutions" do. We already have a mostly satisfactory system of ID verification in place, negotiated between consumers and suppliers, who both, after all, insist that the thing work. Here's a chestnut: "There's no chance that a centralized database will emerge." Nonsense. That is *exactly* what will emerge. Do not start this project if you do not want to see it finished. Incidentally, if ISPs would block forged headers, many of our current problems would not exist, and as has been pointed out, IPv6 will solve many of the (very) near future problems. hard-coding a person to IP address is not necessary. I'll be happy to be *officially* DHCP to the world, and DynDNS if I want more.

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