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Submission + - Aging Is a Disease. Treat It Like One. 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Burger Schmurger. In a Letter to Sergey Brin, Maria Konovalenko urges the Google founder to pursue his interest in the topics of aging and longevity. 'Defeating or simply slowing down aging,' writes Konovalenko, 'is the most useful thing that can be done for all the people on the planet.' Calling for research into longevity gene therapy, extending lifespan pharmacologically, and studying close species that differ significantly in lifespan, Konovalenko says 'it is crucial to make numerous medical organizations recognize aging as a disease. If medical organizations were to recognize aging as a disease, it could significantly accelerate progress in studying its underlying mechanisms and the development of interventions to slow its progress and to reduce age-related pathologies. The prevailing regard for aging as a "natural process" rather than a disease or disease-predisposing condition is a major obstacle to development and testing of legitimate anti-aging treatments. This is the largest market in the world, since 100% of the population in every country suffers from aging.'

Submission + - NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds" (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by NettiWelho
NettiWelho writes: The Washington Post: The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.
Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by law and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

Submission + - New GMail compose inspires user backlash 1

Submitted by s13g3
s13g3 writes: Yesterday, Google finally rolled out the "new compose" as a mandatory change to all users, eliminating the "old" compose option with no way to revert. The move has sparked such a significant amount of user backlash on Google's product forums that moderators are having to close hundreds of "I hate the new compose" threads as "duplicates" and are directing people to the main feedback thread, which is currently over 21 pages some 24 hours later. So far, there appears to be nothing in the way of a response or recognition from Google of the amount of hate the change has inspired, only an insistence that somehow the input of "Top Moderators" from their forums since October 2012 resulted in a number of "improvements" to the new compose in response, which supposedly makes it easier to use, but does nothing to address the laundry list of complaints and issues people have with it: simply put, no one likes the new compose, and significant numbers of users are threatening to abandon the service as a result of this forced change.

Submission + - "451" Error Will Tell Users When Governments Are Blocking Websites (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: To fend off the chilling effects of heavy-handed internet restriction, the UK consumer rights organization Open Rights Group wants to create a new version of the “404 Page Not Found” error message, called “451 unavailable,” to specify that a webpage wasn’t simply not there, it was ordered to be blocked for legal reasons.

Submission + - Rare 388-Year-Old Bonsai Tree Survived Hiroshima Atomic Blast (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by Rebecka
Rebecka writes: According to a report from TwistedSifter.com, one in particular, a rare Japanese White Pine from Miyajima is not only 388-years-old, but also reportedly survived the Hiroshima blast in Japan on Aug. 6, 1945. The bonsai, currently on display at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum at the United State National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., has been deemed a “Hiroshima Survivor.”

The bonsai which was originally created in 1625 and owned by the late Masaru Yamaki, a bonsai master and longtime member of the Japanese bonsai community, was reportedly caring for the specific tree among others the day of the Hiroshima bombing. According to the National Bonsai Foundation the tree survived even after the bomb exploding less than two miles from their family hom

Comment It does matter (Score 2) 479

by TheCount22 (#41791423) Attached to: Does Coding Style Matter?

When writing code everything matters.

Forcing people to follow a style I think is counter productive. It prevents the styles from evolving. In recent years for example people have been moving towards using better naming rather than commenting.

Strict rules prevent creativity and for that reason I disagree with the conclusions of the article to require one. Requiring anything more than just to follow a style no matter what that style may be and to try to maintain the existing code in the style that it was in is about as much as you can do.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

Comment Who knows maybe it will be good or maybe not (Score 1) 250

by TheCount22 (#37358002) Attached to: Google To Introduce New Programming Language — Dart

Hopefully this new language addresses concurrency with lightweight processes, immutable message passing and location transparency, security with capabilities and has a preemptive scheduler like Erlang. Also it would be nice to have a nice type system with a FP/OO hybrid language with no shared mutable state. Built-in fault tolerance and replication would be nice too.

But who am I kidding there is a 1% chance of that happening.

Comment Re:Sony company culture of indifference won't chan (Score 1) 452

by TheCount22 (#36328112) Attached to: Sony Compromised, Again

I agree with you this solves nothing. But then again Sony has only created problems recently. As a honest law abiding customer I ask that they give me back what I paid for. Thats all. If they decide not to I will simply not purchase another Sony product again. No need to hack anything just stop buying their products.

In any case if my information was among the hacked accounts I would be furious right now.

Comment Re:What are they trying to prove at this point? (Score 2) 452

by TheCount22 (#36328048) Attached to: Sony Compromised, Again

Sure but what if the bank started taking stuff out of you safety deposit box because some fine print on a 100 pages agreement said they could (other os). Would you be okay with that? How about if they installed spy cameras in your house how would you feel then (rootkit)? And finally to top it off the bank gets robbed. I suppose that would be acceptable. Should we just ignore the bank and focus only the robbers? What if the robbers where bank customers that wanted their stuff back?

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