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Comment Facebook empowers bullies (Score 5, Insightful) 305

What's troubling is the fact that no one at Facebook contemplated the possibility that this policy would be used as a form of bullying. Their aribtrarily-enforced rules about nudity are routinely used the same way by homophobes, who go around reporting innocuous photos (and even illustrations) of partial male nudity or even just gay couples kissing or showing affection, causing headaches, suspensions, and even bans of gay people from the site. And they do so with complete impunity because they can do so anonymously, and there is no penalty for false reports. The users who are reported are given no right to challenge their accusers (or even know who they are), and effectively no right to appeal. Facebook's own policies and procedures facilitate and empower this kind of harassment and abuse. And they're just now noticing?

Communications

Back To Faxes: Doctors Can't Exchange Digital Medical Records 240

nbauman writes: Doctors with one medical records system can't exchange information with systems made by other vendors, including those at their own hospitals, according to the New York Times. One ophthalmologist spent half a million dollars on a system, but still needs to send faxes to get the information where it needs to go. The largest vendor is Epic Systems, Madison, WI, which holds almost half the medical records in the U.S. A report from RAND described Epic as a "closed" platform that made it "challenging and costly" for hospitals to interconnect.

The situation is bad for patients and costly for medical works: if doctors can't exchange records, they'll face a 1% Medicare penalty, and UC Davis alone has a staff of 22 dedicated to communication. On top of that, Epic charges a fee to send data to some non-Epic systems. Congress has held hearings on the matter, and Epic has hired a lobbyist. Epic's founder, billionaire computer science major Judith Faulkner, said that Epic was one of the first to establish code and standards for secure interchange, which included user authentication provisions and a legally binding contract. She said the federal government, which gave $24 billion in incentive payments to doctors for computerization, should have done that. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology said that it was a "top priority" and just recently wrote a 10-year vision statement and agenda for it.
Space

Mysterious Feature Appears and Disappears In a Sea On Titan 65

schwit1 writes: Cassini images taken in 2007, 2013, and 2014 of one of Titan's largest hydrocarbon seas find that a mysterious feature there keeps appearing and disappearing. Quoting: "The mysterious feature, which appears bright in radar images against the dark background of the liquid sea, was first spotted during Cassini's July 2013 Titan flyby. Previous observations showed no sign of bright features in that part of Ligeia Mare. Scientists were perplexed to find the feature had vanished when they looked again, over several months, with low-resolution radar and Cassini's infrared imager. This led some team members to suggest it might have been a transient feature. But during Cassini's flyby on August 21, 2014, the feature was again visible, and its appearance had changed during the 11 months since it was last seen.

Scientists on the radar team are confident that the feature is not an artifact, or flaw, in their data, which would have been one of the simplest explanations. They also do not see evidence that its appearance results from evaporation in the sea, as the overall shoreline of Ligeia Mare has not changed noticeably. The team has suggested the feature could be surface waves, rising bubbles, floating solids, solids suspended just below the surface, or perhaps something more exotic." That the seasons are slowly changing on Titan is probably contributing to the transient nature of this feature.

Comment Re:There is no more Photoshop. (Score 2) 197

Half correct. Adobe's Creative Cloud software is subscription software, but it is not web-based. The "cloud" bit in the name is just buzzword bingo; the apps are installed and run locally as Windows/OS X executable binaries, just as they always have, with check-ins to confirm that you've paid your protection money this month.

Of course the subscription aspect is reason enough for many people to walk way from Adobe (as I have). I know many illustrators have turned to the Manga Studio for comics production, or the GIMP if they can accept its limitations (e.g. lacking CMYK support). Some people can likewise get by with Free software such as Inkscape or Scribus to replace Illustrator and InDesign, respectively. Serif (which currently has graphics apps for Windows) is undertaking development of a full-featured commercial Creative Suite replacement for OS X, and their Illustrator-substitute Affinity Designer (first piece of the puzzle) is nearly ready for release.

Comment Happens all the time (Score 1) 232

Worked at a major software house serving ðe biggest telecom operators all over the world. Ðe company started doing top notch Unix software, even creating its own SQL-like DBMS when Oracle was not good enough. Everyone from ðat era got promoted out of technical oversight over what was produced later, and ðe people who produced software later also got promoted out of technical oversight, so we were left with Microsofties who feared ðe Posix code, did not understand it, and were capable only of implementing overdue business requirements, not of any technical improvement or even technology updates.

Comment independent support (Score 2) 129

Why would there be any question that Chromium could still be compiled for 32-bit CPUs? It it's open-source, it can be. The only question is whether anyone cares enough to do it.

The Firefox devs walked away from PPC processors some time ago, but there's enough interest in that platform that an independent fork of its code has been maintained.

Comment Re:Scientific Consensus (Score 2, Insightful) 770

No, mathematics and logic are about provability. Real-world phenomena can't be proven; they can only be shown to have worked a certain way every time we've observed them so far. (I've dropped this rock 100,000 times, and every time it has fallen ... but I can't prove that it will next time.) If you want absolute proof you need to stick to theoretical phenomena. Or chuck it all and just believe something with absolute faith because it's written in an old book, like the other people who are afraid of their "truths" being subject to challenge.

Comment "soft" science (Score 2) 770

The notion that climate science or economics can't repeat experiments is not entirely fair. While it's true that we can't conduct isolated double-blind experiments under identical conditions, we can conduct tests under analogous conditions to determine whether a given model is accurate or not, which is the real goal of such science. Given enough instances in which the accumulation of carbon compounds in the atmosphere leads to an overall increase in temperatures, or in which an increase in government spending or low-end wages stimulates economic activity in a market economy, we can make the inference of a correlation, and start looking for a mechanism of a causal connection.

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