Bugmaster - Slashdot User

Google moves censorship from China to Australia-> 0

Submitted by mykos on Saturday January 16 2010, @04:46AM

mykos writes "Mr Newhouse said Google agreed to take the link down after he filed an official complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission.

"Lo and behold they agreed last night to take down the sites."

Mr Newhouse believes the site would be filtered under the Federal Government's mandatory filter.

"Sites that promote racial vilification would actually fall within that description [illegal sites] and therefore would be filtered."

The Federal Government plans to introduce legislation this year requiring all service providers to ban "refused classification" material."
Link to Original Source

Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star 242

Posted by Soulskill on Monday December 14 2009, @05:52PM
from the i-for-one dept.

likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."

Affinity propagation for faster computing

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Monday March 05 2007, @02:21PM

Roland Piquepaille writes "Canadian computer scientists have developed a new algorithm named 'affinity propagation' which can considerably speed up IT systems. One of the researchers said that 'affinity propagation works by considering all possible interpretations of the data at once.' This new algorithm is based on pairing up pieces of data instead of putting them through a process of elimination. As an example, the system was used for handwriting recognition by looking at thousands of images of hand-written numbers taken from postal codes. It took only five minutes to find pictures that accurately accounted for the various styles of handwriting while the standard computing approach would take about five million years(!!!). This 'affinity propagation' could be used in a wide range of applications, such as medical imaging, drug discovery, genetics, telecommunications or airline or automobile traffic planning. Read more for additional references and pictures showing how affinity propagation was used for air travel."