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+ - DoJ Answers FOIA Request After Six Years With No Real Information->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "In response to a Freedom of Information Act request about Google's 2007 complaint against Windows Vista search interference, the Department of Justice has after six years released 114 partially redacted pages and 60 full pages of material. Yet these "responsive documents" consist of public news articles and email boilerplate. All the substantive information has been blacked out."
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+ - Speeding Ticket Robots -- Laws As Algorithms->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "As the age of autonomous cars and drone surveillance draws nearer, it's reasonable to expect that the government increasingly automate the enforcement of traffic laws. We already deal with red light cameras, speed limit cameras, and special lane cameras. But they aren't widespread, and there are a host of problems with them. Now, Ars reports on a group of academics who are attempting to solve the problem of converting simple laws to machine-readable code. They found that when the human filter was removed from the system, results became unreasonable very quickly. For example, if you aren't shy about going 5mph over the limit, you'll likely break the law dozens of times during an hour of city driving. On the freeway, you might break it continuously for an hour. But it's highly unlikely you'd get more than one ticket for either transgression. Not so with computers (PDF): 'An automated system, however, could maintain a continuous flow of samples based on driving behavior and thus issue tickets accordingly. This level of resolution is not possible in manual law enforcement. In our experiment, the programmers were faced with the choice of how to treat many continuous samples all showing speeding behavior. Should each instance of speeding (e.g. a single sample) be treated as a separate offense, or should all consecutive speeding samples be treated as a single offense? Should the duration of time exceeding the speed limit be considered in the severity of the offense?' One of the academics said, 'When you're talking about automated enforcement, all of the enforcement has to be put in before implementation of the law—you have to be able to predict different circumstances.'"
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+ - Classic BBC sci-fi series Blake's 7 to return on Syfy channel

Submitted by Zaiff Urgulbunger
Zaiff Urgulbunger writes "According to the BBC, "Cult classic sci-fi series Blake's 7 is to be remade for the Syfy network, it has been announced.

FremantleMedia International said 13 hour-long episodes will be written by Heroes writer Joe Pokaski."

Here's hoping the special effects budget will be higher than for the original series! Also, hoping that the Liberator is of similar design and includes Zen — the ships computer."

Comment: Re:Uhm... what? (Score 2, Insightful) 146

I run a dev team for a commercial, closed source, product. If one of my developers introduces stolen code into the product, one or both of us is getting fired. It doesn't matter if the environment is .net or not and it doesn't matter if its stolen from a FOSS project or a competitor's code base. I don't think that is unreasonable or hard to understand and I've never had to fire someone because of it.

Comment: Re:.NET Developers Have Long Favored Open Source (Score 1) 146

log4net and Json.Net are two prime examples. We are also using a bunch of open source media libraries (e.g. ffmpeg and opencv) on my current project and have been for years. The only resistance is that we are shipping closed source software so anything that is GPLed is out, but if the business reality changed to where we could a GPLed product there wouldn't be a second thought about using code under the GPL.

Comment: Re:FOIA, anyone? (Score 2) 306

by Yaur (#43026443) Attached to: Supreme Court Disallows FISA Challenges

On a macro level, it wouldn't be long before chaos ensues, society collapses, and what actually takes form in the end is more akin to tribalism; one big, roaming group taking everything for itself and screw everyone else, too bad so sad. If you're a part of that group, it's great for you, but if you're not in that group, it's terrible.

No,no, no. What really happens is that Jim and his neighbors band together, creating a police (or military if there are enough bandits) force to protect their stuff and a set of rules what their collective police force can and can't do... lets call them laws. In other words, states emerge very quickly from anarchy and historically the states have pretty much always won out over the roving groups of bandits.

Comment: The point of the progress bar (Score 1) 736

by Yaur (#42880345) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Is It So Hard To Make An Accurate Progress Bar?
The point of the progress bar is NOT really to measure progress. It's to tell the user if the software is working (and they should continue exercising waiting) or if it silently failed and they should end task the broken application. Until either users start exercising infinite patience or all developers start writing defect free software this will be required.
Progress as actual progress (ie. predicting what you are going to do with your internet connection while you are waiting for a download to complete) is not possible, but not required to convert a "crash" into an annoyance. That said, on my current project the first step of creating the progress bar is to estimate how long the process will take but this is mainly because some tasks can take days and users get antsy if the progress bar updates less frequently than every 1-2 minutes.

Since we're all here, we must not be all there. -- Bob "Mountain" Beck

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