Nemo the Magnificent - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google Glass Driver Proves Distracted Driving Laws Won't Work

Submitted by cartechboy on Friday January 17, 2014 @03:36PM

cartechboy writes: We've all heard about Cecilia Abadie, ticketed in California for driving while wearing her Google Glass. She was initially pulled over for speeding, but also got a ticket for sporting her Google Glass. Why? The cops said it was the same as watching television while driving. Regardless of whether it is or isn't, Abadie was cleared in court yesterday. Not because she wasn't using the device at the time, but because there's no way of knowing if she was or wasn't. And this pretty much shows why laws designed to combat distracted driving won't work well, if at all. To prove that drivers were using them behind the wheel, cops would have to subpoena information from carriers--which they won't do for a simple traffic ticket. When self-driving cars arrive, the issue may go away--but for now, it's clear that the laws as written don't work. Instead, drivers need to learn to put away the gizmos--for the safety of others, and themselves.

Submission + - Adblock's days are numbered (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, 2014 @01:11PM

An anonymous reader writes: PageFair offers a free JavaScript program that, when inserted into a Web page, monitors ad blocking activity. CEO Sean Blanchfield says he developed the monitoring tool after he noticed a problem on his own multiplayer gaming site. PageFair collects statistics on ad blocking activity, identifies which users are blocking ads and can display an appeal to users to add the publisher's website to their ad-blocking tool's personal whitelist. But Blanchfield acknowledges that the user appeal approach hasn't been very effective.

ClarityRay takes a more active role. Like PageFair, it provides a tool that lets publishers monitor blocking activity to show them that they have a problem — and then sells them a remedy. ClarityRay offers a service that CEO Ido Yablonka says fools ad blockers into allowing ads through. "Ad blockers try to make a distinction between content elements and advertorial elements. We make that distinction impossible," he says.

From ComputerWorld http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245190/Ad_blockers_A_solution_or_a_problem_?taxonomyId=71&pageNumber=4

Submission + - Auto-threading compiler could restore Moore's Law gains (drdobbs.com)

Submitted by Nemo the Magnificent on Monday December 03, 2012 @11:41AM

Nemo the Magnificent writes: Develop in the Cloud has news about what might be a breakthrough out of Microsoft Research. A team there wrote a paper (PDF), now accepted for publication at OOPSLA, that describes how to teach a compiler to auto-thread a program that was written single-threaded in a conventional language like C#. This is the holy grail to take advantage of multiple cores — to get Moore's Law improvements back on track, after they essentially ran aground in the last decade. (Functional programming, the other great white hope, just isn't happening.) About 2004 was when Intel et al. ran into a wall and started packing multiple cores into chips instead of cranking the clock speed. The Microsoft team modified a C# compiler to use the new technique, and claim a "large project at Microsoft" have written "several million lines of code" testing out the resulting "safe parallelism."

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