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Comment Re:Why not? (Score 1) 261

by Mr. No Skills (#43424327) Attached to: Microsoft Game Director Adam Orth Resigns Following Xbox Comments

Does someone risk employment discipline when commenting publicly about their employer - of course. Common sense. Worth firing? Not sure, there may be other history at play that we wouldn't know about.

What is hard to find is an explanation of why "always on" is good or bad (pros and cons) that triggered this issue. I watched the IGN video (a great example about what's bad about anyone being able to report news on-line; what a slog waiting for mostly-amatuers to get to the point), and I can't figure out what XBox owners don't like about this fixed-to-the-TV device being plugged into the wall. Seems it evens out content downloads and other software related patching. Is it just the hassle of some complicated reset process if its offline from a power outage?

By the way - thanks for the non-anonymous posting. This thread seems to be loaded with Acs and I can't filter them out.

Submission + - EFF Responds to TV Stations Threatened by Exxon for Critical Ad (priceofoil.org)

Submitted by elrendermeister
elrendermeister writes: Priceofoil.org is reporting that the EFF has responded to Exxon's media intimidation at the site of the Mayflower, Arkansas tar sands oil spill, ExxonMobil has now taken to sending Cease and Desist letters to local Little Rock television stations into canceling the airing of a satirical but cutting advertisement critical of their business practices.

Submission + - 'Secretbook' Lets You Encode Hidden Messages in Your Facebook Pics

Submitted by tad001
tad001 writes: There is a story up on Wired about encoding messages into your Facebook pics. We know about the practice of concealing messages inside computer files (steganography) but hiding things in Facebook pictures is hard because they compress the image.

For now only Chrome users can a have a browser extension (released this week by 21-year-old Oxford University computer science student and former Google intern Owen-Campbell Moore) that will work.

Submission + - Zuckerberg Lobbies for Immigration Reform (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Everyone's favorite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with other notables such as Google's Eric Schmidt, Yahoo's Marissa Mayer and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin. has launched a new immigration reform lobbying group called FWD.us. In an editorial in the Washington Post, Zuckerberg claims that immigrants are the key to a future knowledge-based economy in a United States which currently has "a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants."

As expected, they are calling for more of the controversial H-1B visas which reached their maximum limit in less than a week this year, but those aren't the only things they're looking to change.

Submission + - Microsoft reportedly working on 7-inch Surface tablet

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When Microsoft has launched its Surface RT tablet on 23 October, there was reviews and comments that Microsoft is making an big mistake by not releasing an smaller version of its tablet as an Apple, Google and Amazon competitor at the same time. It seems that Microsoft is working on the commentary, according a new report.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Microsoft is working on a 7-inch version of its Surface tablet, citing some unnamed sources, According to the new report, Microsoft is looking likely to shift the market, because customers are rapidly choosing smaller screened tablets from Microsoft competitors. If the reports comes true, Microsoft would start a mass production for the smaller tablets later this year, and may be announce in advance of the holiday season.

In Earlier year, few days after launching the Surface RT, reports claims that Microsoft is working on a 7-inch gaming focus tablet called “Xbox Surface,” and the device may be separate for the smaller version of the Surface tablet. Some leaked specifications for the smaller version of tablet refers that the device would be powered by a custom ARM processor and 5GB of high-bandwidth DDR3 RAM, which is an improvement for the Surface RT users, as the tablet launched with a Tegra 3 ARM chip.

Submission + - Widely used wireless IP cameras open to hijacking over the Internet (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Thousands of wireless IP cameras connected to the Internet have serious security weaknesses that allow attackers to hijack them and alter their firmware, according to two researchers from security firm Qualys.
The cameras are sold under the Foscam brand in the U.S., but the same devices can be found in Europe and elsewhere with different branding, said the researchers, who are scheduled to present their findings at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam on Thursday. Tutorials provided by the camera vendor contain instructions on how to make the devices accessible from the Internet by setting up port-forwarding rules in routers. Because of this, many such devices are exposed to the Internet and can be attacked remotely, the researchers said.

Submission + - Magic trick transforms conservatives into liberals - and vice versa (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: When US presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate, and that he would focus on the 5–10% thought to be floating voters, he was articulating a commonly held opinion: that most voters are locked in to their ideological party loyalty. But Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, knew better. When Hall and his colleagues tested the rigidity of people’s political attitudes and voting intentions during Sweden’s 2010 general election, they discovered that loyalty was malleable: nearly half of all voters were open to changing their minds.
Hall’s group polled 162 voters during the final weeks of the election campaign, asking them which of two opposing political coalitions — conservative or social democrat/green — they intended to vote for. The researchers also asked voters to rate where they stood on 12 key political issues, including tax rates and nuclear power. The person conducting the experiment secretly filled in an identical survey with the reverse of the voter's answers, and used sleight-of-hand to exchange the answer sheets, placing the voter in the opposite political camp. The researcher invited the voter to give reasons for their manipulated opinions, then summarized their score to give a probable political affiliation and asked again who they intended to vote for. On the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time (research paper). Hall has used a similar sleight of hand before to show that our moral compass can often be easily reversed.

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