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Comment i am + STEED (Score 1) 601

by anarcat (#38435380) Attached to: Do Slashdotters Encrypt Their Email?

... and while i won't go as far as signing this comment (i admire the dedication folks, but really...), i try to use it as much as possible. I have done PGP trainings for the masses (see this and this, in french) and I'm doing my best to strenghten the web of trust.

I am also very curious to see where the STEED project leads us, it looks like a nice way to popularize PGP.
AI

Submission + - A Robot (QBO) Recognizes Itself in a Mirror (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Robots are often cute and they can work on human empathy to place themselves into a position of a pet or, perhaps more worryingly, a small child. This can go to the point where we are fooled into thinking that they are a concious entity similar to, but perhaps lesser than, ourselves. We can be fooled into thinking that they are self aware.
Now we have a video "QBO and the Mirror" that places this claim to self awareness clearly to the public. A small robot, Qbo, was placed in front of a mirror and after some learning algorithms had run their course it utters
"Oh. This is me. Nice."
So we have proof that robots can be self aware.
Watch the video and see what you think.
Does this demonstrate self-awareness?
Or is it just a gimmick?
Censorship

Submission + - The Personal Computer is Dead

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Richard Stallman rankled many with his good riddance to Steve Jobs' 'malign influence on people's computing.' But now RMS gets an amen-of-sorts from Harvard Law School Prof Jonathan Zittrain, who explains in The Personal Computer is Dead why you should be afraid — very afraid — of the snowballing replicability of the App Store Model. 'If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens,' warns Zittrain, 'we'll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we'll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.' Searchblog's John Battelle, who's also solidly in the tear-down-this-walled-garden camp, adds: 'I'm not a nerd, quite, but I’m sure angry.' Are Stallman's views on their way to becoming positively mainstream?
Moon

Submission + - Last Lunar Eclipse until 2014 (nasa.gov)

Submitted by althanas
althanas writes: The action begins around 4:45 am Pacific Standard Time when the red shadow of Earth first falls across the lunar disk. By 6:05 am Pacific Time, the Moon will be fully engulfed in red light. This event—the last total lunar eclipse until 2014—is visible from the Pacific side of North America, across the entire Pacific Ocean to Asia and Eastern Europe. For people in the western United States the eclipse is deepest just before local dawn. Not only will the Moon be beautifully red, it will also be inflated by the Moon illusion.

Submission + - My most hated environment

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: My most hated environment is:
Unity
Gnome3
Kde4
Gnome2
Kde3
The world
Power

Submission + - MPG of a human (ucsd.edu)

Submitted by
InterGuru
InterGuru writes: "Tom Murphy, blogging from UCSD in his Do the Math blog asks
' I am curious to know how potent human fuel can be. How many miles per gallon do we get as our own engines of transportation? '

He finds, after accounting for the energy intensity of American agriculture, which uses ten units of energy to get one unit of food energy, walking consumes 18-34 MPG of oil equivalent, and biking comes in at 70-130 MPG.
Maybe if we switched to a more vegetarian diet, we could improve on this."
Space

Submission + - Voyager Probes Give Us ET's View (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "For the first time, scientists have been able to measure a type of radiation streaming out from the Milky Way that in other galaxies has been linked to the birthplaces of young, hot stars. There was no way to make our own galaxy's measurement of the radiation, known as Lyman-alpha, until the Voyager probes were about 40 times as far away from the sun as Earth — any closer and the solar system's own emissions drowned out the fainter glow from the galaxy."
Technology

Submission + - TV Ownership Declines 2

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes: Every year, the estimated number of U.S. households owning TV sets goes up. Until now. This year, for the first time since 1970, tv ownership has gone down; by about 1%. TV ownership among the key adult 18-49 demo also declined even steeper, down 2.7 percent and percentage of homes without a TV is at the highest level since 1975. The reasons behind this appear to be online media content and the recession.
 

Submission + - Aleph One 1.0 Released (sourceforge.net)

Submitted by treellama
treellama writes: Nearly 12 year since Bungie released the source code for Marathon 2, the Aleph One team is thrilled to release version 1.0 of the Aleph One game engine. Aleph One is a Free software, cross platform game engine that supports all three original Marathon games with enhancements such as OpenGL and Internet play; as well as numerous third party mods known as "scenarios"

Easy to install full versions of Marathon, Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity, now featuring high resolution graphics and modern widescreen HUD support, can be downloaded for free from the project website!
Linux

Submission + - Red Hat's Linux Changes Raise New Questions (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "Last month two Red Hat developers proposed to replace the 30-year-old syslog system with a new Journal daemon. Initial reaction was mostly negative and 'focused on the Journal's use of a binary key-value form of data to log system events,' says blogger Brian Proffit. But now, says Proffitt, it seems that the proposal to replace syslog has less to do with the fixing syslog's problems than with Red Hat's desire to go its own way with Linux infrastructure."
Blackberry

Submission + - RIM PlayBook Tablet Jailbroken (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A group of researchers is claiming that they've found a root exploit that enables them to jailbreak the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet made by Research In Motion. In a video demonstration of the jailbreak, one of the researchers shows off the ability to change the settings on a PlayBook and says that he also has the ability to install the Android Market app on the tablet.

Submission + - How Photoshopped Is That Picture? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Freddybear
Freddybear writes: Digital forensics experts at Dartmouth have developed software that can analyze digital photos to rate how drastically they have been altered by digital editing techniques. "The Dartmouth research, said Seth Matlins, a former talent agent and marketing executive, could be “hugely important” as a tool for objectively measuring the degree to which photos have been altered."
Transportation

Submission + - Algorithm Can Predict Red Light Runners

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Researchers at MIT have developed an algorithm that determines which drivers will run a red light, within one to two seconds before a potential collision. The research based on 15,000 cars at a busy intersection monitored various factors to determine which cars were were likely to run a red light. They found that their predictions were correct about 85 percent of the time, which is about 15-20 percent better than existing traffic prediction algorithms.
Android

Submission + - Carrier IQ: Which phones are infected, and how to (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "The Carrier IQ debacle is quickly spiralling out of control: First it was confirmed that Android devices on Sprint and AT&T had the keylogging software installed, and then late last night it emerged that CIQ is also buried deep within iOS. Since then, other manufacturers such as RIM and Nokia, and carriers like Verizon, have confirmed that Carrier IQ never goes anywhere near their devices. If you're stuck with an Android or iOS phone with Carrier IQ installed, though, here's how to remove it — or at least disable it."

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