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Comment Re:three words, one hyphen: (Score 1) 549

by MentalMooMan (#41789989) Attached to: Why Can't Industry Design an Affordable Hearing Aid?

Using basis points removes the ambiguity when talking about fractions of percentages.

Consider: "The interest rate, previously 5%, has been raised by 1%". Does this mean the new interest rate is 6% (5 + 1), or 5.05% (5 * 1.01)?

If you say "The interest rate, previously 5%, has been raised by 100 basis points" then the only possible interpretation is that the new interest rate is 6%.
Government

CIA Officers Are Warming To Intellipedia 102

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'm-warming-a-turkey-sandwich dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The CIA is adopting Web 2.0 tools like collaborative wikis but not without a struggle in an agency with an ingrained culture of secrecy. 'We're still kind of in this early adoptive stage,' says Sean Dennehy, a CIA analyst and self-described 'evangelist' for Intellipedia, the US intelligence community's version of the popular user-curated online encyclopedia Wikipedia adding that 'trying to implement these tools in the intelligence community is basically like telling people that their parents raised them wrong. It is a huge cultural change.' Dennehy says Intellipedia, which runs on secure government intranets and is used by 16 US intelligence agencies, was started as a pilot project in 2005 and now has approximately 100,000 user accounts and gets about 4,000 edits a day. 'Some people have (supported it) but there's still a lot of other folks kind of sitting on the fence.' Dennehy says wikis are 'a challenge to our culture because we grew up in this kind of "need to know" culture and now we need a balance between "need to know" and "need to share."' A desire to compartamentalize information is another problem. 'Inevitably, every person, the first question we were asked is "How do I lock down a page?" or "How do I lock down a page so that just my five colleagues can access that?"' The growth of Intellipedia has so far largely been fueled by early adopters and enthusiasts says Chris Rasmussen, a social-software knowledge manager and trainer at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. 'We are struggling to take it to the next level.'"
Privacy

New Law Will Require Camera Phones To "Click" 1235

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the pointless-wastes-of-time dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A new bill is being introduced called the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act, which would require any mobile phone containing a digital camera to sound a tone whenever a photograph is taken with the phone's camera. It would also prohibit such a phone from being equipped with a means of disabling or silencing the tone."
Earth

Black Holes From the LHC Could Last For Minutes 672

Posted by kdawson from the becoming-greyer dept.
KentuckyFC writes "There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet (or this way either) when it eventually switches on some time later this year. And yet a few niggling doubts are persuading some scientists to run through their figures again. One potential method of destruction is that the LHC will create tiny black holes that could swallow everything in their path, including the planet. Various scientists have said this will not happen because the black holes would decay before they could do any damage. But physicists who have re-run the calculations now say that the mini black holes produced by the LHC could last for seconds, possibly minutes. Of course, the real question is whether they decay faster than they can grow. The new calculations suggest that the decay mechanism should win over and that the catastrophic growth of a black hole from the LHC 'does not seem possible' (abstract). But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?"
The Internet

Submission + - UK ISPs are censoring Wikipedia

Submitted by Concerned Wikipedian
Concerned Wikipedian writes: Starting December 4th, Wikipedia administrators noticed a surge of edits from certain IP addresses. These IPs turned out to be the proxies for the content filters of at least 6 major UK ISPs. After some research by Wikipedians, it appears that the image of the 1970s LP cover art of the Scorpions' "Virgin Killer" has been blocked because it was judged to be "child pornography" and all other attempts to access Wikimedia foundation sites from these ISPs are being proxied to only a few IP addresses. The latter is causing many problems for Wikipedia administrators because much of the UK vandalism now comes from a single IP that when blocked affects potentially hundreds of thousands of anonymous users who intend no harm and are utterly confused as to why they are no longer able to edit. The image was flagged by the the Internet Watch Foundation, which is funded by the EU and the UK government and has the support of many ISPs and online institutions in the UK. The filter is fairly easy to circumvent simply by viewing the article in some other languages, or by logging in on the secure version of Wikipedia. [Wikinews] and [ZDnet]

Comment Re:White-Space Devices will destroy FREE televisio (Score 1) 94

by Bomarrow1 (#25518479) Attached to: White Space Debate Intensifies As Vote Approaches

While you want your free entertainment in the form of TV shows perhaps some people want it in the form of internet or gadgets to play on.

Also I think the concern given to emergency broadcasts is rather unrealistic. Could tcp/ip not deliver even more reliable emergency broadcasts than TV.

In some of the very sparsly populated and rural communities will there be people with these devices close enough to the TV sets to disrupt it?
Businesses

Tetris Creator Claims FOSS Destroys the Market 686

Posted by kdawson from the sterile-absentia dept.
alx5000 writes "In an interview conducted last week with Consumer Eroski (link in Spanish; Google translation), the father of Tetris Alexey Pajitnov claimed that 'Free Software should have never existed,' since it 'destroys the market' by bringing down companies that create wealth and prosperity. When asked about Red Hat or Oracle's support-oriented model, he called them 'a minority,' and also criticized Stallman's ideas as 'belonging to the past' where there were no software 'business possibilities.'"
Science

Bluetooth Prosthetics Help US Marine To Walk Again 127

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the better-stronger-faster dept.
Like2Byte writes "CNN is reporting that a US Marine who lost both his legs in Iraq is now able to walk again by using bluetooth technology to coordinate his leg movement. The two legs communicate to keep the man in motion. ' [...] Computer chips in each leg send signals to motors in the artificial joints so the knees and ankles move in a coordinated fashion. Bleill's set of prosthetics [legs] have Bluetooth receivers strapped to the ankle area. The Bluetooth device on each leg tells the other leg what it's doing, how it's moving, whether walking, standing or climbing steps, for example.'"
Media

Afterlife Will Be Costly For Digital Films 395

Posted by kdawson from the same-time-next-year dept.
Andy Updegrove writes "For a few years now we've been reading about the urgency of adopting open document formats to preserve written records. Now, a 74-page report from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences warns that digital films are as vulnerable to loss as digitized documents, but vastly more expensive to preserve — as much as $208,569 per year. The reasons are the same for video as for documents: magnetic media degrade quickly, and formats continue to be created and abandoned. If this sounds familiar and worrisome, it should. We are rushing pell-mell into a future where we only focus on the exciting benefits of new technologies without considering the qualities of older technologies that are equally important — such as ease of preservation — that may be lost or fatally compromised when we migrate to a new whiz-bang technology." Here's a registration-free link for the NYTimes article cited in Andy's post.
The Internet

The Kremlin Tightens Its Grip on the Internet 280

Posted by CmdrTaco from the more-you-tighten-your-fingers dept.
reporter writes "According to a report just published by "The Washington Post", the percentage of Russian adults having access to the Internet has risen from 8% in 2002 to 25% in 2007. This growth has attracted the attention of the Kremlin. Its allies are creating pro-Kremlin web sites and are purchasing web sites known for high-quality independent journalism. Pro-Kremlin bloggers have used their skills to bury news about anti-Kremlin demonstrations: at Russian news portals, web links to news about pro-Kremlin rallies consistently rank higher than web links to news about anti-Kremlin demonstrations. The most disturbing development is that the Kremlin intends to develop a Russian Internet which is separate from the global Internet. Russian officials are studying the techniques that the Chinese use to censor the Internet."

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