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Comment Re:Hmmm ... (Score 1) 312

I agree but I think I would put it differently. I think what we need is absolute free speech, including the ability to tell deliberate lies etc. What we should seek to prohibit are actions with the intended consequence of hurting others. I also think the our public discourse/debate, as well as the laws themselves, should be focused the maliciousness of the actions and consequences, rather than the freedom of the speech.
China

Blood For Extra Credit Points Offer Raises Eyebrows In Test-Mad China 90

Posted by samzenpus from the bloody-report-card dept.
An anonymous reader writes Parents in China's Zhejiang province can give their own blood to earn some extra points on their child's high school entrance exam. Four liters of donated blood will get your child one extra point; 6 liters adds two points; and 8 liters, three. From the article: "The policy burst into the national limelight this week, when a Weibo user posted a photo of a bandaged arm, saying, 'For my future child, I say one thing: Relax when you take the high school entrance exam. Your dad's already helped you gain points.' The post was widely shared. Though the user declined to be interviewed by China Real Time, he also clarified his original post, saying that he had in fact been giving blood since age 18."

Comment Re:Prevention and Protection over Punishment (Score 2) 914

You're saying it wouldn't make a difference to a thief if they knew the punishment for robbing a store was either some community service or 10 years in prison? For those among us who are not guided by morality, punishment is the only reason not to perform acts of theft or senseless violence. And regardless of where you think our governments priorities should be, or however much the government can enact policies to prevent crimes, crimes will still happen, and they must be dealt with appropriately. The criminal system needs to be designed with multiple goals: rehabilitation and reform for criminals who have the potential to become better citizens, and the prevention crime through the deterrence of punishment for those who cannot.
Businesses

The Importance of Lunch 475

Posted by Soulskill from the food-for-thought dept.
theodp writes "I've been on teams that eat together every day,' writes Joel-on-Software Spolsky, 'and it's awesome. I've been on teams that don't, and lunch every day is, at best, lonely.' Spolsky is firmly in the camp that believes where and with whom we eat lunch is a much bigger deal than most people care to admit. 'There's a lot of stuff that's accidental about Fog Creek and Stack Exchange,' he concludes, 'but lunch is not one of them. Ten years ago Michael and I set out with the rather ambitious goal of making a great place to work. Eating together is a critical part of what it means to be human and what it means to have a humane workplace, and that's been a part of our values from day one.'"
Math

Are Graphical Calculators Pointless? 636

Posted by Soulskill from the is-it-pointless-to-play-drug-wars-while-looking-productive dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Texas Instruments and Casio have recently released new flagship graphical calculators but what, exactly, is the point of using them? They are slow, with limited memory and a 'high-resolution' display that is no such thing. For $100 more than the NSpire CX CAS you could buy a netbook and fill it with cutting edge mathematical software such as Octave, Scilab, SAGE and so on. You could also use it for web browsing, email and a thousand other things. One argument heard for using these calculators is: 'They are limited enough to use in exams.' Sounds sensible, but it raises the question: 'Why are we teaching a generation of students to use crippled technology?'"
The Courts

Yahoo! Liable In Italy For Searchable Content 145

Posted by Soulskill from the how-does-internet-work dept.
h3rr d0kt0r writes "A recent decision of an Italian court could spark considerable discussion over the liability of a search engines. The court actually ordered Yahoo! to remove any link to any site containing unlawful copies of a movie. Under EU Directives 2003/31, liability of search engines is not regulated (save for caching activities). In the case brought to court regarding the film About Elly, it was not the caching activities of Yahoo! that were questioned (or any content hosted on Yahoo!'s servers), but the mere fact that searching for the film made it possible to reach websites allowing the streaming or downloading of the movie (actually, illegal sites got a better ranking then the official one)."
Music

Leaked Docs Show UK ISP BT Plans Music Service 84

Posted by timothy from the only-has-to-be-good-enough dept.
An anonymous reader submits word of a leaked document that indicates that British Telecom "has plans to launch a new music download service which it hopes will steer users away from P2P file sharing . The introduction of the new service is aimed at giving its customers an alternative to file sharing and is already in the works with talks ongoing between the ISP and music labels such as Universal and EMI. When launched 'in the near future' the service is expected to offer BT's 5.5 million customers completely free music downloads for an initial period of 6-9 months after which an undecided monthly subscription fee will be charged for continued access to the service. The finer details of how the service will look and function is unknown at this stage, but will play a huge part in how successful (if at all) the service will be. Services like Spotify already exist and are hugely popular in the UK meaning BT will have to go the extra mile to convince users they have a service worth using."
Medicine

Mobile Phone May Rot Your Bones 220

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-what-about-my-junk dept.
Stoobalou writes "Researchers at the National University of Cuyo, in Mendoza, Argentina, looked at that strange breed — men who wear mobile phones on their hip. They discovered evidence to suggest that the proximity of the mobile phone caused a reduction in bone mineral content (BMC) and bone mineral density (BMD) in the men who wore the phones over a 12-month period, compared to a control group that didn't."
Government

Utah To Teach USA is a Republic, Not a Democracy 1277

Posted by CmdrTaco from the only-two-of-three-wives-agree dept.
0ryan0 writes "Utah lawmakers passed a bill today to force public school teachers to teach that the USA is a republic, not a democracy, because a 'Democracy' would have 'Democrat' in it." The good news must be that all issues of unemployment, finance and social service must be resolved in Utah for their legislature to spend time on this. It must be a utopia!
AI

Go For It On Fourth Down? Ask Coach Watson 241

Posted by Soulskill from the falling-back-on-the-old-destroy-all-humans-play dept.
jbrodkin writes "If humans can't beat a computer at 'Jeopardy!' why should we trust them to make the right call on fourth down in the Super Bowl? That was the fundamental question asked by some researchers at the recent MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. With thousands of variables to consider on the basketball court or other fields of play, it only makes sense to let computers handle questions of strategy, says Tarek Kamil, whose company built a chip-containing basketball which takes 6,000 measurements per second. 'Fifty years from now, we're going to laugh about how we used to give coaches this much responsibility,' he says."
Google

Bing Becomes No.2 Search Engine at 4.37% 366

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-that's-a-gap dept.
suraj.sun writes "Bing overtook Yahoo for the first time worldwide in January, and increased its lead in February, according to web analytics company, StatCounter. Its research arm StatCounter Global Stats finds that globally Bing reached 4.37%, in February ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both trail far behind Google's 89.94% of the global search engine market." Just a little more plagiarizing to go!

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