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Social Networks

Meg Whitman Campaign Shows How Not To Use Twitter 147

Posted by samzenpus from the type-slower dept.
tsamsoniw writes "California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman's campaign team attempted to share with her Twitter followers an endorsement from a police association. Unfortunately, the campaign press secretary entered an incorrect or incomplete Bit.ly URL in the Tweet, which took clickers to a YouTube video featuring a bespectacled, long-haired Japanese man in a tutu and leggings rocking out on a bass guitar. And for whatever reason, the Tweet, which went out on the 18th, has remained active through today."
Image

Australian Visitors Must Declare Illegal Porn To Customs Officers 361

Posted by samzenpus from the don't-blunder-down-under dept.
Australian Justice Minister Brendan O'Connor has advised visitors to take a better safe than sorry policy when it comes to their porn stashes, and declare all porn that they think might be illegal with customs officers. From the article: "The government said it changed the wording on passenger arrival cards after becoming aware of confusion among travellers about what pornography to declare. 'People have a right to privacy and while some pornography is legal and does not need to be disclosed, all travellers should be aware that certain types of pornography are illegal and must be declared to customs,' Mr O'Connor said."

Comment Re:Irresponsible headline, summary (Score 4, Insightful) 911

by |>>? (#28261609) Attached to: Computers Key To Air France Crash

A well trained pilot would know when to trust the computers and when not to. They would also know how to maneuver and react in situations. It's like the pilot that landed his plane in the river after losing an engine to birds. I don't think a computer would have taken that option and not only would it have been likely that all the passengers would have been killed, but bystanders as the planes computer attempted to correct and eventually goes down in a populated street.

This comment looks sensible on the face of it, but I have to disagree with you. I have a pilot license and am familiar with the process of flying. I've never flown a fly-by-wire aircraft, but I've automated a radio broadcast desk - which might not look like it's relevant, but it taught me that "knowing when to trust the computer" is not an obvious state, not in a radio station and I seriously doubt in a cockpit.

For me the final "aha moment" came when the computer was attempting to tell me something useful, but because I was concentrating on a completely different aspect of interacting with it, I completely missed the information. In my case it caused a few seconds of dead air on a radio station, nothing life threatening, but not human obvious either.

The challenge is not "when to trust a computer and when not to" - the challenge is "how do you get the information that the computer is using to the human in such a way that they can manage that input stream in a timely fashion. Stick shakers are an example of making use of an extra input channel.

Accidents in planes are rarely just one thing going wrong, they generally are a whole string of things. A computer in the mix just exacerbates the issue.
Nintendo

Nintendo Penalizing Homebrew Users? 95

Posted by Soulskill from the thanks-so-much dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Bricked your Wii? Not only will Nintendo charge you for the repair, they will now add an additional fee if they detect any homebrew software. 'Should Nintendo have to pay to repair hacked Wiis under warranty? Maybe not, but they have no (moral) right to gouge customers out of spite for having the HBC installed. This actually poses a technical dilemma for us with BootMii. As currently designed, BootMii looks for an SD card when you boot your Wii, and if it finds the card and the right file, it will execute that file. Otherwise, there's no way to tell it's installed.'"
Security

A Vision For a World Free of CAPTCHAs 168

Posted by Soulskill from the is-that-an-oh-or-a-zero dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Slate argues that we're going about verifying humans on the Web all wrong: 'As Alan Turing laid out in the 1950 paper that postulated his test, the goal is to determine whether a computer can behave like a human, not perform tasks that a human can. The reason CAPTCHAs have a term limit is that they measure ability, not behavior. ... the random, circuitous way that people interact with Web pages — the scrolling and highlighting and typing and retyping — would be very difficult for a bot to mimic. A system that could capture the way humans interact with forms algorithmically could eventually relieve humans of the need to prove anything altogether.' Seems smart, if an algorithm could actually do that."

Comment The Australian Experience (Score 1) 16

by |>>? (#27710259) Attached to: Is it moral to take gov't aid you don't need?

Your question of morality is interesting and I'll get to that in a moment, but I'd first like to share the experience in Australia where such a "First Home Buyers" scheme has been operating for some time. At one point it was AUD$21.000 if you were a first home buyer who built a home, I think at the moment it's "only" AUD$14.000. It started a few years ago at AUD$7.000.

From where I'm standing at the side-lines - I'm renting - it distorted the housing market in many unpredictable ways.

In essence it increased the price of all houses because the new builders would build a house with extras "for free", that incorporated the extra funding. Those first home buyers who didn't build got half the funding and that meant that existing home owners increased the value of their home by that amount so they could get the funding too.

Those same houses that were artificially increased in value caused a bubble in the price of housing, because the next owner saw the percentage increase in their area - as a result of the grant - and then they too wanted to see the same return on their investment, causing a self-feedback loop that made house prices increase like mad when really there was nothing to back that up. The result today is that the return on housing has in fact declined for the first time in decades - completely unheard of in most urban areas in the country.

The grant caused cases where the first home buyer was a child and many cases where people with extreme wealth found ways of getting the grant - for example, if the husband always bought their house as a company, then they could qualify for it as a private purchase etc.

By the examples I'm showing you might surmise that the grant brings out the worst in people. It goes directly to morality because it shows that when there is an opportunity to do wrong, a percentage of the population will in fact do so.

I don't think it's a good or sustainable means of stimulation, nor do I think it's appropriate to use aid that is not required. I think that shining the light on those who abuse the system will ultimately cause a return to common sense.

Those around me think it's appropriate to cheat on your taxes - for me, its the same thing. Ultimately you're cheating yourself and the society you are part of. Unemployment benefits, healthcare, education and infrastructure need to be paid for - even if I don't agree with all that is spent, that's the system I choose to be part of. Paying taxes is part of the responsibility that comes with being part of society - otherwise we'd be still living in caves, hunting and dying at age 22.

For me it's summarised in the following quote:

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools. --Herbert Spencer
Government

Hundreds of Thousands of Chinese Black-Hats 247

Posted by kdawson from the defending-against-gnats dept.
An anonymous reader sends us to Popular Science for a long article on the loose, uncoordinated bands of patriotic Chinese hackers that seem to be responsible for much of the cyber-trouble emerging from that nation. Quoting: "For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China's government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it's more than that: it's hundreds of thousands of everyday Chinese civilians. ... Jack Linchuan Qiu, a communications professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong [says:] 'Chinese hackerism is not the American "hacktivism" that wants social change. It's actually very close to the state. The Chinese distinction between the private and public domains is very small.' ... According to [James Andrew Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies], 'The government at a minimum tolerates them. Sometimes it encourages them. And sometimes it tasks them and controls them.' In the end, he says, 'it's easy for the government to turn on and hard to turn off.'"
Space

Using Light's Handedness To Find Alien Life 210

Posted by timothy from the let's-skip-some-steps-in-the-middle dept.
Rational Egoist writes "Scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have come up with a novel, easy way to detect life on other planets. Rather than try to measure the composition of atmospheres, they want to look at the chirality of light coming from the planet. From the article: '"If the [planet's] surface had just a collection of random chiral molecules, half would go left, half right," Germer says. "But life's self-assembly means they all would go one way. It's hard to imagine a planet's surface exhibiting handedness without the presence of self assembly, which is an essential component of life."' And they have already built a working model: 'Because chiral molecules reflect light in a way that indicates their handedness, the research team built a device to shine light on plant leaves and bacteria, and then detect the polarized reflections from the organisms' chlorophyll from a short distance away. The device detected chirality from both sources.' The article abstract is available online."
Linux Business

Submission + - Ubuntu 9.04 is as slick as Win7, Mac OS X (zdnet.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Opinion: Here's what the official press release won't tell you about Ubuntu 9.04, which formally hit the streets overnight: its designers have polished the hell out of its user interface since the last release in October. Just like Microsoft has taken the blowtorch to Vista to produce the lightning-quick Windows 7, which so far runs well even on older hardware, Ubuntu has picked up its own game.
Games

Contrasting User-Driven Play With Developer Vision 60

Posted by Soulskill from the dance,-puppets dept.
GameSetWatch is running an opinion piece (sparked by a lecture at NYU by Deus Ex developer Warren Spector) about the difference between game experiences that are specifically planned by the game's creators and experiences that are either constructed by players or arise unexpectedly. Quoting: "One thing Spector said during the NYU discussion was that he feels multiplayer games are 'lazy.' This is the designer in him talking, of course — his theory that in letting players build stories via Left 4 Dead-style happy accidents in open worlds, the designer doesn't have to tackle complex challenges like making choices meaningful, or making characters believable. Spector wants to take on those challenges, and he doesn't like the idea that user-driven play, from his standpoint, effectively allows game design to bypass them. It's actually an idea I relate to a lot as a writer — I was raised in an era of authoritative media, when individual voices drove culture, opinion and information. The internet's changed everything, of course; the authoritative voice has evolved into a conversation between writer and audience, and the writer now leads the community discussion rather than acting as a single determiner, a unilateral judge."
Movies

Watchmen 50 Days On, Was It Worth the Gamble? 448

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-i-enjoyed-it dept.
brumgrunt writes "Friday marks the 50th day on general release for what was the long-awaited Watchmen movie. But how much money has it made, and how has it measured up to Warner Bros' expectations? Has it, bluntly, been worth the gamble, expense and hassle? "

Comment Internet Filter (Score 1) 148

by |>>? (#26067343) Attached to: Aussie Censorship "Live Trials" Won't Be Live

An internet filter such as Senator Conroy is proposing is at best a misguided attempt to provide a safe environment for children and at worst a totalitarian tool to placate the population.

The internet is a social tool that will continue to grow in its scope and penetration. As the internet evolves from the teenager that it is, filtering will become less and less effective - despite developers best efforts, just look at how SPAM filters have failed to meet the raising tide since 1993.

A better use of the proposed funds is to provide education to the population about how to deal with inappropriate content, rather than attempt to construct a centralised solution for a decentralised problem.

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