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Call of Duty Gaming Community Points To 'Swatting' In Wichita Police Shooting (dailydot.com) 681

Posted by BeauHD from the first-of-its-kind dept.
schwit1 shares a report from The Daily Dot: A man was killed by police Thursday night in Wichita, Kansas, when officers responded to a false report of a hostage situation. The online gaming community is saying the dead man was the victim of a swatting prank, where trolls call in a fake emergency and force SWAT teams to descend on a target's house. If that's true, this would be the first reported swatting-related death. Wichita deputy police chief Troy Livingston told the Wichita Eagle that police were responding to a report that a man fighting with his parents had accidentally shot his dad in the head and was holding his mom, brother and sister hostage. When police arrived, "A male came to the front door," Livingston told the Eagle. "As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon." The man at the door was identified by the Eagle as 28-year-old Andrew Finch. Finch's mother told reporters "he was not a gamer," but the online Call of Duty community claims his death was the result of a gamer feud which Finch may not have even been a part of.
UPDATE: The New York Daily News reports police in Los Angeles have now arrested 25-year-old gamer Tyler Barriss, who the paper describes as "an alleged serial 'prankster'..."

"Barriss gave cops Finch's address, mistakenly believing it belonged to a person he had feuded with over a $1 or $2 Call of Duty wager."

Submission + - Google's Voice-Generating AI Is Now Indistinguishable From Humans (qz.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A research paper published by Google this month—which has not been peer reviewed—details a text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2, which claims near-human accuracy at imitating audio of a person speaking from text. The system is Google’s second official generation of the technology, which consists of two deep neural networks. The first network translates the text into a spectrogram (pdf), a visual way to represent audio frequencies over time. That spectrogram is then fed into WaveNet, a system from Alphabet’s AI research lab DeepMind, which reads the chart and generates the corresponding audio elements accordingly. The Google researchers also demonstrate that Tacotron 2 can handle hard-to-pronounce words and names, as well as alter the way it enunciates based on punctuation. For instance, capitalized words are stressed, as someone would do when indicating that specific word is an important part of a sentence.

Submission + - Blackhole's 'point of no return' found (harvard.edu) 1

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: Using a continent-spanning telescope, an international team of astronomers has peered to the edge of a black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. For the first time, they have measured the black hole’s “point of no return” — the closest distance that matter can approach before being irretrievably pulled into the black hole.

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a black hole’s mass and spin determine how close material can orbit before becoming unstable and falling in toward the event horizon. The team was able to measure this innermost stable orbit and found that it’s only 5.5 times the size of the black hole’s event horizon. This size suggests that the accretion disk is spinning in the same direction as the black hole.
The observations were made by linking together radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, and California to create a virtual telescope called the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT. The EHT is capable of seeing details 2,000 times finer than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Comment Re:Better than Arch? (Score 4, Interesting) 172

by KazW (#41017511) Attached to: Happy Birthday, Debian!
I use Arch on simple/embedded systems only, when using it for something more complex like a desktop, updates tend to break it quite frequently. I used Arch for 12 months on my desktop and for 9 of those months I had to live with bugs that I just didn't have the time to fix. Arch is great, but there's no QC, whereas with Debian you may not get the latest version, but at least your system will be stable.

To summarize, it's a trade off between stability and having the latest version of packages.

Comment Re:Great timing (Score 2) 314

by KazW (#39400691) Attached to: Linux 3.3 Released
I have at least this many tabs open in Firefox across my tab groups, the "Don't load tabs until selected" option in the general tab is really quite awesome.

Comment Re:Great timing (Score 1) 314

by KazW (#39400683) Attached to: Linux 3.3 Released
The two replies above mine make a good point of explaining this, but your system design is extremely flawed. Also, it indicates to me that you've probably been setup for a failure since day 1 due to your project having an insufficient budget.

Comment Re:It's a Race (Score 1) 74

by KazW (#39096377) Attached to: Intel Gets Serious With Solar-powered CPU Tech

So many people are worried about how technological advances are ruining the environment. What many often forget is that technology is also the answer (unless you want to go back to a hunter-gather lifestyle and I hear that the drum/smoke-signal bandwidth really sucks, it's takes forever to download the latest movie.)

We're in a race - computational speed, new materials, new efficiencies versus the rate in which we're polluting the environment. Many things make me optimistic: photovoltaic paints for one - and now processing power so efficient that it can be solar powered. Wow. We may win this race after all. .

You insensitive clod! Smoke signals release carbon into the atmosphere!

Comment Re:Removable battery (Score 1) 358

by KazW (#38934713) Attached to: iOS Vs. Android: Which Has the Crashiest Apps?
Motorolas are horrible, I had a Milestone for five days before going back and getting an HTC Desire. I had the same problem with the phone completely locking up. So while your point is valid, I would argue that it only applies to certain manufactures, and I have seen iPhones completely lock up as well.

Comment Interesting, but useless (Score 3, Interesting) 155

by KazW (#38661098) Attached to: Kinect For Windows Releasing On February 1
The Kinect has a user base of 18 million units world wide, let's assume only half of those are USB units, that's 9 million units. Instead of Microsoft allowing home users to use their XBox Kinect with Windows Metro apps, home users will be forced to buy a new Kinect to use it with Windows apps (commercial apps anyways, they can use apps made with the beta SDK).

With this move Microsoft has reduced the PC user base of Kinect to 0, eliminating a huge audience for developers. The reason given was that the XBox Kinect was subsidized by game sales, but if using that defence, why not just subsidize this Kinect through the new app store Windows 8 will have? This would let home users use their existing Kinect and keep Microsoft's bottom line doing well in the long term. This is just a very dumb move overall.

Foreword to pro-M$ trolls, I did RTFA and I know about the "near" feature of this new Kinect, but it still doesn't justify this move.

Comment Re:Interesting, but.... (Score 2) 441

by KazW (#38599296) Attached to: Windows 8 To Include Built-in Reset, Refresh
I forgot to add that the reason for re-installing is because you're installing from a known-to-be-clean source. Once viruses get into the image, what's the point?

It's not mentioned, but it'd be nice if you could save the image on an external drive that you could unplug from the system to keep the image safe. Before I switched to using Linux on my desktop, I did much the same thing with a Clonezilla image.

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