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Comment Re:Two problems (Score 2) 233

And honestly, even if we DID have that capacity, I wouldn't be using it to buy laptops, I'd be using it to buy things like guaranteed secure SCADA systems, or computer processors for digital radio, or smart-camera starlight-navigation packages for when GPS is being jammed, or things like that. Laptops are kind of an end-goal when you get all the other pieces working, it's not where you START.
Facebook

Submission + - Google challenges Facebook over user address books (reuters.com)

Submitted by jcombel
jcombel writes: When you sign in to Facebook, you had the option of importing your email contacts, to "friend" them all on the social network. Importing the other way — easily copying your Facebook contacts to Gmail — required jumping through considerable copy/paste hoops or third-party scripts. Google said enough is enough, and they're no longer helping sites that don't allow two-way contact merging. The stated intention is standing their ground to budge other sites into allowing users have control of where their data goes — but will this just lead to more sites putting up "data walls"?
Education

Submission + - In Praise of Procrastination 1

Submitted by
Ponca City
Ponca City writes: "Every year, millions of Americans pay needless penalties because they don’t file their taxes on time, forgone huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never get around to signing up for a retirement plan, and risk blindness from glaucoma because they don’t use their eyedrops regularly. Now James Surowiecki writes that procrastination is a basic human impulse, a peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time — in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting," the ability to make rational choices when they’re thinking about the future, but, where as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. Game theorist Thomas Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves a collection of competing selves, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control where one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals while philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” So before we rush to overcome procrastination we should consider whether it is sometimes an impulse we should heed and that it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic, a weakness of will that allows us to act against our own benefit, and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which."

Submission + - Europe simulates total cyber war (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Tutter
Tutter writes: The first-ever cross-European simulation of an all out cyber attack was planned to test how well nations cope as the attacks slow connections.

The simulation steadily reduced access to critical services to gauge how nations react. The exercise also tested how nations work together to avoid a complete shut-down of international links. Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for the digital agenda, said the exercise was designed to test preparedness and was an "important first step towards working together to combat potential online threats to essential infrastructure". The exercise is intended to help expose short-comings in existing procedures for combating attacks. As the attacks escalated, cyber security centres had to find ever more ways to route traffic through to key services and sites. The exercise also tested if communication channels, set up to help spread the word about attacks, were robust in the face of a developing threat and if the information shared over them was relevant.

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