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Comment Re:Again? (Score 1) 94

by Pow.R Toc.H (#53216499) Attached to: Turkey Blocks Access To Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Facebook

Demonization and banning of opposition parties, jailing of political opponents, suppression of free press.

Pretty much by the numbers totalitarian rule.

Happening here in Brazil also, we already have #1 and #2. #3 will never happen because the Brazilian media always preferred to blowjob the government as long it keeps taxes over press paper zeroed, pays media companies' debts and prevents competition from foreign news services.

Comment Re:Why is it an overstep (Score 1) 158

Exactly. As a Brazilian, Paulista and Paulistano I also second this.

I find strange that: 1) corruption in Brazil, for these people, has just begun on January 1st, 2003 (when PT started their government) and 2) the corrupt people only are on PT and not on PSDB/DEM/name your right-wing party. Meanwhile, here on Sao Paulo state (where the same political group holds the power since 1982), we got massive corruption schemas that were never investigated: the Alston train affair, the irresponsible water management of Sao Paulo's metro area (look for "draught" and "Cantareira") and, last but not least, the case of school meals ("merenda") affair, where the food for the classmates has been sent everywhere but state schools. Mind you, the food that should had been sent to schools has been found at a deposit on a barbecue restaurant of Jundiaí (a city ~50 km from Sao Paulo).

Moreover, the opponent of the right-wing coalition which lost the presidential elections in 2014 has also been denounced on the very same operation that is targeting Lula nowadays not less than 5 times by 5 different people, and absolutely nothing has been done against him. He has also his share of scandals to be investigated - for example, an airport built besides his farm with state money - but the media just does not give a fsck about it. Dilma's government is mediocre at best, but Aecio and his party (PSDB) have been very keen on putting out the fire with gasoline.

Submission + - Brazilian police ilegally seized former president's email 2

Submitted by MythicalMan
MythicalMan writes: During the search and seizure in the Lula Institute last Friday, the Federal Police threatened a computer technician of being taken under arrest, forcing him to give the administrator password of all email accounts @institutolula.org (hosted at Google). Such generic access was not granted by the court's mandate, which referred only to a few specific email accounts. See the information here (in Portuguese).

The fact is worrying not only because of its illegality but also for its possible international repercussions, since Lula Institute corresponds with institutions, public figures and heads of state all around the world. Investigations of corruption in Brazil have been characterized by frequent leaks to the press and to opposition politicians who use them to attack the government of President Dilma Rousseff. The methods used by Brazilian prosecutors have been questioned not only by government supporters but also by jurists, scholars and journalists.

Comment Plasma 5 fiasco (Score 4, Informative) 65

by Pow.R Toc.H (#50724509) Attached to: Fedora 23 Final May Release As Planned On October 27
After the Plasma 5 fiasco, which wasn't ready for production, really, I took the plunge and switched to Kubuntu 14.04 LTS. It sucks to update your distro every 6 months, and it sucks even more to update distros having the feeling that one is in permanent beta. Nowadays I don't care about "beautiful desktop" and bells and whistles in general, I just need a stable and working environment. Still thinking what to do with wifey's notebook, though. But I'll probably go through the same route.

Comment Re:I believe it because.. (Score 1) 291

by Pow.R Toc.H (#47106699) Attached to: Parenting Rewires the Male Brain
Meet the Schürmanns. They circumnavigated the whole world - twice! - while raising their children aboard their boats. One of them stayed on board for 10 continuous years, something that didn't keep him from graduating in the USA. Their daughter, Kat Schürmann, has been adopted from a Australian-Brazilian couple who died of AIDS - she was HIV-positive herself, and that didn't keep them from traveling around the world. Her mother wrote a very emotive memento about her life with Kat, which unfortunately is only available in Portuguese.
Space

Submission + - Earth destroyed repeatedly in the name of science (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Unlike in old B movies, real scientists don’t scream, “Fools! I’ll destroy them all!” before throwing the switch on their doomsday device. At least, most of the them don’t. However, the August 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal reports that a team of scientists are working on destroying the world – not once, but repeatedly. Fortunately, the world they’re destroying exists only in a computer simulation and its destruction is in the service of learning more about planets revolving around other stars.
Microsoft

Kinect Hacked To Play Max Payne, Left 4 Dead 2 30

Posted by Soulskill from the neverending-hacks dept.
TechieAlizay points out a post at Geekword.net about a man who hacked Microsoft's Kinect to play Max Payne. "This hack was possible due to FAAST (a toolkit for Kinect), OpenNi/Nite and GlovePIE. Here's how the hacker describes the different control gestures: 'As you can see, the leaning left and right stuff is all there – and moving your body forward and back moves you back and forward. The reload and interact gestures are becoming pretty standard for me now, and pain killers are popped with an upward motion of the left hand. What makes this special though is the leg movements that activate bullet time. The result is bullet time diving for real! When this game hit just after the Matrix film came out, it caused a big stir – with Kinect augmentation it gets even better. The one thing that needs fixing is weapon select; this will be handled by the +/- buttons on the mote in future, I think.'" Another video shows Kinect controlling Left 4 Dead 2. In addition to future PC support, Microsoft is reportedly working on an official SDK. Yet another recent hack of note allows a human to control a humanoid robot with an impressive level of accuracy. Just be careful if you play the Kinect boxing game; somebody might call the police.
Science

The Proton Just Got Smaller 289

Posted by samzenpus from the size-does-matter dept.
inflame writes "A new paper published in Nature has said that the proton may be smaller than we previously thought. The article states 'The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. But the new measurements could mean that there is a gap in existing theories of quantum mechanics. "It's a very serious discrepancy," says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. "There is really something seriously wrong someplace."' Would this indicate new physics if proven?"

Submission + - Neptune may have eaten a planet and stolen its moo (newscientist.com)

Submitted by jitendraharlalka
jitendraharlalka writes: NEPTUNE may have polished off a super-Earth that once roamed the outer solar system and stolen its moon to boot. The brutal deed could explain mysterious heat radiating from the icy planet and the odd orbit of its moon Triton.

Neptune's own existence was a puzzle until recently. The dusty cloud that gave birth to the planets probably thinned out further from the sun. With building material so scarce, it is hard to understand how Uranus and Neptune, the two outermost planets, managed to get so big.

But what if they formed closer in? In 2005, a team of scientists proposed that the giant planets shifted positions in an early upheaval (New Scientist, 25 November 2006, p 40). In this scenario, Uranus and Neptune formed much closer to the sun and migrated outwards, possibly swapping places in the process.

That would have left behind enough material just beyond their birthplace to form a planet with twice the Earth's mass, according to calculations published in 2008 by Steven Desch of Arizona State University in Tempe.

Neptune's peculiar moon Triton may once have been paired with this hypothetical super-Earth, Desch and colleague Simon Porter now say. Triton is larger than Pluto, and it moves through its orbit in the opposite direction to Neptune's rotation, suggesting that it did not form there but was captured instead.

For Neptune to capture Triton, the moon would have had to slow down drastically. One way to do this is for Triton to have had a partner that carried away most of the pair's kinetic energy after an encounter with Neptune. In 2006 researchers argued that Triton was initially paired with another object of similar size that wound up being gravitationally slung into space after the pair ventured near Neptune (New Scientist, 13 May 2006, p 8).

But Triton could have slowed even more if its former partner were a heavy super-Earth. That's because a more massive body could carry away more of the pair's kinetic energy, Desch calculated in a study presented earlier this month at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas. "It would be a lot easier to capture Triton if it were orbiting something bigger," he says.

Neptune may have engulfed the super-Earth. Heat left over from the impact could explain why the planet radiates much more heat than its cousin Uranus, which is similar in mass and composition, Desch says.

But Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College Park, one of the authors of the 2006 study proposing that Triton had a long-lost twin, points out that smaller bodies would have been common in the early solar system, before planet migration cleared many of them away. Neptune would therefore have had many opportunities to snag Triton from one of these punier objects, rather than from a much rarer super-Earth, so that explanation may still be more likely, he says. Even so, he is not ready to rule out Desch's idea: "It's worth pursuing to see where it will lead."
Government

Leak Shows US Lead Opponent of ACTA Transparency 164

Posted by timothy from the putting-on-an-acta dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Throughout the debate over ACTA transparency, the secret copyright treaty, many countries have taken public positions that they support release of the actual text, but that other countries do not. Since full transparency requires consensus of all the ACTA partners, the text simply can't be released until everyone is in agreement. A new leak from the Netherlands fingers who the chief opponents of transparency are: the United States, South Korea, Singapore, and Denmark lead the way, with Belgium, Germany, and Portugal not far behind as problem countries."
The Military

Directed Energy Weapon Downs Ballistic Missile 297

Posted by kdawson from the sharks-as-witnesses dept.
A**masher writes "In a test off the Califoria coast late last night, Boeing's Airborne Laser successfully destroyed a sub-launched ballistic missile. 'This was the first directed energy lethal intercept demonstration against a liquid-fuel boosting ballistic missile target from an airborne platform,' reported the Missile Defense Agency. It should be noted that destroying a liquid-fueled ballistic missile is generally considered easier than killing a solid-fueled equivalent due to the relative fragility of the fueling and other systems."
Microsoft

Microsoft Phasing Out FAST Search For Linux, Unix 146

Posted by Soulskill from the going-away dept.
viralMeme writes "Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for its FAST enterprise search products, as of its next release. According to a Thursday blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjørn Olstad, 'We’ve continued to sell, support, and update the Linux and UNIX versions of FAST ESP, and we’ve designed the next wave of FAST products (scheduled for release in the first half of calendar year 2010) to include a cross-platform search core that has been extended to take advantage of web services and support mixed-platform deployment models. With our 2010 products scheduled for release in a few months, we’ve just started to plan for our next wave of products. As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX. Many of our customers run FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX today, and we recognize that our future focus on Windows means change. To ease the transition, we’re investing in interoperability between Windows and other operating systems, reaffirming our commitment to 10 years of support for our non-Windows products, and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future.'"

Comment Re:This is how it's done where I'm from... (Score 1) 613

by Pow.R Toc.H (#30899022) Attached to: Why the IRS Should Automatically Fill In Returns With What It Knows
In Brazil you download two pieces of software: one for filling with your earnings, assets, properties and deductions and other for transmitting the data. You have to fill the address form if you're doing your taxes for the first time, and whenever you change addresses. As for marriage, you can declare all the couple's properties in just one form, or spread the properties among the couple. The software will then calculate if it's better for you to use the "standard deduction" or the full declaration. All the process can be followed through the web and you can perform corrections either by web site or using the same software - which runs in all operating systems, linux included.
Image

Police Called Over 11-Year-Old's Science Project 687

Posted by samzenpus from the duck-and-cover dept.
garg0yle writes "Police in San Diego were called to investigate an 11-year-old's science project, consisting of 'a motion detector made out of an empty Gatorade bottle and some electronics,' after the vice-principal came to the conclusion that it was a bomb. Charges aren't being laid against the youth, but it's being recommended that he and his family 'get counseling.' Apparently, the student violated school policies — I'm assuming these are policies against having any kind of independent thought?"

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