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Censorship

IWF Backs Down On Wiki Censorship 226

jonbryce writes "The Internet Watch Foundation, guardians of the Great Firewall of Britain, have stopped censoring Wikipedia for hosting what they considered to be a child porn image. They had previously threatened to block Amazon for hosting the same image." Here is the IWF's statement, which credits the Streisand Effect for opening their eyes: "...in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. ... IWF's overriding objective is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."

Comment Re:Ever been to grad school? (Score 2, Insightful) 74

A million dollars? This is what happens when business people dabble in science. Artificial Intelligence grad students and professors have been studying these kinds of problems for decades.

I think that is the point - academia has been studying this for decades and has yet to produce meaningful results. I'm not saying that universities haven't contributed their fair share of technological advances through the years, but doing so in a practical and timely manner isn't exactly what they're known for. When business and/or money gets thrown into the mix, the pace of progress tends to rapidly accelerate.

X Prize Foundation
Millennium Problems
2008 Templeton Prize

Netflix could have saved a boatload of money by throwing some cash at a university with an established AI group and asking them to research the current state-of-the-art

According to the Netflix site there are currently 35558 contestants on 29326 teams from 170 different countries. They could have thrown any amount of money at any university and still not received the kind of effort they've seen to date. I'd say their million dollars is money well spent.

Feed Mileage maniacs hack Toyota's Prius for 116 mpg (engadget.com)

Filed under: Transportation

In a presumed attempt to prove questionable reports about the Prius' true fuel efficiency dead wrong, a Japanese group of mileage maniacs (or nenpimania) have assembled to push their hybrids to the brink and utilize a sly combination of hackery and zen-ish ways to elicit extreme miles per gallon figures. One such enthusiast burns his gas money on special tires, cardboard surround for the engine bay (saywha?), and blocks of foam rubber that occupy the grill, and somehow manages about 100 mpg by "hacking into the Toyota's computer" and carefully manipulating the accelerator with just his large toe. One upping even him, however, is a fellow mpg freak dubbed Teddy-Girl, who has reportedly become such a master of the "pulse and glide" method of driving that she can crank out 116 miles on a single gallon of fuel. Of course, sustaining such numbers on even mild inclines is entirely unlikely, and we're fairly sure you're hearing best case scenarios with all these gaudy numbers, but until we're all cruising in purely electric whips, this doesn't sound like a half bad approach to keep those trips to the pump at a minimum.

[Via The Raw Feed]

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