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Comment Re:At the same time... (Score 1) 529

by Zhiar (#46505175) Attached to: The Poor Neglected Gifted Child
It takes time for the investments to bear fruit. Scientific institutions can take generations to build.
Don't be too quick to judge the effectiveness of the money spent. Singapore, for example, is a relatively young nation that started its gifted education programme in 1984 and established A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) in 1991.

Submission + - NSA's Legal Win Introduces a Lot of Online Insecurity (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: The decision of a New York judge that the wholesale collection of cell-phone metadata by the National Security Agency is constitutional ties the score between pro- and anti-NSA forces at one victory apiece. The contradictory decisions use similar reasoning and criteria to come to opposite conclusions, leaving both individuals and corporations uncertain of whether their phone calls, online activity or even data stored in the cloud will ultimately be shielded by U.S. laws protecting property, privacy or search and seizure by law-enforcement agencies. On Dec. 27, Judge William H. Pauley threw out a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that sought to stop the NSA PRISM cell-phone metadata-collection program on the grounds it violated Fourth Amendment provisions protecting individual privacy and limits on search and seizure of personal property by the federal government. Pauley threw out the lawsuit largely due to his conclusion that Fourth Amendment protections do not apply to records held by third parties. That eliminates the criteria for most legal challenges, but throws into question the privacy of any data held by phone companies, cloud providers or external hosting companies – all of which could qualify as unprotected third parties.

Submission + - How Does One Compel an Uncooperative Website to Delete One's Account? 2

Submitted by trentfoley
trentfoley writes: I've been trying to clean up my digital life (insert joke about having a life) and have run in to a situation I fear is too common. Many social websites, nextdoor.com in particular, do not allow a user to delete the account they created. In the case of nextdoor.com, their privacy policy makes it clear that the user owns all of their data. If this is true, I should have the right to destroy that data. These lines of thought brought to mind the recent privacy defeat in Europe. Does the defeat of the EU's Right-to-be-Forgotten legislation bring a practical end to this debate?

Submission + - Sherlock Holmes finally in the public domain in the US 1

Submitted by ferrisoxide.com
ferrisoxide.com writes: As reported on the Australian ABC news website, film-makers in the US are finally free to work on Sherlock Holmes stories without paying a licencing free to the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle after a ruling by Judge Ruben Castillo.

A quirk of US copyright law kept 10 stories out of the public domain, on the basis that these stories where continuously developed. In his ruling Judge Castillo opined that only the "story elements" in the short stories published after 1923 were protected and that everything else in the Holmes canon was "free for public use" — including the characters of Holmes and Watson.

Holmes scholar Leslie Klinger, who challenged the estate, celebrated the ruling.

"Sherlock Holmes belongs to the world," Mr Klinger said in a statement posted on his Free Sherlock website.

IANAL, but the ruling of Judge Castillo that "adopting Conan Doyle's position would be to extend impermissibly the copyright of certain character elements of Holmes and Watson beyond their statutory period," is surely going to have implications across US copyright law. Mark Twain must be twisting and writhing in his grave.
Technology

Gartner Says 3D Printers Will Cost Less Than $2,000 By 2016 170

Posted by samzenpus from the get-you-one dept.
colinneagle writes "Widespread adoption of 3D printing technology may not be that far away, according to a Gartner report predicting that enterprise-class 3D printers will be available for less than $2,000 by 2016. 3D printers are already in use among many businesses, from manufacturing to pharmaceuticals to consumers goods, and have generated a diverse set of use cases. As a result, the capabilities of the technology have evolved to meet customer needs, and will continue to develop to target those in additional markets, Gartner says."
Python

Submission + - Python trademark at risk in Europe

Submitted by mvar
mvar writes: It seems that a company in the UK is trying to trademark the "Python" term for all-things-computing and the PSF (Python Software Foundation) is asking for help. According to the PSF, they contacted the company in order to settle the matter but "They blew us off and responded by filing the community trademark application claiming the exclusive right to use "Python" for software, servers, and web services — everywhere in Europe. ". They now seek help from the community in several ways: By sending a letter to the EU council if you happen to work on a company that uses the Python programming language, by providing EU-published material regarding the Python language (articles etc) and/or financially supporting the PSF in the upcoming legal battle.
Idle

Submission + - Trees to call for help if illegally felled (mongabay.com)

Submitted by Damien1972
Damien1972 writes: The Brazilian government has begun fixing trees in the Amazon rainforest with a wireless device, known as Invisible Tracck, which will allow trees to contact authorities once they are felled and moved. Here's how it works: Brazilian authorities fix the Invisible Tracck onto a tree. An illegal logger cuts down the tree and puts it onto a truck for removal, unaware that they are carrying a tracking device. Once Invisible Tracck comes within 20 miles (32 kilometers) of a cellular network it will 'wake up' and alert authorities.
China

Submission + - Unemployed Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks to Factory Jobs (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: While people and politicians are pitching for more educations and reviving manufacturing in this country, jobs go begging in factories while many college educated young workers, which now number 11 times more than in 1989, are unemployed or underemployed in China. A national survey of urban residents, released this winter by a Chinese university, showed that among people in their early 20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an elementary school education. Yet, it is not about the pay. Many factories are desperate for workers, despite offering double-digit annual pay increases and improved benefits, while an office job would initially pay as little as a third of factory wages. The glut of college graduates is eroding wages even for those with more marketable majors, like computer science. Vocational schools and training programs are unpopular because they suffer from a low statue of for people from unsuccessful, poor, or peasant backgrounds.“The more educated people are, the less they want to work in a factory,” said an unemployed graduate. If we do succeed bringing back factory jobs, are their enough people want them?
Government

Submission + - GAO Finds US Military's Critical Technologies List Outdated, Useless (securityledger.com)

Submitted by
chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: "The U.S. Department of Defense has stopped updating its main reference list of vital defense technologies that are banned from export, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), The Security Ledger reports.

The Militarily Critical Technologies List (MCTL) is used to identify technologies that are critical to national defense and that require extra protection — including bans on exports and the application of anti-tamper technology.
GAO warned six years ago that the Departments of State and Commerce, which are supposed to use the list, found it too broad and outdated to be of much use. The latest report (GAO 13-157) finds that the situation has worsened: budget cuts forced the DOD to largely stop updating and grooming the list in 2011. Sections on emerging technologies are outdated, while other sections haven't been updated since 1999. Without the list to rely on, the DOD has turned to a hodgepodge of other lists, while officials in the Departments of State and Commerce who are responsible for making decisions about whether to allow a particular technology to be exported have turned to ad-hoc networks of subject experts. Other agencies are looking into developing their own MCTL equivalents, potentially wasting government resources duplicating work that has already been done, GAO found."

Submission + - Alfred Russel Wallace: what I really thought about Darwin (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Calopteryx
Calopteryx writes: The correspondence of Alfred Russel Wallace has gone online for the first time (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/scientific-resources/collections/library-collections/wallace-letters-online/index.html). New Scientist has opened a wormhole between the 21st and 19th centuries and has "interviewed" the great man
Science

Submission + - Dung Beetles Navigate by the Milky Way (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A day in the life of a male dung beetle goes something like this: Fly to a heap of dung, sculpt a clump of it into a large ball, then roll the ball away from the pile as fast as possible. However, it turns out that the beetles, who work at night, need some sort of compass to prevent them from rolling around in circles. New research suggests that the insects use starlight to guide their way. Birds, seals, and humans also use starlight to navigate, but this is the first time it's been shown in an insect.
Crime

Submission + - Got Questions for MIT's Aaron Swartz Review?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Explaining that it believes 'the most important questions are the ones that will come from the MIT community,' MIT announced that it won't be accepting questions from outsiders for its President-ordered 'review' of the events that preceded the suicide of Aaron Swartz. But if you feel the 25 questions asked thus far don't cover all the bases, how about posting additional ones in the comments where MIT'ers can see them and perhaps repost to the MIT site some that they feel deserve answers? Do it soon — MIT President Rafael Reif will be returning any day now from Davos, where he sat on a panel with Bill Gates (video), who coincidentally once found himself in hot water over unauthorized computer access. 'They weren't sure how mad they should be about it,' Gates explained in a 2010 interview, 'because we hadn't really caused any damage, but it wasn't a good thing. Computer hacking was literally just being invented at the time, and so fortunately we got off with a bit of a warning.'
Android

Submission + - Samsung Working On Tizen Phone? (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Samsung, which became a market leader thanks to Android, is reportedly working on a smartphone powered by Linux-based Tizen operating system.The company is working with NTT Docomo to create a Tizen powered smartphone. "Samsung already has its Bada operating system which it uses in some devices. Samsung was expected to merge Bada efforts with Tizen but there has been no attempt in that regards. How Samsung, the Android market leader, positions this phone and creates an app ecosystem around it will be interesting to watch.
Mars

Submission + - Stanford team developing spiky robot "hedgehogs" to explore Phobos (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Robot hedgehogs on the moons of Mars may sound like the title of a B-grade sci-fi movie, but that is what Stanford University is working on. Marco Pavone, an assistant professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and his team are developing spherical robots called “hedgehogs” that are about half a meter (1.6 ft) wide and covered in spikes to better cope with rolling and hopping across the surface of the Martian moon Phobos with its very low gravity.

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