NYPD To Identify 'Deranged' Gunmen Through Internet Chatter 292

Posted by timothy on Saturday December 22, 2012 @11:17AM from the surveillance-is-good-for-your-health dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Michael Wilson writes in the NY Times that top intelligence officials in the New York Police Department are looking for ways to target 'apolitical or deranged killers before they become active shooters' using techniques similar to those being used to spot terrorists' chatter online. The techniques would include 'cyber-searches of language that mass-casualty shooters have used in e-mails and Internet postings,' says Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. 'The goal would be to identify the shooter in cyberspace, engage him there and intervene, possibly using an undercover to get close, and take him into custody or otherwise disrupt his plans.' There are also plans to send officers to Newtown and to scenes of other mass shootings to collect information says the department's chief spokesman Paul. J. Browne adding that potential tactics include creating an algorithm that would search online 'for terms used by active shooters in the past that may be an indicator of future intentions.' The NYPD's counter-terrorism division released a report last year, 'Active Shooter (PDF),' after studying 202 mass shooting incidents. 'So, we think this is another logical step,' says Kelly."

Comment Re:Meh... (Score 1) 404

by d0hboy on Wednesday February 22, 2012 @02:39PM (#39127895) Attached to: Adobe Makes Flash on GNU/Linux Chrome-Only

Oracle hasn't replaced that site yet -- the primary site is still Flash and you've now reminded me why this will be a big headache.

Seconded. Oracle's central support portal still holds on to that flash-based dashboard. By my estimation, they were appeared to have this in development at a time when flash had the highest penetration, but by the time they finally released it (2009), the world had moved on to AJAX-based interfaces. If they had just held on a bit longer in their dev-cycle, they may have caught that wave and avoided flash altogether.

Notably, a good percentage of the Oracle Support population are linux-oriented, so maybe this is a good opportunity for Oracle (and other *nix-centric organizations) to speed up the development of their next-gen web portal.

Comment Re:BattleTech (Score 3, Interesting) 122

by d0hboy on Friday December 16, 2011 @02:35PM (#38400954) Attached to: The Future of Battle Tech

Anyone else read the title and get excited that it was about the future of "BattleTech" the FASA war/board game?

I also did a double-take. On a site featuring News for Nerds, the editors had to have guessed that the title as-it-stood would have caused a bit of confusion. The closest thing I found to the future of BattleTech(tm) in a quick spot-check of the news was the development of the Mechwarrior Online Free to Play MMO'ish game.

Hotspot Found On Moon's Far Side 96

Posted by Soulskill on Monday July 25, 2011 @06:48PM from the thermal-exhaust-port dept.

derGoldstein tips this news from Discovery.com: "Scientists have found evidence of volcanoes on the far side of the moon. The new discovery, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience (abstract) is a rare example of volcanism on the lunar surface not associated with asteroid, meteor or comet impact events. ... They focused on an area containing numerous domes, some more than six kilometers high. The domes featured steeply sloping sides which Jolliff and colleagues interpret as, 'volcanic in origin and formed from viscous lava.'"

Submission + - Full bladder improves decision making (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by

anymouse

on Tuesday March 01, 2011 @03:32PM

anymouse writes: "What should you do when you really, REALLY have to "go"? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science."

Comment MyGloves (Score 1) 140

by d0hboy on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @06:16PM (#34117752) Attached to: Agloves Allow For Touchscreen Use On Cold Days

Interesting stuff. From the article's image, the AGloves seem pretty utilitarian. There's also a company MyGloves* that produces gloves with similar functionality .. the difference is that they have conductivity elements on only the main digits of your hand (index, thumb) and they're stylized with different prints / marks / fabric, it seems. Just tossing that out for the masses to chew on..

Halo Elite Cosplay Puts Others To Shame 115

Posted by samzenpus on Friday July 02, 2010 @03:42PM from the using-your-time-wisely dept.

AndrewGOO9 writes "Pete Mander, a special effects artist from Ontario, Canada seems like he might have either had way too much time on his hands or just really enjoys Halo. Either way, this is one of those costumes that makes all of the cosplayers at a con feel like their best efforts just weren't quite up to par."

Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video 266

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 02, 2010 @12:27PM from the new-perspective-on-an-old-tragedy dept.

longacre writes "An amateur video of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion has been made public for the first time. The Florida man who filmed it from his front yard on his new Betamax camcorder turned the tape over to an educational organization a week before he died this past December. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the video into the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe. Despite being shot from about 70 miles from Cape Canaveral, the shuttle and the explosion can be seen quite clearly. It is unclear why he never shared the footage with NASA or the media. NASA officials say they were not aware of the video, but are interested in examining it now that it has been made available."

The Woman Who Established Fair Use 226

Posted by kdawson on Sunday April 26, 2009 @08:42PM from the one-of-a-kind dept.

The Narrative Fallacy writes "The Washington Post has an interesting profile on Barbara A. Ringer, who joined the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress in 1949 and spent 21 years drafting the legislation and lobbying Congress before the Copyright Act of 1976 was finally passed. Ringer wrote most of the bill herself. 'Barbara had personal and political skills that could meld together the contentious factions that threatened to tear apart every compromise in the 20 year road to passage of the 1976 Act,' wrote copyright lawyer William Patry. The act codified the fair use defense to copyright infringement. For the first time, scholars and reviewers could quote briefly from copyrighted works without having to pay fees. With the 1976 act that Ringer conceived, an author owned the copyright for his or her lifetime plus 50 years. Previously under the old 1909 law, an author owned the copyright for 28 years from the date of publication and unless the copyright was renewed, the work entered the public domain, and the author lost any right to royalties. Ringer received the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honor for a federal worker. Ringer remained active in copyright law for years, attending international conferences and filing briefs with the Supreme Court before her death earlier this year at age 83. 'Her contributions were monumental,' said Marybeth Peters, the Library of Congress's current register of copyrights. 'She blazed trails. She was a heroine.'"

German Doctor Cures an HIV Patient With a Bone Marrow Transplant 639

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday November 09, 2008 @12:50PM from the not-an-easy-one-though dept.

reporter writes "HIV is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Until now, HIV has no cure and has led to the deaths of over 25 million people. However, a possible cure has appeared. Dr. Gero Hutter, a brilliant physician in Germany, replaced the bone marrow of an HIV patient with the bone marrow of a donor who has natural immunity to HIV. The new bone marrow in the patient then produced immune-system cells that are immune to HIV. Being unable to hijack any immune cell, the HIV has simply disappeared. The patient has been free of HIV for about 2 years. Some physicians at UCLA have developed a similar therapy and plan to commercialize it."

Comment Re:Student elections? (Score 1) 226

by d0hboy on Tuesday May 06, 2008 @06:54PM (#23318462) Attached to: Stupid Hacker Tricks - The Folly of Youth

I felt that neomunk's response (above) is one of the most mature I've read on slashdot in awhile. Most other responses to an argument end up as personal attacks, regardless of whether it was reasonable or not.

Comment Hahahahahaaaaaa. (Score 1) 8

by jb.hl.com on Monday September 03, 2007 @08:39AM (#20450793) Attached to: Modbomb Shows Difficulty of Controling Online Opinion.

The successful modbombing of this account shows both the strength and futility of astroturfing. The troll community has dedicated dozens of accounts and several people's worth of full time effort to harass, smear and downmod me.

The troll community. Yes. Right. Whatever you say, twitter.

It's amazing how one person can so easily tie up the resources of one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful companies.

OK, twitter, let's play this one for laughs: what evidence do you have that any negative reaction to your posts is orchestrated by Microsoft, and is not simply a response to you talking unfounded bullshit about things you have absolutely no usable knowledge of? Do you have any evidence of that? You don't, do you? Because you're pulling it out of your ass, isn't that right?

Bruce Perens is one of the leading lights in not only the Debian developer community, but the F/OSS community as a whole. He posts on Slashdot about free software, a field he is closely associated with, and somehow manages to escape what you so charmingly call "M$ astroturfing". Why is this so? Maybe it's because he can present opinions rationally without resorting to namecalling, and in such a way that they are at least a worthwhile contribution to debates whether you agree with them or not.

You do none of these things. You bluster in, regardless of the debate, start with "M$ sucks" and work backwards from there to make the rest of your comment. Put simply, you talk utter bollocks half the time, about things you have no idea about. And then, the icing on the paranoia cake, you not only believe but regularly claim that anyone who disagrees with this bizarre method of posting is somehow being bribed by Microsoft to harass you.

Distilled down: if someone who has made numerous material contributions to free software and is one of its most valuable figures isn't the target of an "M$" "campaign", why on earth would someone who has little to no influence on anything be the subject of their attentions? Can you give a coherent reason for that? I think not.

Do what you're doing now. Quit while you're ahead. You've preached to the choir, and the choir told you to fuck off. Do so.

Even if they could discover all of my accounts by asking my ISP, I could always create new ones and continue saying what I think.

Um... yeah. Asking your ISP. Right.

It's obvious someone does not like the things I think and the way I express myself, but they are powerless to do anything about it. People who offer to "clean" the web are selling snake oil.

There's very little wrong with what you think, really, however it's the way you express yourself that people don't like. Calm down, quit with the "M$ Windoze" shit and people might take you a little more seriously.

The real answer is to quit doing things that are wrong, that make people angry and need to be covered up with massive lie campaigns

Yeah, you should give that a go.

Valve Says Choice to Make DX10 Vista-Only Hurt PC Gaming 463

Posted by Zonk on Monday August 27, 2007 @04:09PM from the they're-in-a-place-to-know dept.

Erris writes "Valve's President Gabe Newell is calling Microsoft's choice to make DirectX 10 Vista-only a 'terrible mistake' that has harmed gaming. His company's latest hardware study shows the strategy has not moved gamers onto Vista. The result is that almost no one is using the newest version of DirectX, and companies are shying away from creating new input devices that support it. Nine months after release, after Christmas, after graduation, and with school mostly back in session, still only 8% of gamers are using it." Update: 08/27 21:09 GMT by Z : An AC points out that these numbers may be framed poorly given uptake numbers for XP's release.

Run Mac OS X Apps On Linux? 497

Posted by kdawson on Monday July 30, 2007 @08:36AM from the must-be-a-layer-somewhere dept.

I have the urge to commit my 24" Core 2 Duo iMac to a single Linux operating system, thus giving up the goodness of my beloved Mac OS X. I am not a stranger to Linux, but I am a stranger to running Mac apps on Linux. On my PowerPC I can use SheepShaver to run Classic apps. The Mac-on-Linux project can run OS X apps, but it requires a PowerPC, not an x86. Virtualizing and emulating are inefficient, especially given the wonderful results the WINE project has had in getting Windows apps to run on Linux. What I would like is an equivalent: a software compatibility layer that will allow Linux to run Mac OS X apps at native performance. I believe there is some additional complexity in accomplishing this. Mac OS X apps aren't just Mac OS X apps. They are Carbon. They are Cocoa. They are universal binaries. They are PPC code with Altivec. Does such a project exist yet? If not, why not?

Death Threats In the Blogosphere 487

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @01:28PM from the way-over-the-line dept.

Several readers have written in about the death threats and threats of sexual harm that have been directed at tech blogger Kathy Sierra. She is the author of a number of books about Java and a popular speaker at conferences. She has now stopped blogging and cancelled her appearance at eTech. She names the names of four prominent bloggers who are backers of two sites on which the threats were posted. Others in the blogosphere like Robert Scoble and Tim Bray have posted publicly in support of Sierra. Scoble in particular emphasizes the streak of misogyny that is still all too evident in the tech world. The Washington Post is also grappling with the issue of vile comment posts that flirt with illegality. One commenter on Bray's post summed it up: "The Internet used to be a university. Then it became a shopping mall. But now, it's a war zone."

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