Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Government

Submission + - Database Error Costs Social Security Victims $500M 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Washington Posts reports that the Social Security Administration has agreed to pay more than $500 million in back benefits to more than 80,000 recipients whose benefits were unfairly denied after they were flagged by a federal computer program designed to catch serious criminals. At issue is a 1996 law, which contained language later nicknamed the "fleeing felon" provision, that said fugitives were ineligible to receive federal benefits. As part of its enforcement, the administration began searching computer databases to weed out people who were collecting benefits and had outstanding warrants. The searches captured dozens of criminals, including some wanted for homicide but they also ensnared countless elderly and disabled people accused of relatively minor offenses such as shoplifting or writing bad checks and in some cases, the victims simply shared a name and a birth date with an offender. The lead plaintiff in the class-action suit, Rosa Martinez, 52, of Redwood City, Calif., was cut off from her $870 monthly disability benefit check in January 2008 because the system had flagged an outstanding drug warrant in 1980 for a different Rosa Martinez from Miami. Officials said it is difficult to estimate how many social security recipients might be affected by the agreement but said the number is fewer than 1 percent nationally. "What's remarkable about this case is the sheer number of individuals who were unfairly denied benefits and the size of the financial settlement they will receive," said David H. Fry of Munger, Tolles & Olson, one of the pro bono attorneys who represented victims. "Hundreds of thousands of impoverished seniors and people with disabilities will once again receive their benefits, and countless others will avoid the same problem in the future.""
Transportation

Submission + - SAHIMO Hydrogen Vehicle Gets 568km per Liter (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
Mike
Mike writes: "Students from Turkey's Sakarya University have unveiled a remarkable attempt at creating Europe's most fuel efficient vehicle. Dubbed the Sahimo, their pint-sized hydrogen car is cable of eeking out an incredible 568 Kilometers on 1 Liter of Fuel (about 353 miles on a quarter gallon). An aerodynamic carbon fiber construction keeps the vehicle's weight down to less than 110 kilograms, and the designers hope to push the SAHIMO's performance even further to a full 1,000 kilometers/per 1 liter of fuel before participating in the Global Green Challenge in October."
Television

Submission + - The Simpsons: Worth More on Hulu than Fox (pcworld.com)

Submitted by N!NJA
N!NJA writes: A tectonic shift has taken place for the digital age: ad rates for popular shows like The Simpsons and CSI are higher online than they are on prime-time TV. If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers. Online viewers have to actively seek out the program they want to watch, so advertisers end up with a guaranteed audience for their commercial every time someone clicks play on Hulu or TV.com. Online programs also have an average of 37 seconds of commercials during an episode, while prime-time TV averages nine minutes of ads.
The Internet

Submission + - Domain-Name Wars: Rise Of The Cybersquatters (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "When FreeLegoPorn.com began publishing pornographic images created with Lego toys, Lego acted quickly. "The content available on the site consisted of animated mini-figures doing very explicit things. We were not amused," says Peter Kjaer, an attorney for Denmark-based Lego. Lego didn't go to court. Instead it filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization, which ruled in its favor. The domain registrar for FreeLegoPorn.com, GoDaddy.com, eventually shut down the site and transferred the domain name to Lego under ICANN rules. But it's not just Lego and Verizon that are suffering. Green energy is a hot topic, so cybersquatters have been targeting wind and solar energy start-ups. And malicious sites can create havoc with a brand's reputation. Cybersquatting activity rose by 18% last year, with a documented 440,584 cybersquatting sites in the fourth quarter of last year alone, according to MarkMonitor's annual Brandjacking Index report. And WIPO cited an 8% jump in dispute filings in 2008, to 2,329 complaints — a new record. Now, ICANN is preparing to open a potentially unlimited number of new top-level domains as early as the first quarter of 2010."
Google

Submission + - Extracting Meaning from Millions of Pages

Submitted by freakshowsam
freakshowsam writes: Technology Review has an article on a software engine that pulls together facts by combing through more than 500 million Web pages that has been developed by researchers at the University of Washington. The tool extracts information from billions of lines of text by analyzing basic relationships between words. "The significance of TextRunner is that it is scalable because it is unsupervised," says Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, which donated the database of Web pages that TextRunner analyzes. The prototype still has a fairly simple interface and is not meant for public search so much as to demonstrate the automated extraction of information from 500 million Web pages, says Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer scientist leading the project.

Slashdot Top Deals

...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor. - Fred Brooks, Jr.

Close