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Submission + - NSA Chief Keith Alexander Takes His PRISM Pitch to YouTube (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: There’s definitely something goofy about the video’s wan attempt at looking/sounding like a NOVA episode (the music, why?), but even moreso, Keith Alexander, director of the NSA and commander of US Cyber Command, comes off as a weird dude and, you know, a literal tool. Alexander, who defended the agency at Black Hat this summer and recently announced his retirement next year, takes care to emphasize the agency's privacy compliance precautions and oversight. "We have not had any willful or knowing violations in those programs," he says referring to sections 215 and 702 of the Patriot Act, which relate to the telephone metadata and PRISM programs respectively. "There have been [violations] in other programs, but not in those two."

Submission + - ATI takes crown away from Nvidia for almost half the price as fastest GPU (maximumpc.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: AMD may have trouble in their CPU department with Intel having superior fabrication plants. However, in the graphics market with GPU chips AMD is on fire! AMD earned a very rare Elite reward from Tomshardware as the fastest GPU available with its fastest r9 for as little as $550 each. NVidia has its top end GPU cards going for $1,000 as it had little competition to worry about. Maximum PC also included some benchmarks and crowned ATI as the fastest and best value card available. AMD/ATI also has introduced MANTLE Api for lower level access than DirectX which is cross platform. This may turn into a very important API as AMD/ATI have their GPUs in the next generation Sony and Xbox consoles as well with a large marketshare for game developers to target

Submission + - NSA Declares War on President (yahoo.com)

Submitted by pupsocket
pupsocket writes: U. S. citizens can stop pretending that their secret agencies exist to provide deniability to the President. Yesterday the German newspaper of record, Frankfurter Allgemeine, reported that the President told German Chancellor Merkel that he would have stopped the tap on her phone had he known about it. Today, another German paper, Bild am Sonntag, quoted U. S. Intelligence sources that the President had been briefed in 2010. This violation of secrecy should end the myth that the White House tells the secret agencies what they can and cannot do. Sounds like blackmail, the endgame.

Submission + - NASAs Curiosity Confirms Origins of Martian Meteorites (spaceindustrynews.com)

Submitted by littlesparkvt
littlesparkvt writes: Earth’s most eminent emissary to Mars has just proven that those rare Martian visitors that sometimes drop in on Earth — a.k.a. Martian meteorites — really are from the Red Planet. A key new measurement of Mars’ atmosphere by NASA’s Curiosity rover provides the most definitive evidence yet of the origins of Mars meteorites while at the same time providing a way to rule out Martian origins of other meteorites.

Submission + - Irish government close Apple's tax loophole (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: Ireland and particularly its tax system came under some extreme scrutiny earlier this year when it was revealed that Apple funnelled billions of dollars of revenue though three subsidiaries based on the island. Thanks to a loophole none of these subsidiaries were tax-resident in Ireland, meaning they didn't even have to pay Ireland's relatively low 12.5% corporation tax rate. Worryingly for Apple, Ireland's finance minister has just shut this loophole.

Submission + - How to Develop Unmaintainable Software

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Greg Jorgensen specializes in debugging, fixing, maintaining, and extending legacy software systems. His typical client has a web site or internal application that works, more or less, but the original developer isn’t available. Greg lists some things you can do in your own software projects to keep him in business. In summary, the list goes as follows. Customize your development environment a lot, don’t make it easy for the next programmer to start working on the code. Create an elaborate build and deployment environment and remember to leave out the documentation. Don’t bother with a testing/staging server but instead have secret logins and backdoor URLs to test new features, and mix test data with real data in your database. Don’t bother with a well-understood framework, write everything from scratch instead. Add dependencies to specific versions of libraries and resources, but don't protect or document those dependencies. For the icing of the cake, use the coolest mix of cutting-edge programming languages.

Submission + - China's State Press Calls for 'Building a de-Americanized World'

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Businessweek reports that as nations around the world fret over the US budget impasse according to a not-so-subtle commentary published by China’s official Xinhua News Agency "it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world". Key among its proposals: the creation of a new international reserve currency to replace the present reliance on US dollars, a necessary step to prevent American bumbling from further afflicting the world. “The cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising the debt ceiling has again left many nations’ tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonized,” says Xinhua. “The world is still crawling its way out of an economic disaster thanks to the voracious Wall Street elites." The commentary calls for a greater role for developing-market economies in both the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and adds that “the authority of the United Nations in handling global hot-spot issues has to be recognized. That means no one has the right to wage any form of military action against others without a UN mandate." The commentary concludes that "the purpose of promoting these changes is not to completely toss the United States aside, which is also impossible. Rather, it is to encourage Washington to play a much more constructive role in addressing global affairs."

Comment Cultural Participation (Score 1) 158

by h4nk (#45110257) Attached to: Read Better Books To Be a Better Person
Literature, as a form of art, really is about the culture from which it originates from and that culture which is the subject. Any personal "enrichment" by a reader, regardless of the material, is based on their subjective experience. Whether the take-away experience positively or negatively affects the reader... I can't see how any valid generalization can be made beyond, "it may or may not happen, and to the degree and quality, that is indeterminate." The only thing we can really verifiably say is that the reader participated in the cultural narrative.

Submission + - Read better books to be a better person (wordpress.com) 1

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: Researchers from the New School for Social Research in New York have demonstrated that if you read quality literary fiction you become a better person, in the sense that you are more likely to emphasise with others. Presumably we can all think of books that have changed the way we feel about the world — so this is, in a sense, a scientific confirmation of something fairly intuitive.

Submission + - Hillary Clinton: "We Need To Talk Sensibly About Spying" (theguardian.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The Guardian reports: Hillary Clinton has called for a "sensible adult conversation", to be held in a transparent way, about the boundaries of state surveillance highlighted by the leaking of secret NSA files by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. In a boost to Nick Clegg, the British deputy prime minister, who is planning to start conversations within government about the oversight of Britain's intelligence agencies, the former US secretary of state said it would be wrong to shut down a debate. Clinton, who is seen as a frontrunner for the 2016 US presidential election, said at Chatham House in London: "This is a very important question. On the intelligence issue, we are democracies thank goodness, both the US and the UK. We need to have a sensible adult conversation about what is necessary to be done, and how to do it, in a way that is as transparent as it can be, with as much oversight and citizens' understanding as there can be."

Submission + - Patriot Act Author Introduces Bill to Limit Use of Patriot Act (dailydot.com)

Submitted by wjcofkc
wjcofkc writes: In an ironic but welcome twist, author of the Patriot Act, Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), is introducing the USA FREEDOM Act, a bill specifically aimed at countering the portions of the Patriot Act that were interpreted to let the NSA collect telephone metadata in bulk. The congressman has been a vocal opponent of the NSA's interpretation and misuse of the Patriot Act since Edward Snowden first leaked evidence of the program in June. On Wednesday, he wrote to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that the “collection of a wide array of data on innocent Americans has led to serious questions about how government will use—or misuse—such information.”

Submission + - Gene Variant Can Cause Nattering Nabobs Of Negativity (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Researchers from the University of British Columbia, Cornell University and Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health report in the journal Psychological Science that a gene variant can cause individuals to perceive the negative side of every situation. UBC Prof. Rebecca Todd said the ADRA2b deletion variant influences not only emotional memory, which was previously known, but also amplifies a person's real-time perception of events, for better or for worse. "Some individuals are predisposed to see the world more darkly than others," Todd said. "What we found is that a previously known genetic variation causes some individuals to perceive the world more vividly than others and, particularly, negative aspects of the world."

Submission + - EU court holds news website liable for readers' comments (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: Seven top European Union judges have ruled that a leading Internet news website is legally responsible for offensive views posted by readers in the site's comments section. The European Court of Human Rights found that Estonian courts were within their rights to fine Delfi, one of the country's largest news websites, for comments made anonymously about a news article, according to a judgment.

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