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Why is this any different than the "Billions of free money" IBM gets from government subsidies?

You raise good points but you discount the fact that police forces are only a necessary evil of a modern society. Police are in theory there to "protect citizens" - but often times in practice the goal of protecting citizens puts them at odds against citizen's rights.

In a perfect "police" world the police would know everything about you and be able to monitor everything that you do. Then they could perfectly catch criminal acts. Is this an idyllic situation? No - because we do not live in a perfect world and because police are not perfect (especially considering that the police actively discriminate against intelligence).

There is a reason why the constitution outlines a good deal of protections against the police. Police left unfettered will continue to grow in influence and power and intrude further into citizen's lives. It is a fine balance between accounting for the marginal increase in personal liberties as a result of police stopping the intrusion of liberties of an individual committing a crime and the marginal loss of personal liberties from the police having the tools to stop the aforementioned crime.

In regards to the "majority of people" wanting drugs to be illegal - when you create a positive feedback loop of turning drug users into criminals it makes it relatively difficult to break the cycle. The majority of people in this country are against gay marriage as well: does this mean that gay marriage should be illegal? There is a reason that the United States is a Republic and not a pure democracy. In the words of Alexander Hamilton - the masses are asses. Irrational fears often overcome rational deduction. All you have to do is look at segregation, Japanese internment camps, and the Salem Witch Trials to realize that majority rule is not always the right way to go about deciding things in emotionally charged and sensitive matters.

"Smart" is not a desired quality in police officers.

Here's some hot news for the rest of the world.

"Britons are among the ugliest people in the world, according to a controversial website that only allows 'beautiful' people to join.

Fewer than one in eight British men and just three in 20 women who have applied to BeautifulPeople.com have been accepted, reports the Daily Telegraph."

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3557668.html?menu=

Speaking as someone who spent a large number of years in the UK that's pretty funny. That will teach the ba***rds to ridicule American plugs not long ago.

Here's some hot news for the rest of the world.

"Britons are among the ugliest people in the world, according to a controversial website that only allows 'beautiful' people to join.

Fewer than one in eight British men and just three in 20 women who have applied to BeautifulPeople.com have been accepted, reports the Daily Telegraph."

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3557668.html?menu=

Reminds me of a bit from one of my favorite movies "You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse; grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God... and where can you go from there?"

You mix the combination of giant egos with Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and you end up with some seriously large douches. But the problem with laws like this is they ALWAYS get abused. Look at the 6 year old who was suspended and looking at being sent to a school for juvenile offenders for bring his cub scout multi-tool to school to eat lunch with. Laws like this will be badly abused, and the last thing we need is one of the last bastions of truly free speech turning into a place where you can't speak your mind for fear of getting arrested or sued. I for one would rather have free speech than some bureaucrat deciding whether or not something I said on a forum could take away my freedom, wouldn't you?

I get it! Cops are all dumb, lazy, and technically illiterate!

They won't hire you if you're too smart.

No I'm not trolling I'm serious:
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_56314.html
http://northernmuckraker.blogspot.com/2008/08/too-smart-to-be-cop.html
http://irradiatedcat.blogspot.com/2008/06/too-smart-to-be-cop.html
http://www.thepostroad.com/news/2000/20000912.new.london.pd.robert.jordan.html

...don't have medical drills for that very purpose?

...to Ananova, about this very story, leads to the related story there (funny how that works, huh?) that states specifically "The small country hospital was not equipped with neurological drills, so Dr Carson obtained a household De Walt drill, used for boring holes in wood, from a hospital maintenance room."

So, no, it seems this particular small country hospital, not being equipped for neurosurgery, did not have a neurological drill on hand. Not every hospital and clinic in the world -- even in the modern countries -- performs neurosurgery on a regular basis. This boy would have been airlifted to somewhere that did if there had been time. He was airlifted after he stabilized some.

"otherwise it had not voted twice for the idiot bastard son"

Once. Anyway, there are actually more neurons in your gut than there are in your brain, it's true, look it up. I know many of you will say you did look it up and it's not true, well that's because you looked it up in a book. Next time try looking it up in your gut.

(although in all seriousness, second brain disovererd in stomach" has already happened... not sure if it's enough to measure in the same way to use for biometrics, eg, different people having recognisably different stomach thought patterns, so there goes my attempt at bringing my post on topic!)

They decided to open a Porn Appreciation Course, citied in TFA http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3158640.html?menu=news.quirkies

They should go after the evil predators responsible for these heinous crimes before they go after the cartoon watchers.

I mean, come ON, what's up with all this cognitive dissonance shit going on the U.S.?! Can any lawmaker convict anybody with a straight face given the elite's tacit approval of so-called "pedophilia"?! We can do better than that, we're not some repressive Islamic state or 14th-century Catholic fifedom.

People keep doing building these "robot heads with emotional features", as if it would somehow get closer to AI. Rod Brooks spent a lot of time going down this road; remember Cyc? There have been many animated talking heads; remember Ananova? (That used to work; then they broke it and put up that "under development" page, which has been up for, what, five years now?)

And who could forget Microsoft Barney for Windows? Microsoft hasn't. I went to RoboDevelopment last Tuesday, and there was a new animated furry character in the Microsoft Robotics booth, a large teddy bear. Microsoft never gives up. At least the new version isn't purple.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with doing this, but it's something that should be done by Disney and Hollywood as entertainment, not by universities as "research".

No, and I'm delighted to find out that it was a normal Swedish newspaper.

Scandinavia just has some sense of humor which is great. Aftenposten had some pretty funny articles in the past too.

Here is a second hand example:

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1706617.html?menu=

and another

http://www.aftenposten.no/english/business/article709784.ece

And the seeding isn't over yet. Take a look at this article:
Man 'targeted by aliens'

Looks like invasion of the body snatchers to me...

There are not too many occupations where it's really good to be dumb

On the same topic, I remember hearing about a story where an applicant to a police department was rejected because he was too intelligent:

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_56314.html

I wonder how common this practice is? It might explain the currently sorry state of law enforcement.

Inventor turns dead cats into diesel

If a fully grown cat "produces" 2.5 L of diesel, imagine a fully grown human...

The only way to really kill the RIAA is to break through its corporate veil and nail its members.

...with a wooden stake. Don't forget the wooden stake. That's the most important part, because they'll just rise from the grave if you don't. Although maybe exposure in full sunshine will do them in too, I never remember which remedy works best on which kind of monster.

One of the reasons I've resisted wireless for so long (apart from the fact that by the time I've even unwrapped my first wireless router, there will be a whole new standard out running at ten times the speed and the kit will be twenty pounds cheaper) is that you don't know what's on the end of it. A cable can be followed. RF can't. If someone wants to play silly buggers with a wired network, they've got to get physical access to your cables. But no wires means no traceability!

With a bit of readily available software, such as Linux and hostap, you can turn a laptop (or SFF mobo plus suitable battery; a 12V/8AH lead-acid is about the right size for a good day's phun while you're away doing other things) into a great wireless hacking tool (that looks just like a real live wireless router, not an ad-hoc connection). You can snarf logins, passwords and credit card details on their way to the real website without even having to stop with a fake error message. This works even if they're using SSL; you just have to accept incoming SSL requests, let them get decrypted on your machine, and pass them on to the real internet via SSL (classic MITM hack; Bob thinks you're Alice and Alice thinks you're Bob). Your certificate probably won't be recognised by their browser; but if you put in the name of the place where you're working your scam, they might just think it's perfectly normal because they're going through that place's gateway and accept it anyway. Other people's ignorance can be your best friend.

One last word: Don't rush it. Leave awhile between snarfing the data and making use of it. That way, they're less likely to suspect you. If someone connected through a "free wi-fi" network one morning and got stuff bought on their card the same afternoon, they might remember the "free wi-fi" when trying to think what they'd done. If a couple of weeks elapse before you make your hit, it's less likely to come back on you. Oh, and getting stuff delivered to your own address is even stupider than answering the telephone in a house you're burgling!

Isn't this the basically the same thing as Ananova? And didn't that come out, like, 6 years ago? I am skeptical. News anchors, don't start looking for a new job just yet.

this would certainly get ME to buy as diesel car as I'm allergic to cats !

252 comments - and nobody has mentioned the iPood?

Hey, they even have albinos! :)

What do you expect in a country where we discriminate against applicants to the police force because they are too intelligent?

Obligatory photo.

Susumu Tachi from the University of Tokyo has a much better "invisibility cloak" -- and there ARE pictures of this one in action. It is actually called Optical Camouflage as an image is projected onto the target.

I'm surprised they didn't mention the Musical Breast Implants. These things should be ... interesting, to say the least if they ever come out on hte market.

I seem to recall an instance where a man was turned away because he scored too high on the entrance test... http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_56314.html
Call me cynical, but I get the impression that our system here in the US is corrupt enough that electing a politician who'd correct the problem is nigh impossible, and the law enforcement community has adopted a "brotherly" attitude of cops vs. everyone else. From what I've been told (from people who've actually gone through the programs), a degree in Criminal Justice is equivalent to majoring in Art (Their words, not mine! No offense to the art majors out there...), and the police academy is less of a "pass / fail" system than a "here's your training, now go do it" mentality.

Unless you don't return your books...Then they'll keep it for fifty years. http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1718538.html? menu=

But seriously, as we look to have more personal information available to us from the net, we have to compromise our privacy some. I applaud Google for deleting the material quickly; I would like a more detailed accounting of the storage process though.

At the end of the day, if people are worried about this, don't enable the data sharing. Google has it set to off by default.

Mac Donalds and Microsoft. Oh God. Such a terrible analogy and modded +4 informative. Also, you are wrong about eating at Mac Donalds. Know the facts.

"I get the shuffle and then I shuffle the shuffle," he told confused reporters.

Biodiesel is great, until you run out of cats.

The blood test is used to backup a failed breath test.
It happens back at the station and has been known to prove the breathtest was incorrect (suck a fishermans friend then drive a bit silly and you will find out for yourself).

See here for more info.

There are more recent precedents, in fact. In the UK, a letter threatening an ASBO (Anti Social Behaviour Order) was sent regarding Dominic Brown's abuse of his motor scooter. Which came as a surprise to his mother, because he wasn't due to be born until September.

The full story.

Just use Dead Cat Deisel. Each dead cat makes 2.5 Litres of fuel! That should power your player for ages.

Can it run on dead cats?

Hey man, don't be hasslin' the Hoff

I guess as soon as you can watch Star Wars with this stuff, the DRM will get cracked in a few days.

Pure software methods always get cracked. Even hardware, as Bruce Schneier mentions, gets cracked, routinely. It really is just a question of how much time, and how much resources it takes to break it. The problem with digital stuff is that once you do it, you've cracked it for everyone.

The town of "Fucking" (that really is the name) in Austria had a problem with people stealing the signs. They recently moved to a new system, where the signs are really hard to steal. But as the mayor said -- "it would take all night to steal". Not, "you can't steal it" -- but it will take so long that someone will/may come along and arrest you before you make off with it.

With DRM, the guy gets to take the "sign" home for a few weeks at a time, until he can manage to crack it -- and once he does, you don't have any clue that he's done it.

What they ended up with was something that sort of fakes human interaction. That's been done before. Remember Ananova? Chatterbots? My Real Baby, from Hasbro? COG is basically similar, but with a bigger budget.

The COG web site apparently hasn't been updated since 2000. Like the Leg Lab, it seems to have reached the limits of the ideas used.

This is sad, because there were some good ideas there. But they weren't anywhere near enough to even consider going to human-level AI in one jump. This is a classic vice of AI researchers - they have a reasonably good idea, and then start claiming that human-level strong AI is right around the corner. We went though this with the "expert systems" crowd in the 1980s, and that was even more embarassing and expensive, because doomed startups were launched. AI as a field was dead for a decade after that.

That's the price of overhyping a technology.

The Penguins are a miraculous species, capable of extreme heroism, self-sacrifice, sorrow and unshakable love.

They're also capable of extreme homosexuality.

I found that http://www.ananova.com/ was quick and fast during the entire ordeal. Though I, too, first found out about what happened by a post on someone's blog ;)

that "Nerds Make Better Lovers" does that mean that they can develop and program a sex robot to pleasure themselves? I hope that the author didn't really think that nerds can actually get real live women did they?

Want to read something really scary? Some police forces are actively rejecting applicants if their IQ is "too high". Read about it here. On the test they use a score of 33 is approximately equal to an IQ of 125. They refuse to even interview anyone who scores above 27. That means rejecting anyone more than about one standard deviation above average. They also reject anyone below about 100. A very narrow uniform grouping right near average.

As for your comparison of the average Slashdot reader, I figure the mean Slashdot reader is at minimum one standard deviation above average. Hell, the mean newspaper reader probably almost a standard deviation above average, heh.

-

And Edinburgh is now Scotland's "Party City" or the "Inspiring Capital".

If someone really gets their jollies by looking at backscatter images I really feel sorry for the person and they obviously are in need of psychological counseling for something.

Do they have 3D chicken input? The National University of Singapore seems to be putting a lot of work into it.

McDonald's are trialling a new breakfast meal made of Spam in their restaurants in Hawaii. (Story dated 2002.) In that case, Spam would definitely be an increase in the food quality.

You might be able to get customized. (Careful with the overclocking!)

Just make sure it's protected sex, sex with machines can be dangerous.

"Police who were alerted to the fact by a customer say they later confiscated 70,000 pounds worth of fake euros from the bank in Cologne, but did not say how the money came to be in the bank's coffers.

"An unnamed female customer who was paid 5,000 euros (3,400 pounds) in fake cash from the KoelnBonn savings bank in Cologne's Longerich district was the first to raise the alert.

"She said: "The notes were nearly all new. Then I noticed that they all had the same serial number."

"The bank admitted it had not contacted the police straight away, claiming it wanted to carry out an internal investigation first."

It's a well known fact that Best Buy hires only the stupidest people it can find, but a cop ought to at least know what currencies are legal.

The police don't hire smart people either. cite