Slashdot Mirror

Cast a wide net, and somewhere in the billion people in the world "maybe" there is something that can help.

Just last week I saw this on TV...
  http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.co...

which references this...
  http://www.strokebreakthrough....

This is pertinent for me since a few months ago my Aunt had a stroke and is now suffering speech and motor difficulties.

One thing I've wondered about of late is the reliability of evidence collected on the internet.

We've heard cases where someone was arrested because they admitted to something on Twitter, or had a picture of themselves doing something wrong on Facebook, and so on.

Absent any other evidence, is admission of guilt on the internet sufficient to convict someone in ideal circumstances?

Does anyone here with legal knowledge know the answer?

(I understand that you can get convicted of anything for any reason, and even for no reason, but I'm wondering about theory here. What's the situation, given an honest judge and correct representation?)

(And no, I'm not seeking legal advice on the internet since I'm not accused of a crime.)

Some examples of late: picture of teenager holding a beer (or holding a joint) leads to alcohol/drug charges, tweeting that you were driving drunk, and so on.

to just cary one device, and 1 controller.

If you're going to carry one Android device, it should be a HTC phone. It's been tested as a shield and worked well.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/2013/10/29/13/46/man-s-phone-stops-bullet-aimed-at-chest

To maintain your household under constant marketing surveillance. I'm waiting for Bruce Schneier to weigh in on this one, specifically. He does an excellent examination of the general case in his recent "Surveillance and the Internet of Things"

Microsoft is taking Xbox further down the road of current trends in targeting and profiling "users". The model for most web applications and nearly all mobile apps has been that of of the Trojan Horse. An apparently benign, amusing or useful set of functions is presented the user, often below the cost of producing the technology. It does no good to labour the point with tedious argument: the applications are invasive and - depending on your perspective - abusive of privacy.

XBox One is the adaptation of these trends, delivered into the home as a 7/24 data collection head, with a colour camera and a microphone that can't be turned off.

"German federal commissioner for privacy protection: "Xbox One is a surveillance device"

Civil Liberties Australia says Xbox One 'meets definition of surveillance device'

Privacy breach: Xbox One a 'twisted nightmare'

Here... let me help you with the speculation:

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/8502957/smaller-risk-of-getting-shot-in-australia

There are no references in the article to substantiate their claim of being 15x more likely to get shot in the US than Australia, but seeing as they "made a sharp turn away from the gun culture in 1996", Australia must have been a mighty rough place at one time. It's still almost a rounding error away from the claimed US "getting shot" per capita rate today.

You know, nobody is happy with any of this. Who has the lowest crime rate anywhere? Switzerland.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/why-switzerland-has-the-lowest-crime-rate-in-the-world.html

Mexico has a high rate of deaths by gunfire, higher than the US, even though all guns are illegal in Mexico. Banning guns nationally isn't really working out for them.

It appears that armed citizens have a higher survival rate than disarmed citizens left as victims to those who follow no laws. Singapore has a low crime rate due to their system of immediate corporal punishment for offenses which Americans would receive a parole sentence. Anyone who opens fire during a crime and is caught is quickly tried and executed in Singapore. Same goes for narcotics offenders. That doesn't happen in the US, so here we are with gun toting criminals on the street in some places.

Bottom line is I agree with the dangers of getting shot in the US, but more than half of the death rate by gunfire is people shooting themselves in the head. The other consideration is regional if you're filtering by intentional homicide. The largest danger comes from a small sliver of regions and subcultures within the US. If you walk into a narcotics driven badland, you're more likely to be harmed.

Here's a "List of countries by intentional homicide rate": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homicide_rate

Murder Capital of the US is the DIstrict of Columbia. It's just 10 square miles of the US (out of 3.79 million) and practically all of the deaths are narcotics related. I've lived right outside of DC for 35 years and work in DC. Know it well. I've never heard gunfire. Must be because the crack houses are the old solid masonry row houses. So, 0.000264% of the US is the most dangerous. Next is Puerto Rico (3435 square miles or 0.00214% of the US) and below that is Louisiana. Most of the crime in Louisiana is centered on four cities. I won't speculate here why their crime rate is high because... hmmm... I can't even say that. Those three areas of the US, one of which isn't even on the mainland, make up for a huge chunk of the overall statistic leaving the rest of the US relatively safe - except for a few areas rife with narcotics traffic. The Northern Territory of Australia is worse than about half of the US. Even New Jersey is safer than the Northern Territory.

Ok, enough.

...my Google Android phone gets the importance of standard connectors.

What?
So they can migrate and make other countries just as bad as their own?

Obviously you missed the whole problem with gangs of Lebanese teenagers gang raping young girls.. and claiming it was a cultural right.

The muslim attitude to sex is sickening. Here is another example: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/8450261/refugee-sentenced-over-second-vic-rape

No.

How about the citizens of that country stand up for what they believe in and fix their own country? Yes, a lot of people are gong to die, be tortured, and generally go through what Europe went through in the Dark Ages.. but there is light at the end of the tunnel and today is a good day to start.

You don't fix a problem with bullies by running away from them. In this case, though, I admit that the bullies may all need to die before this particular problem can be solved.

The video from the companies website, http://pal-v.com/, states that many attempts have been made to make flying cars. Looks like a lot of those attempts fly just fine. Guess they don't have access to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car_(aircraft) Terrafugia is one of the more modern flying car contenders: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/8445752/flying-car-cleared-for-takeoff

How about I look for what I actually claimed, which was the people were saying that cyclones were caused by global warming:

http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=30541&Cat=1
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/97558/super-storms-linked-to-global-warming
http://hauntingthelibrary.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/global-weirding-how-global-warming-will-mean-more-cyclones-and-fewer-cyclones/
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/05/14/tropical-cyclones-warming.html

Oh look, about five seconds.

Uh-huh. And you're sucking at the propaganda pretty good. How about a read from someone else? If you're making $34k/yr or more, you are the 1%.

http://finance.ninemsn.com.au/newsbusiness/motley/8371350/attention-protestors-youre-probably-part-of-the-1

These protesters are simple leftist whiners who want free stuff through socialist wealth redistribution.

I think you're trying to look at this as an isolated incident, and I'm trying to look at as it one incident in a long pattern.

The mother, seen in the video holding down the daughter while she is beaten, divorced the judge four years ago, and claims that she was also abused, saying, "I was completely brainwashed and controlled." http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8370540/texas-judge-defends-his-abuse-of-daughter

The daughter says the abuse went on for years, the judge says he lost his temper. I don't think the charitable explanation casts him in a particularly good light, either. The beating he lays down is wildly out of proportion to the offense (downloading stuff from Kazaa).

As to your point about spanking, we can have a discussion about spanking a child, but this is a 16-year-old. You're not going to correct her behavior by beating her up. Meanwhile, I know plenty of millennials who weren't spanked who are reasonable people, and I know a small handful of them who were beaten as children who have some pretty substantial mental health issues. It's a non sequitur though, because whether or not spanking your child is necessary to make them a functional adult (hint: it's not), this judge beat the shit out of his 16-year-old daughter because she downloaded music from the internet and had an attitude. If you think that deserves a beating, I'm not sure what to say to you.

Dirty and unreliable. http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8267695/jellyfish-clog-shuts-uk-nuclear-reactors

Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about the law in France

Yes, but where is the line drawn at? If they include the headlines along with the various gimmics, could they be seen as news shows? Sure they're trashy, almost as much as our current affairs shows (Non-Aussie's: these two shows are tabloid crap, flitting from moral outrage to shameless advertisement in the space of a few seconds). But I doubt that a sense of taste comes into legalities

Yep, even read a story about a pedo using a cantenna from a boat to a coastal home. The homeowner got his house raided.

Nice analogy. I think the root of this "research" may well be Australian superiority complex over the indigenous people.

When I visited New Zealand in 2007 the top headline in the paper was "Maori found to be genetically inclined towards violence." The article used similar psuedo-scientific interpretation of the data to prove that the Maori people in New Zealand are born violent with a "warrior gene."

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/120718/warrior-gene-blamed-for-maori-violence

I'm glad that something like that wouldn't be allowed in the USA these days without extreme scrutiny. Hell, even if there was scientific basis to it (there was very very little meat and potatoes to the NZ story), I thought it was very irresponsible to print a headline that would only lead to more ill will between the native community and whites that arrived 150 years ago.

Going off those two stories, and what I witnessed first hand in NZ (saw several instances of what can only be called endemic racism by some whites towards Maori and Arabs) I think the Australian and New Zealand media hype genetic superiority to their readers quite a bit. That is what their anglo-saxon bases want to hear, so they spoon feed it to them and it happily gets devoured. My sister moved to Australia for 3 years, and now has lived in New Zealand for almost 4 years. Its sad seeing the general perception down there change her viewpoint. The last time we talked about Maori people she said something along the lines of "The Maori are poor and dangerous. Kinda like Mexicans in California." I was like "Hey! A lot of my friends and colleagues are Mexican, I like Mexico. WTF?!!"

The time I have spent in other countries has re-iterated to me many times over that despite the extremists we have on both sides, the struggles that the US has gone through with racism, slavery, xenophobia, immigration, etc, has made us stronger and more accepting of other cultures. If I had to pick one thing that makes me proud to be an American, it would be that every citizen is guaranteed a fair shake here.

the precession effect is "nothing new" and had already been taken into consideration.

"The constellations don't suggest what's coming up, it's the planets! The constellations are a measuring device."

I think what pisses astrologers off is that this "news" undermines their percieved authority. Also, I think that "serious" astrologers need to know a fair bit of astronomy, so they would have known about this for a very long time.

Source: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8196971/star-sign-changes-spark-controversy ...
Disclaimer: I know that ninemsn is not exactly a proper news source. But, hey, we're talking astrology here.

Damn, meant to hit preview. Anyway, just wanted to add that, sure it doesn't happen all the time or even most of the time, but cars do in fact catch fire after being crashed.

Explosions are probably taking the artistic license a bit far, but even that can happen in some circumstances.

Ah, here's the article I was actually looking for when I found the ones in my previous post:

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/8172130/man-dies-in-burning-car

The driver and three passengers escaped with minor injuries when their vehicle veered off Main Arm Road and rolled over an embankment near Mullumbimby on the far north NSW coast.

The driver then returned to his Holden Commodore, climbing into the backseat to recover some belongings when the vehicle caught alight, according to a police statement.

The man was trapped inside his burning car and died at the scene, at around 3am (AEST).

Seems like the last "first time" was just 2009 ($US75 billion btw). Well, I guess it sounds better to write for the first time in a decade a second time then for the second time a first time. ; )

A really bad ugly un-fixable mess.

As bad and ugly as it would be, the chinese are already there.

China's investment in Africa has grown by as much as 30% annually, faster than in any other continent, from $1.6-billion in 2008 to $5.4-billion in 2009. About 2000 Chinese companies are engaged in 8000 projects in Africa, mainly in infrastructure and agriculture.

And here you have some other numbers: "Beijing says its trade with Africa is on track to top $US100 billion ($A103.5 billion) this year" (this year means less than 3 months now, isn't it?)
To put the things in perspective: in July 2009, US owed China 900+ billion (without counting the trade deficit with China) - 10% of money that US owes China will go into Africa in less than 3 month!?!

For your survival: learn mandarin!

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/975707/police-investigate-world-of-warcraft-murder

It's not ok for google to inadvertadly capture minute packets of useless information, but it's ok for the government to direct ISPs to intercept data illegally.

The Australian Labor party have time and time again broken their promises, Barging ahead with Policies that their citizens do no want and completely fucking up things they tried to achieve

The only reason Google are in hot water is because they stood up to Senator Conroy and he got upset about it.

I for one will be making my vote count this year and I urge all fellow Australian slashdotters to do the same.

The New York Times and Boston.com websites have been infected before. It's just a matter of time before these things become more like ransomware.

Joseph Evers, of encyclopedia dramatica, whose experience might be instructive for the creator of wikileaks:

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/1028037/encyclopedia-dramatica-owner-could-face-charges

Encyclopedia Dramatica is believed to be one of the websites that will be banned in Australia under upcoming internet filtering legislation.

The online community Anonymous, which is responsible for several hacking attacks against government websites in protest of the proposed filter, is strongly associated with Encyclopedia Dramatica.

The email from the Human Rights Commission to Evers cites a 2002 court case in which an Australian businessman was able to sue a US company for defamation over an article published online.

Dow Jones & Co Inc ended up paying the defendant, mining entrepreneur Joseph Gutnick, $580,000 in fees and damages.

Evers wrote that he had been advised never to return to Australia.

"My counsel has advised me that I can never under any circumstances visit my family in Sydney again, nor otherwise make any appearances on Australian soil," he wrote.

"Here's to the hidden cost of freedom."

so basically, you're ok with edgy internet content in the free world... unless you piss off australians. and if you do, and you happen to be australian as well, then say goodbye forever to your homeland and your family and friends

seriously, australians: what the fuck is wrong with your fucking government? i feel like i'm reading about iran or north korea sometimes when i read stuff like this

australians: fix your broken fucking government. yesterday. thank you

australia is a fucking disgrace

Open this in Firefox and see what happens in the Task Manager:
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world-news.aspx

If the browser doesn't hog a full processor straight away, then try opening a couple of news articles in tabs.

According to this news announcement Perelman turned down the price offer saying "he had all he wanted." and that "he is not interested in money or fame."

Demonstrating your willingness to dissolve things in acid can be very persuasive...

The article states that he communicates through a keyboard device in his right hand (perhaps like Stephen Hawking's), not by "facillitated communication".

FC refers to somebody else grabbing the patient hand and then moving it over the keyboard and that is exactly what was happening in this case, he didn't even look at the keyboard and the speed of input would even be troublesome for somebody who isn't in a comma. He did at much typing as keyboard cat did play music.

Well, here's a picture of the Jonas Brothers in a security line at LAX. Here's one of Paris Hilton at LAX. Here is a whole who's-who of famous celebrities who have gotten in trouble going through standard airport security, including Naomi Campbell, Snoop Dogg, Courtney Love, Whitney Houston, and Paul McCartney. Now, I'm not saying they're treated the same: Whitney Houston had issues because they found a bunch of pot in her carry-on -- but they let her board the plane and keep the pot. Likewise if you're Britney Spears they'll hold your liter-sized container of liquid while you go through security and then give it back to you but the image of rich people only flying in private jets is completely false. They regularly fly on commercial aircraft along with the proles.

One of ubuntu's (and Linux in general) main obstacles is the lack of public awareness

Recently I was watching a free-to-air TV channel we have in Australia called GO. I noticed however that the station ID had changed slightly. Normally it's just the GO logo bouncing around the inside of a small room, with lots of colourful effects and whatnot. Now... it's the GO logo bounding around the same room along with the WINDOWS LOGO bouncing around the room too!

FFS - how can Linux compete in mindshare when Microsoft has enough money to change the advertisements for TV stations?

On the other hand, I shouldn't be surprised. They like to advertise Bing a lot and their website is http://go.ninemsn.com.au/ , so it's obvious who their partners are.

Because some men tend to take "a lot" of coffee breaks in their cars, each time taking a shoe full of $1 and $2 coins with them....

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=107801

"You're completely wrong. Our planet could sustain 8 billion people, 9-10 billion if we really tried...[snip]...The Earth will find its own equilibrium, we don't need to do it for it. That's terribly Arrogant and Elitist."

That's some mighty twisted logic there. First you define an arbritrary equilibrim point and insist it's more correct than the GP's arbritrary equilibrim point, then you attack all such arbritrary equlibrium points as "Arrogant and Elitist".

Rationing is never the solution.

It's always the solution when a fixed quantity of resources R must supply X number of people for Y length of time but the average DESIRED consumption is greater than R/X per Y, in such a situation where the resource is essential to life the only alternative to rationing is violence. Violence is more or less mandatory if the REQUIRED individual consumption is greater that R/X per Y.

As evidence of the social effectiveness of rationing, try watering your garden with a mains water hose/sprinkler in Melbourne Australia, most people (including me) would dob you in before the water even hit the ground. This is in a culture were the label "dobber" is a serious insult.

Note: The first link blames the government, this is way too simple minded. Nobody saw the permenent drought coming so fast, even the climate change people thought it was 50yrs away (studies of why they failed to see it coming, show that runoff drops at 3X the rate of rainfall, so a 10% drop in rainfall equates to 30% less runoff to the dam). When it was obvious the drought was more than a normal cyclical drought the govenment fast tracked a $3.5b desal plant that will be one of the largest in the world (Melbourne is the largest project but most Aussie cities are building similar desal plants), none of which will resurect Australia's terminally ill breadbasket. If there is an obvious flaw in the government's plans/actions it's the fact they decided to power the desal plant with 100% coal even though it sits on the edge of the "roaring fourties".

The biggest problem with witch hunts for child pornographers is that it's not the cold eyed brutal child rapists who tend to get caught up and prosecuted as child pornographers, it's teachers investigating student misconduct, 13 year olds and high school students.

That the alleged pornagraphy was produced by its subject, was voluntarily distributed to the "child pornographer" or that tarring the accused with the term "child pornographer" is ludicrous seems to be no barrier to prosecution and sometimes conviction.

Their website is atrocious, so very very busy.. glad I don't have to go there anymore Nine

For those that don't get it (like me):
http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html

and then it "sold" on ebay.

What is the point if they only got one submission for the Hash contest?

Europe's top contenders in the hash competition were devastated by some new laws in Amsterdam, banning whores and space-cake cafes: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=683353

Well, duh, do you think people travel there to look at the wooden shoes and windmills? What have their politicians been smoking?

And yes it will take years to pick the winner.

If the stuff is good, and the judges supply of Doritos hold out, it could take decades.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=665847

That's a bit rich since the movie industry itself regularly engages in fraud to rip off movie makers and actors. Did you know the author of Forrest Gump didn't make a single cent from the movie, the smash hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding technically made a loss (so the actors were ripped off royalties) and both Rob Schneider and Spielberg and many others have both stolen movie ideas in the past and baulked at paying the creators. So why is camcording a movie a criminal offense publishable by jail but fraud isn't? and in the US why is fraud only ever settled in civil courts without the threat of jail?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
http://www.tmz.com/2007/12/11/aussies-to-adam-you-stole-our-gay-firemen-flick/
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=335127

That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people, and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we're talking about.

That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI, Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance, Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so thereâ(TM)s no need to rehash all that. That was then, this is now!

That Jonathan Bushâ(TM)s Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew George, but it's still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions.

That George Bush's brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre, Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit those Bush boys have done alright for themselves.

That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment of Osamaâ(TM)s brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just one of those things - one of those crazy things.

That Osama bin Laden is known to have been an asset of US foreign policy in no way implies he still is.

That al Qaeda was active in the Balkan conflict, fighting on the same side as the US as recently as 1999, while the US protected its cells, is merely one of history's little aberrations.

The claims of Michael Springman, State Department veteran of the Jeddah visa bureau, that the CIA ran the office and issued visas to al Qaeda members so they could receive training in the United States, sound like the sour grapes of someone who was fired for making such wild accusations.

That one of George Bush's first acts as President, in January 2001, was to end the two-year deployment of attack submarines which were positioned within striking distance of al Qaeda's Afghanistan camps, even as the group's guilt for the Cole bombing was established, proves that a transition from one administration to the next is never an easy task.

That so many influential figures in and close to the Bush White House had expressed, just a year before the attacks, the need for a "new Pearl Harbo

Here's the technical explanation: http://www.cudos.org.au/cudos/research/Research.php ...and here's another topical piece: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=594743

Try this.

http://health.msn.com/health-topics/allergies/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100154510

http://health.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=2506

opps, guess you can be allergic to water.

Forget the Haneef stuffup, it's things like what happened in the Ul-Haque case that the Feds really don't want the press talking about pre-trial. Or at any other time I'd wager. ASIO wasn't happy with the outcome anyway.

This would be why I exited MySpace, Friendster, etc. (and never got near Facebook) early on ... because I have managed to maintain a tightly-controlled internet identity for professional purposes and social networking sites increasingly made it impossible to *actually* network. I maintain Facebook and MySpace will both cause their own deaths (despite what the kids have to say... and in the interim, I will continue to use neither.

People don't want to be told that the media lie. It shakes their whole world view. So the people who want to be told about the latest diet fad will keep watching ACA and TT, and the rest of us wouldn't have fallen for their rubbish news anyway.

My guess is that the meteorite hit with enough force to trigger an underground steam explosion or release of carbon dioxide in an area with some geothermal activity. Namely, the underground water supply was probably superheated due to heat from some deeper magma body. The force of the meteorite impact flashed a quantity of that into steam and caused a steam explosion. Alternately, there was a supersaturation of carbon dioxide disolved in the ground water and the impact of the meteorite caused that to spontaneously come out of solution. Either way you get a bang with a lot of carbon dioxide and traces of other poisonous gasses.

Better article with a photo of the impact site. Quite an impressive hole. One hopes it's just some underground gas, and not the realization of Andromeda Strain...

Interesting; Live Search...

Microsoft Vista class action lawsuit Page 1 of 69,968 results

Might not be the best course of action if you're in the US, however.

Yahoo recently partnered with one of Australia's three TV networks, Ch 7. I'm not sure what they're planning on doing with it - MSN and Channel 9 did a similar thing years ago and I don't really understand why, as they haven't done anything interesting with it.

According to Toyota - and the company is commendably frank about its car's environmental equations - Prius doesn't even begin to break even on greenhouse gas emissions until it's been driven around 20,000km. This is because extracting and manufacturing the raw materials to make a Prius consumes more energy than a conventional car. The extra energy required means more carbon dioxide is emitted to make a Prius than a conventional technology car.

So no, hybrid cars don't grow on trees, but they do win in the end on total emission. Toyota cars are known for their reliability (the main German automobile organization have found toyota to be the top reliable car for years in a row already), so expect them to overcome this 20.000 km barrier many, many times over. (estimated battery life seems to be about 160.000km at minimum).