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Maria Gurova

Russia's War on Foreigners - By Anna Alekseyeva | Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • Estimates of the number of illegal immigrants living in the country vary widely, but fall somewhere in the range of three to six million people. It is likely that around 30 percent of Moscow's immigrant population is illegal.
  • According to Russia's Federal Migration Service director, Konstantin Romodanovsky, these middlemen have created a shadow economy that amounts to almost $1 billion. As with every lucrative industry in Russia, this shadow market inevitably has ties to the government.
  • The cruelty that has become an all-too-common refrain in today's Russia stems, at least in part, from the ingrained belief in Russian exceptionalism -- the idea that Russian morality is unique and therefore beyond reproach. Originating in ancient Kievan Rus, this idea was propagated by the Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages, and was prominently displayed in the communist revolutionary claims of the 20th century.
Maria Gurova

online piracy in Norway falls says report - 1 views

  • 210 million songs were illegally downloaded last year, compared to more than a billion four years ago.
  • Earlier this month, strict new laws aimed at tackling piracy were introduced which give rights holders the power to monitor suspected infringers and potentially order the government to shut down sites.
  • claims and has said on its website that income from online use of music, including legal streaming services, has risen.
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  • TONO also
  • “As high-speed internet capacity has become normal and often included in mobile subscriptions, illegal download and use of music has decreased,”
  • “The new legislation is in my opinion not sufficiently technology neutral, as it is clearly designed to serve as a tool to prevent P2P file sharing and not, for example, illegal streaming services, which may become a problem in the years to come.”
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    Norway continue to tighten the copyright laws in the advantage of the IP owners. Though the approach is based on strong preventive measures rather then transparent, easy to use, relatively inexpensive access to content it seems to work
Maria Gurova

Academic conference on 'Love and Sex with Robots' abruptly cancelled after being declar... - 0 views

  • Humanoid robots are now being introduced into nursing homes, and as therapists, for example. The new Hello Barbie toy will be a "friend" to children, holding conversations with young boys and girls. Robots are even getting married in Japan.
  • A perfect example of the backlash against human-like machines happened last Friday, when Adrian David Cheok and David Levy were forced to cancel their second annual Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, set to be held in Malaysia next month.
  • The case of the cancelled conference is just the beginning of the kind of obstacles intellectuals and researchers may encounter in the pursuit of academic study of humanoid robotics—an increasingly controversial field as the line between fantasy and reality gets blurred
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    Two academics decided to hold a conference for a controversial matter of human robot interactions, the conference with a provocative name and a highly scientific content was banned in a very conservative and religious country of Malaysia 
al_semenchenko

Smartypants: the fart-filtering future of underwear | Art and design | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The term “enhancing underwear” might summon images of go-go-gadget pants that help you run faster and jump higher, but it actually refers to a new breed of briefs that promise you a bigger bulge. Push-up bras and “butt-lifters” have long been a staple of women’s lingerie aisles, but genital scaffolding has now spread to menswear. Featured in the V&A exhibition, the “Wonderjock” is the work of Australian company AussieBum and aims to do for men’s bits what the Wonderbra did for women’s busts – hoisting them up and thrusting them out.
  • US army researchers have developed smart underwear, with sensors secreted inside elastic waistbands that track heart rate, body temperature and perspiration, and beam the stats back to a central monitor. This “wear-and-forget” sensory system is also designed for stressful training situations, identifying which soldiers remain more balanced, so they can be picked for the harder missions.
  • Underwear is already a common place for smuggling drugs of the illegal variety, but a recent pharmaceutical innovation could soon make putting pills in your pants a legitimate activity. Swiss textile giant Schoeller has developed a fabric that administers drugs to the surface of your skin over time, and thinks the best place to put it is in your undies – as those are the garments you’re least likely to forget to put on.
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  • A more practical innovation comes from British manufacturer Shreddies, which has developed flatulence-filtering underwear, allowing you to “fart with confidence”. Their magic farty pants incorporate a layer of Zorflex, a microporous carbon-based material more commonly used in chemical warfare.
Ekaterina Nurieva

Russia seeks skilled workers, tweaks migration laws - 1 views

http://rbth.ru/politics/2013/08/05/russia_seeks_skilled_workers_tweaks_migration_laws_28659.html

3.5 million illegal foreign workers in Russia; Vacancies will be offered to local residents during the first month all Russians second and only after that foreigners;Before they were either fined or deported; now both penalties apply social Political

started by Ekaterina Nurieva on 05 Sep 13 no follow-up yet
Maria Gurova

Мигранты : Профессор Сорбонны об этнопреступности в Европе - Перемены - Афиша... - 0 views

  • Но самое интересное, что совершенно зашкаливающий уровень ксенофобии обнаруживается у людей, обитающих еще дальше от Парижа, в богатых зеленых пригородах.
  • Это кажется странным — почему они так боятся иммигрантов, если они с ними практически никогда не сталкиваются?
  • их ксенофобию подпитывает экономическая неуверенность:
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  • после погромов в Лондоне в 2011 году британская полиция распространила фотографии подростков, грабивших магазины, с призывом помочь их найти.
  • во Франции, все были бы в шоке: как, им предложили на кого-то доносить! Я думаю, это отчасти последствия Второй мировой войны: до сих пор силен комплекс вины за выдачу немецкому правительству французов-евреев.
  • когда общество неблагополучно, ему требуются козлы отпущения. Чаще всего таковыми оказываются люди, во-первых, отличающиеся внешне, а во-вторых, стоящие ниже всего на социальной лестнице
  • за время работы я пришла к выводу, что независимо от того, идет ли речь о религиозных, этнических или культурных различиях, идеальные кандидаты на роль посредников — это молодые матери с колясками. У них всех исключительно похожий образ жизни
  • Если в неблагополучном районе создать место, где молодые мамы разных национальностей смогут встречаться и общаться между собой, считай, полдела сделано.
  • один архитектор предложил просто снести два здания и построить на их месте торговый центр — достаточно крупный, чтобы туда стали приезжать люди из соседних районов. И тогда подростки, раньше тусовавшиеся в подъездах, волей-неволей начали встречаться и взаимодействовать с людьми из более благоустроенного мира, и это само по себе постепенно поменяло их поведение.
  • Не стоит недооценивать цивилизующее влияние торговых центров.
Ekaterina Yanovskaya

Driving in the Networked Age | Reid Hoffman | LinkedIn - 0 views

  • how soon will it be illegal to operate human-driven cars on public streets?
  • autonomous vehicles will also be able to share information with each other better than human drivers can, in both real-time situations and over time. Every car on the road will benefit from what every other car has learned. Driving will be a networked activity, with tighter feedback loops and a much greater ability to aggregate, analyze, and redistribute knowledge.
  • when thousands and then even millions of cars are connected in this way, new capabilities are going to emerge.
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  • But the benefits of self-driving cars are so significant that in time the public will demand prohibitions against old-fashioned legacy driving in most public spaces
  • there are more than 2 billion legacy cars on the road, globally. Currently, the car industry can only produce around 100 million new vehicles a year. Just from a manufacturing perspective, it could take 20 years to build a new fleet that approximates the one we have now.
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    driverless cars that will function with a "zero
Maria Gurova

The Airbnb vs. New York hearing: Lots of yelling, no decisions - 0 views

  • The City Council's Housing and Buildings Committee heard testimony Tuesday from residents, housing advocates, city officials and companies about the effects of the growing industry on the city.
  • In November 2014, about 15,300 New York City listings were entire homes or apartments representing about 59% of the available listings on the site that month, according to Slee. There were also 9,704 listings for private rooms, and 753 listings for shared rooms. The analysis also showed that 2,764 users were renting out two or more units, which opponents have cited as evidence the service is helping illegal hotels. More than 200 users were renting out five units or more
  • Airbnb is calling for "smart regulation," which it has had success with in cities including Portland, Oregon; San Jose and San Francisco, California; Amsterdam; and Paris. Airbnb collects lodging tax directly from hosts in those cities, and several local governments have passed laws that allow short-term rentals in some form.
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  • Both sides agreed on seemingly only one thing: That a discussion and regulation of short-term rentals in New York City is overdue.
Maria Gurova

Should You Trust Big Pharma With Your DNA? | Popular Science - 0 views

  • In January, the biotech company Genentech reportedly committed $10 million for access to the DNA of 3,000 Parkinson’s patients and their families. A week later, Pfizer made a similar deal for the genomes of 5,000 people with lupus.
  • A trove of data could give scientists the tools they need to develop gene-specific drug therapies for certain diseases. “We are hoping to ultimately develop Parkinson’s medicines, for example, that actually modify the disease as opposed to just treating symptoms,”
  • “this has the possibility of not only helping us find new cures, but it also helps us create a genuine health care system as opposed to just a disease care system.”
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  • Even a small segment of DNA (23andMe looks at 750,000 base pairs out of 3 billion) can reveal a history of illness or predict future risks and be used
  • The 2009 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act makes it illegal for employers or health insurance companies to discriminate based on genetic data. The Act doesn’t address who controls data once it’s out there
Maria Gurova

Italian courts order ISPs to block isoHunt - 1 views

  • FIMI successfully lodged the complaint stating that isoHunt, which provides access to and sharing of illegal copies of copyright protected content, costs the Italian music industry millions of euros.
  • Earlier this year, the Rome court ordered to block domains of 27 torrent websites.
  • The growth of blocking orders seems to be a result of the struggle against online copyright infringements through torrent websites. Opponents of website-blocks argue that blocking access to torrent sharing websites is ineffective.
Maria Gurova

Norway gives powers to rights holders in piracy battle - 1 views

  • companies will be able to order the scanning of suspected copyright infringements and also target Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
  • “If you are an entity and feel you have IP rights and are the subject of piracy, what the law allows you to do is to start collecting suspected Internet addresses.  At the point when you have enough evidence you can then approach the court to get the ISP to reveal their identity
  • Once the entity has that address it’s up to them whether they want to bring a copyright case to the court or write to the person behind the website
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  • It appears to be designed to serve as a tool for rights holders to intervene against illegal file sharing by the use of peer-to-peer technology and web sites
  • “It is still an open question whether the rights holders will be able to use the legislation as a tool against copyright infringements that employ different technology, such as cloud-based storage and sharing of infringing material.
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