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Looks like Slashdot Media's subsidiary is a bad netizen. Shame!

According to ASCI's 2014 poll of Internet Service Providers (see coverage by Ars), Time Warner had the lowest satisfaction of all broadband companies (54% and dropping faster than any other company). Comcast was 2nd-worst (57% and dropping 2nd-fastest), and Charter was 3rd-worst (and dropping 3rd fastest). So, this may lessen Time Warner's decline.

Personally, I have used both companies for coax services in the DFW area, and I prefer Charter. Business services are similar, but Charter is much cheaper (currently $40/mo promo for 60M/4M versus Time Warner at over $300/mo for 50M/5M). Time Warner's aging infrastructure in Dallas definitely does not warrant the premium. Plus, Charter service is no-contract.

The changes in OS X and iOS are not even close to the clusterfuck that is Modern apps and abandonment of human-interface guidelines at Microsoft.

The only red-hot mistake in the Apple camp is the attempt to throw out Save/Save As... for Keep/Discard file management that nobody can get their heads around. Fortunately, Apple isn't trying to push that very hard. The rest of it is just aesthetics... the appearance hasn't change THAT much (be honest) and the functionality stays pretty much the same.

At Microsoft, you've got THREE different interfaces: traditional pull-down menus (most 3d-party software), Ribbon with File as a menu (stock apps like Wordpad), and full Ribbon (Office apps exclusively) where File isn't a menu or a tab - it takes over the whole window making your document disappear.

Oh, wait, then there's Modern apps, so that's FOUR, FOUR different UI interfaces.

and yes, iOS apps may work under Windows 10, so that's FIVE, FIVE different UI interfaces.

Not even Linux is as insane as this... in spite of innumerable UI toolkits from Xlib to Motif to GTK to KDE, Linux has never sent users on some weird hunt for the charms or how do I quit and get out of this?

If we are going to post an ad for this piece of hardware, could we at least go with the Ars Technica review as it at least reviews the Linux version of this laptop. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets... Although unfortunately at least as of when the article was written, Thunderbolt 2.0 isn't quite fully functional as of yet.

So, then, you are admitting the hosts file is not effective at blocking botnet c&c channels. Take that out of your list of extravagant claims of the benefits of hosts files.

How many times is a dumbshit like YOU going to *try* pull that on me, menial? Are there hostnames here that are still online?? Yes, ZEUS botnet (as a SINGLE example) https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/m...

If your approach only blocks 5-10% of domain names, then it is NOT effective for security. This might fly in your shareware consumer world, but that is not enterprise-grade.

Any OTHER kind, such as the edge case RARE types you noted (out of 'desperation') MY SECURITY GUIDE catches via Layered Security/Defense in Depth practices -> http://forums.pcpitstop.com/in...

You DO NOT HAVE A SECURITY GUIDE. I actually looked for it, and the closest I could find was where you posted it, but everybody thought you were an idiot and banned you. Not what I would call "success."

"Sounds like you've washed out of every job you've had."

Wouldn't matter, since if YOU are 'state of the art' in "security engineers" (allegedly)? You suck...

Yeah, you have totally washed out of every job you had, and now you've been an author of (shitty) shareware. Found this gem:

IpTables, iirc, = the LINUX modern evolution of the older IPChains system, right?? I am more of a Win32 guy the past few years though, so I must ask.

So you don't even understand UNIX. You are quite the security professional.

When I FRY weasels like YOU on a forums as I have here? Sure, they get pissed & have to 'kick me'...

You have been banned from almost every forum you've ever joined. Like when you were banned in 2000 from arstechnica, and rejoined as a different name to defend yourself. Or when you were banned after trying to spam your shitty security guide in 2007.

The best thing I could find anyone say about you, from a friend, was:

Vortac said:

The only thing I don't like about him (although I've gotten over it), is he thinks everyone is an idiot. He just hasn't had any real experience, deadlines to meet, or being a team player within an organization.

And the worst thing is, you're a really shitty programmer!

For my Hosts Engine, I chose Object Pascal since it's beaten even MSVC++ in strings work which my app does HEAVILY - dumb thing for you to say:

Funny, because you got called out for very poorly performing code (that just sorted some strings and took 11 minutes) here. And here are the kinds of things people said about your code a few years ago:

Man with no head wrote:

Of course spamming forums with publicity ads is kind of lame; don't take it personally, but you brought it upon yourself.

Now as regarding the actual package, I find the UI kind of weird and you don't seem to be following Windows UI guidelines (That's a no-no in Tog speak).

The feature set is kind of questionable; I fail to see the real value of your product really.

And to finish my rant, I got these errors on startup on my Win2k SRV SP1 system.

BTW

It must work almost as well as their fiber:

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

If for example, Samsung and LG make decent Android devices and provide support for them, you could buy from them and get a decent consistant Android device and support.

If that were the case, you'd be safe. I don't know of a manufacturer that consistently provides bug-free devices and support for them for, say, 2 years back.

You are generally safe with Nexus devices, since you have the best chance of upgrading to the latest OS. This helps with vulnerabilities which won't be fixed in older versions of Android. But because Nexus devices shuffle between different manufacturers, you lack consistency from a hardware standpoint.

On a slightly more serious sidenote, it's easy to see Java's popularity dropping, since Google seems to be dumping java for high performance javascript/dart development, as they have already been announcing for Android.
http://arstechnica.com/civis/v...

Linus has actually stated it in a way that is frequently seen as toxic. But, while C++ is one of my favourite programming languages, certain language features tend indeed to "rotten" people's brains, just like pre-GIT CVS+derivatives did to source control habits. And I find that Java is actually the perfect representative of that nowadays, not C++ (and even Linus is now commiting patches in C++) I don't know what you guys people but when I have to traverse a tree of 10 folders, and files have 10 lines and exist only for a single abstraction's sake, I kinda feel OOP, though a powerful tool, has been overused. When everything has to be an object just for a paradigm's sake, things can get kinda distorted. One of the greatest programming innovations is, in my opinion, MVC (or even MVVC stuff like Angular) is one of the greatest things that have been getting popular lately. By separating logic from models and views people are encouraged not to create stupid abstractions and use procedural programming where it is adequate and avoid performance losses.

(proof that torvalds actually uses C++ if anyone hasn't seen that: https://github.com/torvalds/su...)

One Cambridge researcher says the optimal copyright term is 14 years, closer to the patent term. Patents last 20 years; why can't copyrights?

AFAICT it doesn't put 'the internet' in jeopardy, reports are only a small percentage of websites are even vulnerable to this (link).

Here's the weird thing about this to me (in bullet points):
* A couple years ago, the only people who cared about vulns were people who knew how to use metasploit or ethereal or something.
* Last year, with Heartbleed, the news organization found out it could generate page views if the vulnerability had a pretty logo.
* Now with this story, the non-techy articles are so numerous it's hard to figure out what the actual exploit even is. But if you want to find an 'personal interest' story blaming Bush or Clinton (or whatever president), they're all over the place.

I wonder what will happen if the mainstream media learns to read Apple's or Microsoft's security bulletins and finds out how common security exploits actually are......

To be even handed, Apple takes exactly the same position. To view a real clusterf--k, check out the FBI criminal investigation into iPad purchasing at the LA Unified School District.

At this rate, we'll see a story about the hypervisor floppy-disk vulnerability in... December.

Microsoft will be pre-installing Candy Crush Saga to help people, well, focus... I guess...

That was... quite a wall of rambling text, so I apologize - was quite sleepy when I typed up that book above. lol.

But, to follow up:

Sony's Playstation 4 has never (to my knowledge) been modded and there are no hacks other than account sharing and cloning at the present time. It was released in Nov of 2013. I frequent homebrewer sites... and basically, they've given up trying to mod consoles altogether declaring the age of the mod chip over. People are also afraid of jail time as some have been charged with DMCA violations for selling mod chips.

The Playstation 3 was never modded either - it wasn't even really hacked as someone leaked the keys, so everyone used those to make software mods.

The hardware mods only worked b/c the manufacturers weren't expecting them. Now, they hide the internals better so you can't solder between chips and perform man-in-the-middle attacks. They also check firmware versions and test for mod chips, then disable online access if anything abnormal is found. I wouldn't say hardware modding is over yet, but it's getting there. Most mods I see these days are for controllers, not systems.

As for PC miniaturization, I thought this was impressive:

Look at the latest 12" Macbook motherboard:

http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-co...

http://i.imgur.com/19nDmFc.jpg

http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-co...

http://s3.amazonaws.com/digita...

It's smaller than a Raspberry Pi 2, and only a bit bigger than the tiny Iphone 6 motherboard. It holds a Dual Core Pentium M 1.2 Ghz with hyperthreading and turboboost to 2.6 ghz with 8 GB of RAM and Intel HD Graphics 5300 that supports the retina display.

This article basically goes on to say what I've been saying - you can't service this kind of device, you just replace the entire mobo if it breaks:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2...

The system is hardly top of the line, but it does support the idea that the internals of PCs/laptops are shrinking to credit-card size at a rapid pace and that the current GHz speed plus a decent graphics chip are "good enough" for most people. The high end macbook pro and macbook air motherboards aren't much larger, really - just some additions for more I/O and fans. If it's that small now, just wait another 10 to 20 years. We already have the tech to put that entire mobo on a chip smaller than a dime, but it'd cost a fortune to design and get a decent yield off of a wafer that size.

Of course, in 10 to 20 years, desktops will be gone. We'll maybe have a something that looks like today's PCs acting as a "home media server" with lots of laptops, phones, and tablets that connect.. maybe all on the same domain or "home network" of some sort. Maybe a few small form factor devices like mac minis, roku, tivo, etc. None of the devices will be upgradable or repairable as it'd be cheaper to buy a new one than to bother. I expect in 30 years, all of them will be locked into one walled garden or another.

It's been years since I've needed or even noticed needing better graphics performance yet battery performance of OS X pure versus Windows? Oh yeah, THAT I notice. On the occasions I forget a charger I have to minimise running Windows or I'll be running out of battery at least twice as fast as when using OS X. I can get work 7 Hours using just the battery on my rMBP with occasional excursions to Windows to check mail but or use corporate windows only tools but running windows will only give me 3 hours. Windows isn't even doing much, it just does it all the time & never lets the CPU sleep for any significant time - see here for reasons why.

What you're seeing here really is driver issues. Apple doesn't put the resources into developing the Boot Camp drivers properly for Windows... they're good enough so they're shipped. Apple doesn't want you to run Windows, or Linux or anything else. They want their beautiful machines running their beautiful OS, to hell with what the end user actually needs. A good set of power management drivers would go a long way to fix Windows on Mac hardware but they're not going to put the time and energy into it.

This philosophy of Apple's is part of the reason I've abandoned them as a platform for my own use.

Apple has been optimising OS X for years, but not for Graphics Performance. They've been optimising it for longer battery duration.

It's been years since I've needed or even noticed needing better graphics performance yet battery performance of OS X pure versus Windows? Oh yeah, THAT I notice. On the occasions I forget a charger I have to minimise running Windows or I'll be running out of battery at least twice as fast as when using OS X. I can get work 7 Hours using just the battery on my rMBP with occasional excursions to Windows to check mail but or use corporate windows only tools but running windows will only give me 3 hours. Windows isn't even doing much, it just does it all the time & never lets the CPU sleep for any significant time - see here for reasons why.

Yeah, the pure graphics performance may be poorer on OS X. Most people don't care as long as it's good enough.

No it wont, unless you're prone top motion sickness, in which case VR is not for you.

Yeah right, sure. That's why oculus games' developers themselves are complaining about VR sickness:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

They're analogue computers they can solve the thing they're setup to solve faster than a digital computer.

So for example, if you set up a system that follows an elliptical curve as a voltage (as opposed to calculating the values of the curve in the floating point unit of a digital computer), then it can crack elliptical curve cryptography a lot faster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

The buzzword these days seems to be to call these 'quantum' if the analogue aspect is the phase of a photon, but that's just marketing nonsense.

You do know that elliptic curve crypto isn't done on a real plane that can be approximated with floats or volts? It's done (or should be done) within a prime field. There is not a continuous analog representation that does that.

http://arstechnica.com/securit...

Logic Supply ML100G-30. Pricier, but silent.

I don't have polling data, but it does pass the sniff test to assume that one form of magical thinking, inculcated from birth, would tend to make the personality more at-risk of accepting other magical-thinking proposals.

Well, there are some studies which suggest what you say is true, but there are other scientists and psychologists who have claimed that supernatural beliefs and superstitions are "hard-wired" into humanity. Many anthropologists have argued that some sort of supernatural beliefs were necessary for the foundation of complex societies, but there's disagreement about the exact role or types of beliefs and their effects.

On the other hand, regardless of upbringing, there seem to be specific psychological traits that are highly correlated with religiosity, such as lower intelligence or various personality traits. There have been literally hundreds of studies on this stuff, and your proposal that various superstitious thinking may be related to and/or substituting for religious thinking has been studied for close to 40 years.

There seem to be no clear answers and a lot of contradictory studies about whether paranormal/supernatural beliefs are basically innate or mostly affected by psychological traits or intelligence, or whether nurturing children affects those tendencies in significant ways.

The only thing I can say is that people have believed weird nonsense throughout history, and even if you expunge various myths and bogey men, people will find other weird nonsense to believe -- whether it's aliens or conspiracy theories or whatever. You can even look at demographic stats and polls for other countries -- participation in institutional religion is very low in Europe, and many countries have relatively high numbers there of people who are nominally atheists, but various other types of occult and superstitious elements are exceptionally popular.

Bottom line: decreasing religious indoctrination of youth may have some impact on overall belief in "magical thinking," but many people will still find various weird things to buy into as adults. Aside from natural cognitive tendencies of humans to "ascribe meaning" to random or natural phenomena and such, religion is historically about defining social groups as well as beliefs, and there's a lot of evidence that people will buy into all kinds of weird crap if it seems like the stuff that most of the people around them are into.

I grew up in a tough *white* neighborhood and experienced the same culture of squalor you described. Just a generation before, troublemakers in this region were still known as "the Irish gangs" although that is now mostly a thing of the past.

As for African Americans, don't expect much to change as long as the police state remains so agressively frightened of black males. If you want to see what that means for a possible future where more blacks are focused and studious, you need only connect how police react to a black male driving a fast machine to the way the West has made a multi-decade project out of dragging the Muslim world AWAY from proficiency in STEM and industry (and self determination). And, yes, those last bits do come with the capacity to make weapons.

I now suspect that the dominant white culture (with its 'Five Eyes' mass surveillance over the world, because non-Anglo whites just aren't 'trustworthy' enough) is just as prone to gang mentality and has its own anti-intellectual, anti-science bent. Poor whites of the South are baying for other peoples' blood with every election cycle, and there is a core military establishment that is happy to ride atop that 'gangsta' mindset as their power base. If we don't grapple with racist and sectarian tendencies, then a hypothetical generation of black engineers and scientists would no doubt be demonized and attacked as powerful 'others'.

And, unfortunately, the Uncle Tom thing is real. A generation ago there were well educated blacks and Hispanics being held up as examples (and anti-progressive wedges) by the conservative Republican establishment. I don't think its any coincidence their facade at home in the US melted away in the wake of the neocons 'clash of civilizations' and 'New American Century' project; The privilege, bigotry and aggressive attitudes spilled over and became too blatant even for Uncle Toms to deny.

If American civilization wants to get past its crisis of identities and aggression, it will have to cast off its burgeoning police state and make sentencing for crimes resemble actual justice instead of formalized racism. It will have to stop making global military domination its work-a-day norm, and actually gain enough sense to bring its oligarchs to heel.

TL;DR; Our educated white folk are not so great, and some of our brightest are hard at work trying to drag large swathes of the world back into the stone age, and turn the rest of it into a 1920s over-financialized casino. Most of what passes for 'enlightenment' is technology worship (not science), ecocide and a lust for control and punishment. If the people you're complaining about change and join the rat race, how will that make things better?

I don't know why this is moderated down, it is absolutely correct. Ubuntu provides and supports both upstart and systemd:

It's worth noting that while systemd is the default in Ubuntu 15.04, all of the Upstart packages are still there, and you can in fact keep using it if you wish. If you want to switch back and forth, you can use Grub and select "Advanced options for Ubuntu," where you will find an "Ubuntu, with Linux ... (upstart)" entry. If you want to permanently switch, install the upstart-sysv package.

Mint is just following their lead, which makes sense given that Mint is based on Ubuntu. This is a non-story, fabricated because editors know systemd flamebait generates traffic.

Ah, sharing the science of your gut feelings is it? Very rigorous. Your gut doesn't beat scientific models which make predictions which have so far agreed with the data (and are also tested by making sure they can predict past changes in the climate too). http://arstechnica.com/science... http://arstechnica.com/science...

" Oh by the way, more CO2, more for plants to breath, better crops."
This is hopelessly naive. Yes, crops can photosynthesise more, but there are other implications on crops and the environment more generally. Specifically, nutrient levels are reduced in tests:
"Effects on human nutrition are likely as well. In FACE experiments, protein concentrations in grains of wheat, rice and barley, and in potato tubers, are decreased by 5â"14% under elevated CO2 (Taub et al. 2008). Crop concentrations of nutritionally important minerals including calcium, magnesium and phosphorus may also be decreased under elevated CO2 (Loladze 2002; Taub & Wang 2008)."
http://www.nature.com/scitable...
so it's a mixed picture. But that isn't the real issue with crops. Some regions may have gains in production, but a larger share will lose production: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm... pg 488

A major issue for crops is that an increasing frequency of droughts etc is having and will have an increasingly major impact on food supplies:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm...
and those areas affected by droughts will be hit even more (particularly Africa) http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... . Of course, this is still one narrow area of the impacts from climate change.

"We WANT the greenhouse effect."
The greenhouse effect is the warming that follows an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases. You managed to balls that up and confuse it with the increase in CO2.

Ah, sharing the science of your gut feelings is it? Very rigorous. Your gut doesn't beat scientific models which make predictions which have so far agreed with the data (and are also tested by making sure they can predict past changes in the climate too). http://arstechnica.com/science... http://arstechnica.com/science...

" Oh by the way, more CO2, more for plants to breath, better crops."
This is hopelessly naive. Yes, crops can photosynthesise more, but there are other implications on crops and the environment more generally. Specifically, nutrient levels are reduced in tests:
"Effects on human nutrition are likely as well. In FACE experiments, protein concentrations in grains of wheat, rice and barley, and in potato tubers, are decreased by 5â"14% under elevated CO2 (Taub et al. 2008). Crop concentrations of nutritionally important minerals including calcium, magnesium and phosphorus may also be decreased under elevated CO2 (Loladze 2002; Taub & Wang 2008)."
http://www.nature.com/scitable...
so it's a mixed picture. But that isn't the real issue with crops. Some regions may have gains in production, but a larger share will lose production: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm... pg 488

A major issue for crops is that an increasing frequency of droughts etc is having and will have an increasingly major impact on food supplies:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm...
and those areas affected by droughts will be hit even more (particularly Africa) http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... . Of course, this is still one narrow area of the impacts from climate change.

"We WANT the greenhouse effect."
The greenhouse effect is the warming that follows an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases. You managed to balls that up and confuse it with the increase in CO2.

Perhaps there are millions of reasons why you are receiving spam and weird things?

Arstechnica above has a half dozen security issues related to it. It is so bad at this stage I would not recommend anyone use it as the plugins are not updated even if the core is which means full security exploit season. Especially if your programmer wrote them in 2011 and is no longer around and you have +40 security exploits and sql injections. Like IE 6 it needs to be avoided at all costs.

Perhaps there are millions of reasons why you are receiving spam and weird things?

Arstechnica above has a half dozen security issues related to it. It is so bad at this stage I would not recommend anyone use it as the plugins are not updated even if the core is which means full security exploit season. Especially if your programmer wrote them in 2011 and is no longer around and you have +40 security exploits and sql injections. Like IE 6 it needs to be avoided at all costs.

Perhaps there are millions of reasons why you are receiving spam and weird things?

Arstechnica above has a half dozen security issues related to it. It is so bad at this stage I would not recommend anyone use it as the plugins are not updated even if the core is which means full security exploit season. Especially if your programmer wrote them in 2011 and is no longer around and you have +40 security exploits and sql injections. Like IE 6 it needs to be avoided at all costs.

Stop using that security nightmare.

PLEASE!

IE 6 and XP with pre service pack 2 had less security exploits for crying out loud. No IT professional should trust it as arstechnica and others have a 0 day posted every other month.

Stop using that security nightmare.

PLEASE!

IE 6 and XP with pre service pack 2 had less security exploits for crying out loud. No IT professional should trust it as arstechnica and others have a 0 day posted every other month.

Stop using that security nightmare.

PLEASE!

IE 6 and XP with pre service pack 2 had less security exploits for crying out loud. No IT professional should trust it as arstechnica and others have a 0 day posted every other month.

Stop using that security nightmare.

PLEASE!

IE 6 and XP with pre service pack 2 had less security exploits for crying out loud. No IT professional should trust it as arstechnica and others have a 0 day posted every other month.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

4 MB Embedded DRAM video memory bandwidth at 48 gigabytes per second

PS2 main RAM is 32MB of RAMBUS RAM.

You know how some PC centric developers complained about the small caches on the PS2? Well the PS2 is not a PC, who needs huge cache when you have bandwidth to burn..
http://arstechnica.com/feature...

http://archive.arstechnica.com...

The PS3 also has massive bandwidth. The PS4 is more conventional from a PC devs perspective but also uses GDDR5 as main RAM. So yes, the PS2, PS3, PS4 can zip data around inside very quickly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

4 MB Embedded DRAM video memory bandwidth at 48 gigabytes per second

PS2 main RAM is 32MB of RAMBUS RAM.

You know how some PC centric developers complained about the small caches on the PS2? Well the PS2 is not a PC, who needs huge cache when you have bandwidth to burn..
http://arstechnica.com/feature...

http://archive.arstechnica.com...

The PS3 also has massive bandwidth. The PS4 is more conventional from a PC devs perspective but also uses GDDR5 as main RAM. So yes, the PS2, PS3, PS4 can zip data around inside very quickly.

Don't let them give you a set-top box. Make them give you a CableCard instead, and take a stand for the spirit of "any lawful device" (which should have been applied to cable companies, but hasn't).

Also, they'll tell you the box is "free," but if you swap it for a CableCard they should give you a discount.

http://arstechnica.com/securit...

Certainly they aren't fixing all of the issues.

we have not seem massive Android botnets or waves of spam from infected phones

Seems like it works as well as my tiger repellent stone then.

It wouldn't matter what criminal charges I was facing, I would be boldly laughing in the face of this moron who feels the need to go all "sci-fi" while at work, as if the Star Trek embellishments somehow helped here.

Are you suggesting that a court which listened to Prenda's John Steele and Paul Hansmeier, operating under the name 'Lightspeed Media Corporation', argue that Court ordered sanctions don't apply to them because they don't feel like paying, is still somehow dignified and above making references to something as banal as Skiffy? That a defendant who is considered an embarrassment to the entire legal profession cannot ever be subjected to ridicule?

No, I guess what I'm asking for here is for a person that represents our legal system at one of the highest levels to not reduce themselves down to the utter fucking stupidity that may be presented in front of them at any given time.

But I guess asking a professional to maintain professionalism in a courtroom is simply too much to ask.

It's a reference to the (IMHO unprofessional and tasteless; the Hulk should sue) title graphic that Arse Technica (sic) used for their initial story. Until this post, the only way to get to that image from here is to click the link that goes back to the previous slashdot article, and then click that link there.

It wouldn't matter what criminal charges I was facing, I would be boldly laughing in the face of this moron who feels the need to go all "sci-fi" while at work, as if the Star Trek embellishments somehow helped here.

Are you suggesting that a court which listened to Prenda's John Steele and Paul Hansmeier, operating under the name 'Lightspeed Media Corporation', argue that Court ordered sanctions don't apply to them because they don't feel like paying, is still somehow dignified and above making references to something as banal as Skiffy? That a defendant who is considered an embarrassment to the entire legal profession cannot ever be subjected to ridicule?

More to the point, did you know that Prendateer John Steel already tried calling a district judge a moron and laughing in his face in his own courtroom, with predictable results.

If anybody has offended the dignity of the courts and running up the bill for the State of California before running off without paying, it was John Steele, Paul Hansmeier and Mark Lutz.

Perhaps after you have spent six years in law school, nine years in the Marine Corps, served as a county sheriff for eleven years and then put in twenty-five years as a practising lawyer before being appointed to sit in county and state courts, you too will be able to write legal decisions any way you like. Until then, there's always complaining on the Internet.

True but the link points to another slashdot story, the summary of which says nothing about Star Trek. The link should have pointed directly to the Ars Technica article.

It's called discovery! And it's required under the law. You can't hide evidence or its provenance from the defense!!!

In theory that is true.

In practice, many people cannot afford an extensive legal fight and settle quickly. Those who do actually go through the courts --- only about 3% in the federal system --- often learn during discovery that the initial reports came by anonymous sources.

Anonymous sources are tricky. A single anonymous source is not considered reliable enough to issue a warrant, but is reliable enough to investigate. Two different anonymous sources can be enough to meet probable cause (People v. Coulombe (2001)).

So as has been documented several times, one government agency, such as the NSA, will observe some illegal behavior but they are not allowed to prosecute. If the information is traced back to them during discovery then the unlawful search or unusable information would be dropped, so they give an anonymous tip to local law enforcement, reporting all the details they are able. Local law enforcement gets the anonymous tip, investigates, finds exactly what the tip said was there, and arrests them all. When questioned about their sources, law enforcement can pull out the records of an anonymous tip, mention that the reporter refused to give their name and that is why they investigated.

It isn't always that the source itself is unlawful. There are many types of lawful recordings and intercepts but during the course of the investigation they hear about other items. Due to the scope of their work they may be legally forbidden from following those other leads.

The term is "parallel construction". Usually the local police either are unaware that the report came from another agency or unlawful search, or they suspect it did but keep their mouths shut. With a successful parallel construction there is no evidence to be uncovered during discovery. The person making the report is careful to leave no evidence connecting their report (which would taint the entire case) that the local officers could discover.

Several cases have been several cases recently where officers were caught attempting to use parallel construction (and failing at it) when data came from these devices.

It's called discovery! And it's required under the law. You can't hide evidence or its provenance from the defense!!!

In theory that is true.

In practice, many people cannot afford an extensive legal fight and settle quickly. Those who do actually go through the courts --- only about 3% in the federal system --- often learn during discovery that the initial reports came by anonymous sources.

Anonymous sources are tricky. A single anonymous source is not considered reliable enough to issue a warrant, but is reliable enough to investigate. Two different anonymous sources can be enough to meet probable cause (People v. Coulombe (2001)).

So as has been documented several times, one government agency, such as the NSA, will observe some illegal behavior but they are not allowed to prosecute. If the information is traced back to them during discovery then the unlawful search or unusable information would be dropped, so they give an anonymous tip to local law enforcement, reporting all the details they are able. Local law enforcement gets the anonymous tip, investigates, finds exactly what the tip said was there, and arrests them all. When questioned about their sources, law enforcement can pull out the records of an anonymous tip, mention that the reporter refused to give their name and that is why they investigated.

It isn't always that the source itself is unlawful. There are many types of lawful recordings and intercepts but during the course of the investigation they hear about other items. Due to the scope of their work they may be legally forbidden from following those other leads.

The term is "parallel construction". Usually the local police either are unaware that the report came from another agency or unlawful search, or they suspect it did but keep their mouths shut. With a successful parallel construction there is no evidence to be uncovered during discovery. The person making the report is careful to leave no evidence connecting their report (which would taint the entire case) that the local officers could discover.

Several cases have been several cases recently where officers were caught attempting to use parallel construction (and failing at it) when data came from these devices.

really? please elaborate because i havent seen them do anything insane in a decade plus

Eh, Secure Boot http://arstechnica.com/informa...

... on ars technica: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/05/01/googles-new-version-of-password-alert-blocking-bypass-is-bypassed/. This one also has the original author of the exploit commenting on his findings.

No, I mean like how the old, old AT&T (before the monopoly was broken up) used to only allow "approved devices" on its landline network, gave you exactly one choice of phone (the Model 500), and had to send a technician out to hard-wire it, using screw terminals, to the phone network (i.e., this was before RJ-11).

I almost did a double-take with this story; a few months ago I read about computers having solved heads-up _limit_ Texas hold’em: http://arstechnica.com/science...

Well, it looks like the computer can win when there is a limit, but humans can still win when there is no limit.

I guess that's not too surprising: the limit really cuts down the number of choices, making a brute-force calculations more practical, and brute-force calculations are what computers do best. Without the restrictions of a limit, the AI needs to be a lot more clever. I wonder how long it'll be until computers win at this.

Probably not, and the system shat it's self when a single U2 spy plane flew into the air space at 60K feet.

Apparently it tried to check all aircraft/altitudes for collision courses and then took a giant shit and crashed.
http://arstechnica.com/informa...

The system has been rolled out one center at a time over the past several years. This article is just stating that the last center has been converted and the transition from HOST to ERAM is complete. That's not to say that there weren't glitches along the way.

Recently someone found out a virtual nose helps a lot, so maybe that will help:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

"There is ample evidence of Ocean acidification to suggest that CO2 needs to be treated as a pollutant."

Then I'm sure you'll have no problem providing that evidence of this and of any harm..

I can tell you ahead of time corals have genes that switch on to handle heat and co2 and they have survived 7000 ppm CO2 in the past and that this is not affecting reefs which by some miracle are only dying near man where he pollutes; in the open ocean coral is fine.

Tree of life with time scale
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...

Historic co2
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Corals can turn certain genes on and off to cope with heat
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Dr. Bruce Carlson produced a wonderful video demonstrating the resilient capacity of coral reefs if humans would simply stopped interfering with nature.
http://www.advancedaquarist.co...

Palau's coral reefs surprisingly resistant to ocean acidification
http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ....

Total reef losses due to climate change are unlikely
http://www.advancedaquarist.co...

For cold water corals, warming is beating acidification to drive a growth spurt
http://arstechnica.com/science...