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The Clinton administration used Lotus Notes, and none of this was newsworthy. Lotus Notes is a solid database system with excellent replication.

Then the Bush administration came in and ditched Notes for Exchange and made headlines for lost emails and failure to archive; almost as if the crappy Microsoft functionality was desirable for not being up to the task of keeping operable, accurate archives of staff messages.

The current administration uses a Drupal/OpenAtrium intranet with email notification.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/04/bush-lost-e-mails/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/08/white-house-memo-no-white-house-email-recovery-this-year/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/11/whitehousegov-releases-second-set-open-source-code

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/in-salt-lake-city-for-the-2002-olympics-the-nsa-may-have-read-your-texts/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130821/00421524264/nsa-fbi-spied-all-emails-salt-lake-city-before-after-olympics.shtml
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/08/nsa-olympics-spying-salt-lake-city/
"nobody agreed that we would trade off our fundamental civil rights for the government to come in and spy on us"

Recall the early days of brand name VoIP with p2p qualities? keep using it, its safe...difficult, tricky, outside the USA, complex...
Then reality unfolds years later :)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/let-us-count-the-ways-how-the-feds-legally-technically-get-our-data/

Don't mention what the fuck it does or anything.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/facebook-suddenly-deletes-social-fixers-facebook-pages/

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/bitcoin-talk-forum-hacked-hours-after-making-cameo-in-silk-road-takedown/ might be it?

It might have been a very large push in getting Nvidia to be more supportive of an open driver.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/nvidia-seeks-peace-with-linux-pledges-help-on-open-source-driver/

They have also been putting out a better closed driver for linux for years in my opinion. I have never had anything but issues with the radeon amd drivers. Sometimes you want things to work more than you want them to be open. This could be very good for the opensource community.

Re: felony in the process.
Yes the ability to get admin rights or add code while the owner is away/sleeping would be tempting as part of a larger offensive military cyber capacity.
With tasks been outsourced to private security firms and "jokes" about individuals on "lists" this could get interesting:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/ex-nsa-chief-jokes-about-hunting-down-snowden-advocates-targeted-killings/
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-10-02/chief-dhs-privacy-officer-government-called-privacy-office-terrorists
Maybe that ideological or privacy news related home sever makes a list too?

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/10/poking-holes-in-the-gravity-trailer-with-nasas-help/

The judge didn't *understand* the situation -- she outright questioned whether "unencrypted" was even a word, and said that if Levinson wanted to make the accounts secure, he should have used a different key for every single one. From yesterday's Ars Technica article (emphasis mine):

By July 9, prosecutors asked the court to hold Levison in contempt of court, and he continued to resist, arguing that by handing over the key, he would be compromising the security of all users.

In an August 1 hearing, Judge Claude Hilton said that it was effectively Levison's fault that sites have only a single private SSL key.

"You're blaming the government for something that's overbroad, but it seems to me that your client is the one that set up the system that's designed not to protect that information, because you know that there needs to be access to calls that go back and forth to one person or another," the judge asked Levison's attorney, Jesse Binnall. "And to say you can't do that just because you've set up a system that ...has to be unencrypted, if there's such a word, that doesn't seem to me to be a very persuasive argument."

Wasn't it just last year that SONY kept gettin' hacked for stupid security? And they weren't the only ones. Just a couple years ago, PC Pro had an article called "Is This The Golden Age of Hacking?". Last year, Ars Technica had an article "Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger". The state of security on the internet is appalling & that was well known before Snowden woke people up with more facts about the appalling nature of internet security.

In the Ars Technica article about it they speculate that the "investors" just want to get rid of him so they more easily can sell off parts of Microsoft to make a quick buck.

A FSIC judge used that blame-the-victim security logic according to a new interview with Lavabit's ex-owner at Ars Technica, even though the judge wasn't sure if "unencrypted" is even a real word:

[Levison] continued to resist, arguing that by handing over the key, he would be compromising the security of all users. In an August 1 hearing, Judge Claude Hilton said that it was effectively Levison's fault that sites have only a single private SSL key.

"You're blaming the government for something that's overbroad, but it seems to me that your client is the one that set up the system that's designed not to protect that information, because you know that there needs to be access to calls that go back and forth to one person or another," the judge asked Levison's attorney, Jesse Binnall. "And to say you can't do that just because you've set up a system that ...has to be unencrypted, if there's such a word, that doesn't seem to me to be a very persuasive argument."

[sarcasm]Yeah, nothing wrong with being so over-intrusive since it's not like the guy really tried to make it secure...[/sarcasm]

• com.aurorasoftworks.quadrant.ui.standard
• com.aurorasoftworks.quadrant.ui.advanced
• com.aurorasoftworks.quadrant.ui.professional
• com.redlicense.benchmark.sqlite
• com.antutu.ABenchMark
• com.greenecomputing.linpack
• com.greenecomputing.linpackpro
• com.glbenchmark.glbenchmark27
• com.glbenchmark.glbenchmark25
• com.glbenchmark.glbenchmark21
• ca.primatelabs.geekbench2
• com.eembc.coremark
• com.flexycore.caffeinemark
• eu.chainfire.cfbench
• gr.androiddev.BenchmarkPi
• com.smartbench.twelve
• com.passmark.pt_mobile
• se.nena.nenamark2
• com.samsung.benchmarks
• com.samsung.benchmarks:db
• com.samsung.benchmarks:es1
• com.samsung.benchmarks:es2
• com.samsung.benchmarks:g2d
• com.samsung.benchmarks:fs
• com.samsung.benchmarks:ks
• com.samsung.benchmarks:cpu

It's about performance as well as improvements to the overall chip architecture. RAM addressing is not yet an issue for phones or tablets. A couple of links you might want to read about this: http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/09/17/inside-apples-64-bit-ios-7-and-the-prospects-for-a-64-bit-android http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/review-with-the-iphone-5s-apple-lays-groundwork-for-a-brighter-future/3/

There is a file containing a list of all the common benchmarking apps, and everything in the list is a benchmarking app - nothing else. When one of those packages is run, the phone locks the frequency of all cores to fMax and also seems to fiddle with the GPU.

The result is a battery-nightmare, but a boost of 20% to *only* benchmark apps. This is despicable - plain and simple.

See http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/galaxy-note-3s-benchmarking-adjustments-inflate-scores-by-up-to-20/

Simon.

We already know the NIST has crippled some of its standards in response to NSA pressure.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/stop-using-nsa-influence-code-in-our-product-rsa-tells-customers/

It was assumed for years, but we never had proof till recently.

LAW & DISORDER / CIVILIZATION & DISCONTENTS How the FBI found Miss Teen USA’s webcam spy RAT user "cutefuzzypuppy" wasn't all that cute. by Nate Anderson - Sept 27 2013, 7:40pm EDT INTERNET CRIME 83 RATer's moniker was "cutefuzzypuppy."

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock The sextortionist who snapped nude pictures of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf through her laptop's webcam has been found and arrested, the FBI revealed yesterday. 19-year old Jared James Abrahams, a California computer science student who went by the online handle "cutefuzzypuppy," had as many as 150 "slave" computers under his control during the height of his webcam spying in 2012.

Watching all of those webcams to see when a young woman changes her clothes takes a serious time commitment, and Abrahams made one; he "was always at his computer," according the FBI complaint against him. Abrahams yesterday turned himself in after the complaint was unsealed, and a federal judge released him on a $50,000 bond.

Anatomy of a RATer

How did Abrahams get his start learning the intricacies of remote administration tools (RATs), the malware used to spy on his victims? Not surprisingly, he was a regular user of hackforums.net, which features a large RAT forum that I profiled earlier this year. As cutefuzzypuppy, Abrahams asked for plenty of help distributing software like DarkComet to victims, since he "suck[ed] at social engineering" and needed to find better ways to spread his spyware.

He also announced his successes. On May 17, 2012, he told the RAT community at hackforums.net, "Recently I infected a person at my school with darkcomet. It was total luck that I got her infected because I suck at social engineering. Anyway, this girl happens to be a model and a really good looking one at that :D. I was hoping I could use her and her facebook account to further spread my darkcomet rat. I want to mass message all her friends on facebook but I have no idea what to message them to get them to download the rat. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated :)."

The "model" in question appears to have been Wolf, whose machine was infected in mid-2012. Abrahams used DarkComet to snap lots of nude photos of Wolf, whom he watched until March 21, 2013. That day, Wolf received a message from Facebook saying that someone was attempting to change her password. Then came a similar message from Twitter—then messages from Tumblr and Yahoo. Suspicious, she checked her profiles; her Twitter account now displayed a "half nude" photo of Wolf.

Thirty minutes later, she received an e-mail from her attacker. He demanded that Wolf either send him "good quality" nude pictures through Snapchat, that she send a video of herself, or that she "go on skype with me and do what I tell you to do for 5 minutes." If she didn't, the attacker pledged to release his many nude photos widely—and he attached a few just to prove how many he had.

Instead, Wolf went to the FBI, and the Bureau's LA cyber squad swung into action. On March 29, the FBI looked at Wolf's laptop and found evidence of both DarkComet and another RAT known as Blackshades, which confirmed how the attacker had taken his photos. But who was he? The IP addresses behind the attacker's e-mails resolved back only to a VPN provider which purposely kept no logs. But the RATs themselves had connected back to the attacker by accessing no-ip.org, a service which allows users to dynamically map their IP address to a domain name (in this case, to cutefuzzypuppy.zapto.org and schedule2013.no-ip.org), thereby allowing the "slaves" to phone home, even when the attacker was using a dynamic IP address from a home Internet account. No-ip.org did keep records, and the FBI obtained them.

The records showed that the

ArsTechnica covered this "epidemic" in March.

The article is slightly sensationalist, but interesting ... The Remote Administration Tool is the revolver of the Internet's Wild West.

Perhaps law enforcement has opened a can of worms... or monkeys... autistic monkeys.

The NSA system is automatic too...
http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/newsrelease/gmail-judge-holds-internet-accountable-wiretap-laws-key-consumer-victory
Long term the US legal system seems to be returning to the "neither instrumental to the provision of email services, nor are they an incidental effect of providing these services" side.
Another aspect is the http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/01/supreme-court-holds-warrantless-gps-tracking-unconstitutional/
near the end under "Sotomayor attacks the third-party doctrine"
"ill-suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers."
The public wants their "persons, houses, papers, and effects" back ie to be protected from a gov in cahoots with a .com.

So we are back to the "third party doctrine" legal cover. You dial out to the phone company and your rights are gone as you entered the "phone number".
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/01/supreme-court-holds-warrantless-gps-tracking-unconstitutional/ has some emerging insights on long term US legal thought surround ongoing metadata use.
The public, press and political leaders and gov spy staff now have a clear understanding of what "metadata" is in 2013.
http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-continues-to-press-intelligence-officials-on-needed-domestic-surveillance-reforms
They also understand that its domestic vs the old line about only from a foreign country to the USA.
Recall the great quotes form 2006 and reflect where the privacy debate is thanks to Snowden and many others :)
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm

For those who don't know, Senators Wyden (D-OR), Udall (D-CO), Paul (R-KY) and Blumenthal (D-CT) say they will introduce a bill today to rein in the NSA.

Somebody beat you to it and I'm not talking about the film. There is a product called Solent intended to be an inexpensive meal substitute. Apparently it is not too bad, and leaves you feeling full (and gassy.)

A good story about somebody who tried it for a week: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/08/nothing-but-the-soylent-were-trying-1-full-week-of-the-meal-substitute/
Their site where you can pre-order: https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body

Oh, my sweet Ars. How I do wish for better fnord your collective, squishy wetwarez:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/youtube-tries-to-rescue-its-terrible-commenters-from-themselves/?comments=1&post=25369641#comment-25369641

their methodology results in a pretty pricey setup

You're being pedantic in a way that's annoying and counterproductive, unless you're the kind of person who wallet thickens on discovering the following tidbit:

Audioquest Everest are the most expensive speaker cables in the world at over $21000 for 3m.

Oh come on. This does not properly belong in the category of "speaker cables". If it did, "taking a step back" would land you this:

Pear Cable Corporation's ANJOU Speaker Cable, a 12 foot length of which retails for $7,250

These aren't products, they are honeypots of rarefied nonsense. Navy Investigating Bills For $660 Ashtrays, $400 Wrenches:

The Navy is investigating bills from Grumman Aerospace Corp. to determine why it was charged $660 each for two aircraft ashtrays and $400 each for two socket wrenches.

The costs of the parts, manufactured by Grumman, were revealed during an inspection this month, said Cmdr. Tom Jurkowsky, spokesman for the Pacific Fleet Naval Air Force.

Burch said the Navy officers who authorized the purchases would be disciplined and possibly dismissed.

First cross off anything that will get you disciplined or possibly dismissed, then take a step back toward the sane center. Is that so hard?

I don't build as many boxes as I once did, but it only takes a couple of hours a year to stay current if you know how to parse the tea leaves, and you pick a up quick booster shot from Ars Technica System Guide: July 2013.

When I've purchased bundled systems, I usually discover surprising limitations and short-cuts down the road unless one pays the insurance premium of buying twice the box you really needed.

Apple has a tiny product line, so at least with Apple any warts are soon well known, until the day comes that they change the software underneath you and deprive you of features you had come to depend upon, with little warning and no public rationale. Welcome to an ecosystem with benefits you can't refuse.

Just as with Surface 2, Microsoft wanted to make Surface Pro 2 a better Surface Pro. The major complaint leveled at Surface Pro was that its battery life was poor. The internal improvements made to Surface Pro 2 substantially address that.

That change is, however, basically invisible. The device looks and feels almost identical to the old one. It just goes faster and runs for longer. In practical terms, those are huge improvements that will make the new device far better than the old one. In a few minutes of hands-on time at a launch event, however, you'd never notice the difference.

Further strengthening its productivity credentials are additional RAM and storage. Four models of Surface Pro 2 will be offered: 64GB storage with 4GB RAM at $899, 128GB with 4GB at $999, 256GB with 8GB at $1,299, and 512GB with 8GB at a rather eye-watering $1,799.

Overall, it's clear that Microsoft isn't going to abandon its productivity tablet idea any time soon. If the Surface concept appeals, the new devices are in every sense better. They address the major shortfalls of their respective predecessors. In so doing, they become a lot more appealing.

If, however, the productivity tablet idea has no appeal—if you just don't care about Office or just can't give up the laptop form factor—then the new devices won't fundamentally change that. For that, Microsoft will need to take another step down its path to becoming a Devices and Services company. They'd need to develop, for example, an eight inch "Surface Mini" and perhaps even a Surface Ultrabook.

Both of Microsoft's new tablets will be available to buy on October 22 with preorders starting on September 24

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/hands-on-with-surface-2-and-surface-pro-2-second-verse-same-as-the-first/

If I search for "loli president bomb" then that's what's going to get me in trouble, not the results I receive.

As if the user-agent string wouldn't land you on the watchlist. That wasn't a joke by the way. And as far as the results you receive, you probably shouldn't trust those either. But let's set aside your awesome new indy band name Loli: President Bomb and focus on the real issue here: The gullibility of free software consumers. They are exactly as gullible as Windows and Macintosh users, it would seem: They're trusting an abstract organization that is continuing to collect personally-identifiable information, simply because said organization upon being caught doing so, has said "oops! Our bad. We'll anonymize the data now." And these people should know better than to believe such claims.

Perhaps it is a sign of how far Linux has come into the mainstream then: It's become the microbrew of the IT world. All these new distributions, the promise of being trendy, geeky, and cool... and yet, suspiciously lacking in all of the things that made "Free as in freedom, not free as in beer" so appealing to the much smaller community of non-hipsters that was here before. Linux has finally made it to the big time: It's become "hip". And no surprise...Ubuntu, like many other major distributions, sees the chance at monetization and is taking it. Oh, I know... I'll get modbombed again for suggesting that the pure and noble Linux isn't like all the other operating systems out there... but then, wasn't that the goal all along? To create an alternative to closed source? Mission: Accomplished. Too bad success isn't what they thought it would look like.

I think you're forgetting how much animation there was in iOS 6 just because you got used to it, whereas the iOS 7 ones are different and are therefore noticeable. Other than the parallax effect and the translucence/blur, which I'd already mentioned, where else are there animations/eye candy where there weren't before?

Ars Technica's review of iOS 7 gives good details on this. Skip down to the bottom of page 3 for a side-by-side video comparison of the new animations and how much longer they take than the old animations and the old animation-free operations.

Ars Technica made a video comparing animated transitions in iOS 6 and iOS 7 side by side. The animations in iOS 7 do take longer than those in iOS 6, making the user experience more sluggish.

Direct link to video.
Link to article with the video in it

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-death-sentence-ios-7-on-the-iphone-4/

"When asked whether you should install iOS 6 on an iPhone 3GS, we can say "yes" without hesitation or condition. When it comes to the iPhone 4 and iOS 7, our response is a more measured "do it if you like the new features, but have you considered a newer phone?"

iOS 7 on Apple's oldest-supported hardware is hardly a disaster, but it's apparent that the only reason Apple issued this update was because they were selling the iPhone 4 free with contract up until September 10. It has been their value option for a year, and in the Apple ecosystem, even people who bought a new iPhone 4 on September 9 will get at least a year's worth of updates. The A4 simply isn't up to the task of rendering iOS 7 as Apple intended, and the upgrade in general performance and apparent smoothness between even the iPhone 4 and year-newer 4S is significant (to say nothing of the iPhone 5, 5C, and 5S).

When it comes to launching apps, the iPhone 4's general slowness is only exacerbated by the too-long animation durations in iOS 7. This is also a problem on the faster phones and tablets, but at least there you've got faster underlying hardware to keep everything moving at a steady clip.

It's great that Apple isn't abandoning older iPhone owners really. People buying an iPhone 4 free with contract were still getting a phone that felt reasonably fast with iOS 6, and they weren't necessarily aware that they were getting an older single-core SoC with an older, slower GPU that would be ill-suited for Apple's new direction. At least they have the option to upgrade. That said, the iPhone 4 and iOS 7 just can't quite provide an experience that's up to Apple's usual standard. Apply the update if there's an iOS 7 feature (or an iOS 7-only app) that you need in your life, but our recommendation now would either be to wait for potential performance boosts in a future iOS 7 update or to start looking into a new iPhone 5C or 5S."

I was unable to install many apps because they required the new version of iOS and older versions of those apps were unavailable on the App Store.

They fixed that the other day too; now the App Store will warn you if the current version won't run on older iOS, and will offer you the last version that will run on your system .

Of course, now people are bitching about that...

But at least it fixes some of the more stupid fuckups - for example, iOS happily updating core apps like iBooks on old hardware to incompatible versions for the last year or so...

Dealing with your 'blockquote' style is way too hard. I suspect this is a rathole, and nobody else is reading it, and that you know what you said, so I'll omit the quotes.

So, your assertion is that changes in CO2 levels is NOT caused by human activity, or that the contribution by humans is negligible. Sadly, most authorities disagree with you. I have no way of measuring the effect, so I can't weigh in, other than to mention that I trust folks who do this for a living far more than I trust you. Here are a few links:

EPA
IPCC
NOAA
More IPCC
RealClimate

According to folks that study this, the sea level is rising. Here are some links:

Union of Concerned Scientists
National Geographic
EPA
NASA, scroll down.

The ice core mystery has been explained in such a way that the time differences are in the noise. Here is a link that attempts to explain it: arstechnica. However, one obvious reason why CO2 might follow temperature rises is that lots of CO2 is released in the arctic tundra when the permafrost melts. As solar cycles cause warming CO2 is released. However, it could easily be a situation where small changes in temperature cause CO2 spikes, which then contribute to a feedback loop. Since nobody was there, nobody really knows for sure. However, this article describes a paper in Nature 2012 that describes the feedback loop. Note the paper assumes that excess CO2 causes temperature rises. That is pretty much not contested at this point, I believe, due to a strong theoretical understanding of the interactions. Since there were no excess sources of CO2 in the Pleistocene, the temperature rise precedes the CO2 rise. Since we are artificially increasing CO2, we trigger the warming effect without a requirement for excess solar radiation.

I have read 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' by Taubes. The book is very convincing. The view of nutrition as a power game, with no real science behind it is quite interesting. Sadly for your case, there is LOTS of science to back up the assertions of Global Warming caused by human activity. Too many to simply dismiss.

If there is no problem with CO2 causing global warming, and we are going to be ok despite these emissions, well, that would be wonderful. Due to lobbying by Koch and friends, that is probably what we are going to end up with anyway. However, if there is only a 1% possibility that the worst will happen, and hundreds of millions of people will die because of it, I will still support doing whatever we can to prevent it. Can you really be so sure of your facts, many of which are supported by papers paid for by Koch subsidiaries who have a real financial interest in stopping any action on climate change?

Yep NSA did play a hand in this insecure logarithm.

Sadly just a month ago such a comment would be modded -1 offtopic or -1 flamebait as the equailivant of that crazy guy drunk talking to himself on the subway.

Slightly different topic, this algorithm seems very strong as it is what slashdotters say is a perfect encryption mathmatical algorithm. It is Elispse based so there are more numbers to guess and the seed process is very stenious to make it harder to crack. It seems like the best one which is why BASE libraries use it just on that evidence. Can a mathmatician or crypto expert explain why this NSA endorsed algorithm has so many problems compared to SHA-2 or BES?

The problem is that Snowden didn't just expose rights abuses. He exposed *everything* that the NSA did.

Actually, no. Barton Gellman of The Washington Post has said that he made sure that he had people he could trust not to release everything recklessly before he made his leaks. Glen Greenwald of The Guardian has also asserted that Snowden wanted people with discretion to have his data.

(Unless you live in the fairy land where idealistic heroes defeat Evil Doers, in which case, what Snowden did was a good thing. Too bad we don't live in fairy land.)

It's a bit closer of a neighbor to reality than the imaginary kingdom in which an agency that repeatedly lies to Congress can be trusted with the totalitarian power to watch everything everyone does because they're all just so damned noble and patriotic.

Frankly, I don't consider terrorists as big of a threat to me as I do an unchecked secret police bureau. It's not a matter of if but when these capabilities get turned against US citizens exercising their Constitutional rights to express political opinions that those in power don't like. All one has to do is remember COINTELPRO and Nixon.

Unless the two dominant sources of e-books (Amazon and Apple) support it: no.

That would be a yes then:

Amazon infuses e-books with HTML5 power with new KF8 format
It’s Official: iBooks Now Supports Epub3 which is based on XHTML1.1 which introduced html5 features to XHTML

The only question now is the nature of the tinfoil layers needed.
Was it tracking a user over a network?
Was it more a permission, checksum and no log files methods?
Was it on going help with long term decryption?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/nsa-taps-skype-chats-newly-published-snowden-leaks-confirm/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/can-apple-read-your-imessages-ars-deciphers-end-to-end-crypto-claims/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/new-york-times-provides-new-details-about-nsa-backdoor-in-crypto-spec/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/nsa-attains-the-holy-grail-of-spying-decodes-vast-swaths-of-internet-traffic/

The only question now is the nature of the tinfoil layers needed.
Was it tracking a user over a network?
Was it more a permission, checksum and no log files methods?
Was it on going help with long term decryption?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/nsa-taps-skype-chats-newly-published-snowden-leaks-confirm/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/can-apple-read-your-imessages-ars-deciphers-end-to-end-crypto-claims/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/new-york-times-provides-new-details-about-nsa-backdoor-in-crypto-spec/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/nsa-attains-the-holy-grail-of-spying-decodes-vast-swaths-of-internet-traffic/

The only question now is the nature of the tinfoil layers needed.
Was it tracking a user over a network?
Was it more a permission, checksum and no log files methods?
Was it on going help with long term decryption?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/nsa-taps-skype-chats-newly-published-snowden-leaks-confirm/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/can-apple-read-your-imessages-ars-deciphers-end-to-end-crypto-claims/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/new-york-times-provides-new-details-about-nsa-backdoor-in-crypto-spec/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/nsa-attains-the-holy-grail-of-spying-decodes-vast-swaths-of-internet-traffic/

The only question now is the nature of the tinfoil layers needed.
Was it tracking a user over a network?
Was it more a permission, checksum and no log files methods?
Was it on going help with long term decryption?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/nsa-taps-skype-chats-newly-published-snowden-leaks-confirm/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/can-apple-read-your-imessages-ars-deciphers-end-to-end-crypto-claims/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/new-york-times-provides-new-details-about-nsa-backdoor-in-crypto-spec/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/nsa-attains-the-holy-grail-of-spying-decodes-vast-swaths-of-internet-traffic/

If one assumes that Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are correct, and there is no observational evidence that they are not, then Yang-Mills theory, or something very much like it, is inevitable. It arises from the need for conservation of the various charges each force.

A Yang-Mills theory, based on {pick-your-favorite-group}, may be inevitable. Whether it would be the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory is another matter; it won't be.

Apple-Android fanboy war aside, Google dropped the requirement for NFC from Google Wallet today due to lack of device support. NFC has caught on about as well as QR Codes; in other words, it hasn't. It may be useful for some people, but it's ultimately just a feature bulletpoint and irrelevant to most users.

So, since the Gold Shop and the Real Money Auction House were the primary reasons they were giving for requiring the always online, does this mean that they'll be patching that "functionality" out as well?

They should.

The console versions do not have an auction house nor are they always online.

So the removal of the auction house should remove the need for always online since the consoles do not require it

Otherwise from that overview, it shows that the console version is in some ways superior to the PC versoin.

You seem to think you can patent an idea. You can't. It says so right in the uspto website.

Except that you can patent an idea in practice. Software patents are effectively patenting an idea. Software = Math. Math should be unpatentable as it is by definition abstract but you certainly can get a patent on software. Patent on software = patent on math = patent on idea. There is (so far) no requirement to provide working code and plenty of software patents have been approved for the last several decades without providing so much as a functional algorithm.

You know that models don't return 1 temperature, right? Looking at a chart like that tells you nothing about how accurate a model is. Models depend on a lot of inputs and, depending on what the inputs are, usually return a range for what they are forecasting. Usually, when talking about a model, there are multiple variations of inputs put in when trying to predict the future (as it's hard to know exactly what will happen). The proper way to validate a model is to take the original model, put in the actual data for the inputs and see if the predicted output matches the actual output. Just looking at a previously published paper tells you nothing unless you know that they correctly predicted the inputs.

THIS is how you test how accurate models actually are. The fact that you think that particular graph means all climate models are terrible (and the fact that you think it's a big deal that they tune models to fit past data, as that is the CORE of modeling in general) tells me all I need to know about how much you know about forecasting models. Which is obviously not much. (Note: my knowledge isn't about the specifics of climate change models, so I don't know exactly how much weight they put on various factors; my knowledge is about forecasting models in general and my specialty was population modeling).

Now there's Soylent...

http://arstechnica.com/search/?query=soylent

Look, the human body is a massively complex thing, but we can still say that calorines in > calories spent it = weight gain.

The problem with that analogy is that is seems people forget about the fact that a human can start exercising, therefor burning more calories that previously, and lose weight while taking in an even larger amount of calories.

In other words, models are based on one scenario,

No they're not:

Climate models are used to generate projections showing the consequences of various courses of action

Then you said:

and then not accurately corrected as reality shows them to be wrong.

And it's you that's wrong, again (from the above link, itself well documented with links):

In order to gain useful insights, we need climate models that behave realistically. Climate modelers are always working to develop an ever more faithful representation of the planet’s climate system. At every step along the way, the models are compared to as much real-world data as possible. They’re never perfect, but these comparisons give us a sense for what the model can do well and where it veers off track. That knowledge guides the use of the model, in that it tells us which results are robust and which are too uncertain to be relied upon.

Do you have issues with other scientific models, or are you a climate expert? Do you tell particle physicists that their models are wrong based on your gut feeling too?

And the problem with your scenario is that you fail at skepticism, per the article again:

Skepticism is certainly not an unreasonable response when first exposed to the concept of a climate model. But skepticism means examining the evidence before making up one’s mind.

Actually, the real problem with your post is that while you do point out that a human over-consuming food can begin exercising to put themselves back into a better state, you're also dismissing the current climate models without links of any kind, never mind links to peer-reviewed science. It this attitude that prevents action from being taken to address the "exercising" issue.

Which frankly blows my damned mind, its like "do no evil" is some sort of RDF instead of just another slogan like "think different" and "where do you want to go today?".

I mean from the nasty stuff we are learning from Snowden to the locking down the backend (where is the public API for Google+? Last I checked it didn't exist) to their using spammer techniques with Chrome like tying it to unrelated third party software which I would say is not only evil (because Joe and Jane don't know how to reset the default browser) but seriously douchey time and time again we have seen Google act just as nasty as MSFT and Apple yet...crickets. Hell it doesn't matter what they do, even ripping off the old "Requires IE" bit not only will people refuse to see this as nasty you will often see them charge to DEFEND whatever douchey thing Google does! When I pointed out on one forum that Google was using the old toolbar spammer trick of tying Chrome to programs like CCleaner and Defraggler I even had one defender say "Well I downloaded Chrome and didn't get CCleaner" because he was so fucking desperate to defend an obviously scumbag behavior he was grasping at any straws he could find!

I don't know, maybe I'm weird but I don't believe in "flying the flag" of ANY company, especially not the megacorps. If they make a good product like Win 7 or Android 2.x? I'll be happy to give credit where credit is due. If on the other hand they put out a product I think is crap, like Win 8 or those proprietary as hell and NSA wet dream ChromeBooks? I'll be the first to start passing out the rotten tomatoes. I honestly do not understand this whole "corporations as ballclubs" mentality, first I thought maybe it was a form of buyer's remorse, you have invested all this money into something you really don't have a use for so you defend and try to justify it like the gal I saw struggling to use an iPad for a grocery list, but then you have the free products like Chrome and Google Search that are just as militantly defended...I don't know, maybe I'm one of the last sane guys in the nuthouse but jumping through flaming hoops to defend some supermegacorp that would happily shove them under a bus if it made the stock bounce 8% is just insanity to me.

What is quality to you is not necessarily quality to someone else.

The idea that an amateur poking out a song on their laptop is somehow inferior to one mixed by a "professional" is totally up to each individual. And in fact, if more people are choosing said amateurs, then it is likely that said "professionals" are not really worth their pay grade.

Laying the blame on convenience is just an excuse. It's also much more "convenient" for me to download someone's MS paint sketch, but I don't see professional oil artists complaining that the internet is destroying their livelihood.

And finally - a few key quotes from the past (sourced from http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/10/100-years-of-big-content-fearing-technologyin-its-own-words/ )

That your fingerprints are all over your phones.

I believe mythbusters showed how trivial it was to bypass fingerprint protections by making your own "finger" from said prints? (This time on an electronic door lock).

Except that various people have already been investigating the fingerprint reading technology Apple is using, and they seem to think that it's really not that easy, because they're using a more robust technique than the classic scan-the-surface-optically method.

Dan Aris

This is Verizon Telecom (eg FiOS) not Verizon Wireless. (Though they will soon be one in the same). The FCC only regulated wireline ISPs in it's Open Internet Rules. Thus Verizon Wireless can play all the games they want and sell their paying customers to content providers at will.

However, the case that went to federal court this week was brought by Verizon Telecom so that they could charge Netflix, YouTube, et al.. And they don't even need to degrade service, they just need to drag their feet on peering agreements.

What they are doing is purely evil. It's hostile to their own customers and they are already causing these problems. Now they are suing to be allowed to make it worse.

Another good read:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/fccs-wishy-washy-rulemaking-might-doom-net-neutrality-in-court/

This is Verizon Telecom (eg FiOS) not Verizon Wireless. (Though they will soon be one in the same). The FCC only regulated wireline ISPs in it's Open Internet Rules. Thus Verizon Wireless can play all the games they want and sell their paying customers to content providers at will.

However, the case that went to federal court this week was brought by Verizon Telecom so that they could charge Netflix, YouTube, et al.. And they don't even need to degrade service, they just need to drag their feet on peering agreements.

What they are doing is purely evil. It's hostile to their own customers and they are already causing these problems. Now they are suing to be allowed to make it worse.

Another good read:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/fccs-wishy-washy-rulemaking-might-doom-net-neutrality-in-court/