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Spend a million dollars, and astroturf the meme "evil republican congress people are trying to influence you with memes".

Back in reality-world:

http://www.freedomworks.org/co...‘one-nation’-just-liberal-astroturfing

http://mashable.com/2008/08/08...

http://lonelyconservative.com/...

http://dailycaller.com/2013/02...

Google Street View cars are doing a great job so far:
http://mashable.com/2013/06/10...

Will they now restore the nuked accounts? Was her account restored later? Maybe they've restored it now.

Have you ever tried to contact Google? If you needed to discuss a problem with your account being shut down you would not find it easy. http://mashable.com/2011/07/18... He got his account back fairly quickly, but he would still have been much better off going nowhere near G+ !

I saw another Tamil movie of a murder victim reincarnating as a house fly to take revenge. The kind of graphics and CGI done by them is incredible.

There is a threat to Hollywood dominance too. Bollywood, the Indian cinema was the only one that withstood the assault of Hollywood while the French, German movie industries collapsed. Bollywood movies are as silly as the Hollywood ones but it connects with the Eastern audience well. Another movie by the Superstar, called Muthu, is a cornier than the farmlands of Iowa. Friendship, sacrifice, moral values, suffering while taking the high road... it got it all. That became a super hit in Japan! Got rave reviews contrasting the great inspiring storyline of that cornfest with the triteness of Hollywood.

Even Hollywood would not save America's bacon for long

Yeah, I suppose they should have just gone ahead with the launch. There was probably only a small chance of doing this or this.

Did _you_ know that your wireless router was using OpenSSL to manage EAP? Or did you just assume that having SSH blocked and not serving HTTPS would be enough?

And even if you did, is it even possible for you to upgrade a single library on your access point?

Try going back to the original CVE, the plethora of vulnerability checkers, or any of the press surrounding it. Every reference to Heartbleed pointed to HTTPS or, rarely, TLS and VPN services as being vulnerable to the bug. Now pretend that you don't know the implementation details of WPA and EAP. Based on all of that, why would you even consider updating or replacing every wireless device you have which don't use HTTPS unless the manufacturer told you?

Moreover, when have manufacturers of popular wireless equipment _ever_ produced timely and relevant updates without at least eight months lead time and court cases in at least three countries?

This is not true. Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the 1982 Nobel prize in literature for his book, "One Hundred Years of Solitude". He was denied US visas for his "subversive" attitudes, including his friendship with Fidel Castro. President Bill Clinton eventually lifted the restriction and helped him get a valid visa so he could visit the US.

                    http://mashable.com/2014/04/17...

...now they allow you to create pseudonymous sub-accounts that cannot be tracked back to any real life identify

I'm sorry, that wasn't possible when I joined G+. Back then they ban accounts with fake names

And setting one up doesn't sound so easy to me.

The use of actual pseudonyms is a little more complex. All pseudonym requests will require some kind of evidence, which could range from a URL to your scanned driver’s license. Google+ is not, however, accepting new pseudonyms. This is designed for “established ones.” Horowitz explained that the new account naming option is intended for “people who have earned credit in other social systems and want to redeem that credit in Google+ We will swing the doors open and welcome them to our system.” Google will destroy all documentation you send them once the account verification process is complete.

And the G+ faq pretty much wants you to use real names. No help on making these pseudonymous accounts there.

A lot of hoop jumping just to get some anonymity, won't you say.

History of AIM.

can't wait, in ten years, everyone can talk about the fights and struggles to get Facebook, iOS, Android, et al. out the door.

Gotta be some epic stories in there somewhere.

When did Slashdot become infested with NSA apologists?

Putin does this show annually. I am sure that the callers are vetted, but the questions tend to be wide-ranging, and don't really seem scripted to me. (I liked the one about buying Alaska back.) After all, it's a 4 hour show.

Now, as for Snowden, I see this as positive. State security is not talked about that much in Russia, and he brought it up. While Putin said pretty much what Obama might have said in 2010 (in other words, it's fair to doubt whether he was being truthful), it gets it out in the open, and all in all I think that is a good thing.

Current guidelines already include rc aircraft. The only difference here is 'commercial.' The FCC has guidelines for non-commercial use, but haven't done anything for commercial use.

And the "guidelines" they have for this non-commercial use of R/C planes that you're referring to says nothing of commercial or non-commercial use, and it's *advisory* -- not binding.

The FAA is basically just making up their rules as they go along, and they can't even bother to write them down so that people will know what the rules are. Instead, people get letters from the FAA saying that they're breaking the rules. Now, from that, people have sort of deduced what these unwritten rules are now, but it's still messed up.

Which is probably what prompted this ruling against the FAA ... they can't enforce laws that they haven't even made yet. (That said, they continue to try, and other courts may agree with them. But they could fix this by actually writing down their rules and making them official.)

Bah, it's just following the dictate to have haircuts like Kim Jong Un.

And, yes, that's evidently a real requirement in North Korea now.

Billionaire says "figure out a way to" pay for it. Meanwhile, he will be figuring out ways to collude with other companies to keep your salary low and to bring in thousands of people from Asia to compete with you for jobs.

FWIW Apple collects $6-$8 from HTC for every device sold for patent fees too. Nokia and Qualcomm collect patent licensing fees as well. The point is that the innovators then cross-license, so the more you innovate the more you have to cross-license and the less you have to pay in licensing fees.

That's a paraphraseof Joe Stalin's “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Except that the election results matched what the polls predicted in fifty out of fifty states. So this conspiracy theory requires the participation of not just the vote counters, but also the pollsters, journalists, and even Randall Monroe.

You can download Mavericks and do a "clean install" by following the instructions here: http://mashable.com/2013/10/23...

Use "SuperDuper" or Time Machine to do a complete backup first then after installing Mavericks use Migration Assistant to get your apps, files, and settings restored.

behold, the rhetorical skills of an ignorant nutcase. and it's funny you should mention education...since mine is an engineering degree that involved various geotechnical, geological, and environmental courses, and I'm currently working on expanding my education specifically into petroleum/energy engineering.

When you have information produced by someone with more than a 6th grade education, let me know.

why you looking for a tutor? because apparently you somehow think faultlines just stop at subsequent rock layers, rather than transcending layers (which they do). here, this wikipedia entry should be helpful. It has pictures, so even you can understand it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

And I didnt even mention flowback, the injection water that returns to the surface and has to be treated and released....except they dont always treat or capture it, and is another major source of contamination as a result of fracking.

And then there's these...

4 states confirm water pollution from drilling:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

Fracking Wastewater Radioactive and Contaminated, Study Finds:
http://www.livescience.com/401...

Fracking Investigation Finds Evidence of Water Contamination:
http://mashable.com/2014/01/06...

EPA's Study of Hydraulic Fracturing and Its Potential Impact on Drinking Water Resources:
http://www2.epa.gov/hfstudy/hy...

Environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Just so you don't think I'm pulling it out of my ass:

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/...
Official police statistics show that there were more than 40 cell phone muggings in November. The number may not seem high, but it is unsettling with just a portion of the crimes reported, and virtually all of them involve a gun, knife or physical assault.

http://mashable.com/2012/12/20...
Officer Gordon Shyy, media relations unit of the San Francisco Police Department, tells Mashable they don't have any data about whether cellphones deterred crime in the 90s, but said today cellphone muggings are "an epidemic nationwide."
From January 2012 through Nov. 30, 2012, there were approximately 1,732 cellphone related thefts reported in San Francisco out of a total of 3,487 robberies — making 50% of all robberies cellphone related.

I Googled "laser pointer helicopter" and the first results were exactly what I expected: images of this famous scene from the Egyption protests awhile back. The pilot apparently suffered no harm, and I think it's safe to say that as far as aircraft pilots go, he's probably had more laser pointers pointed at him than pretty much anyone else ever.

It's probably because of low wages too. I remember when I was in Malaysia I was with someone who dropped off some wages for Indonesians working in a Malaysia factory. Now I worked out the hourly rate and when I went back to Taiwan I mentioned it to people who know about things and they were surprised it was lower than someone doing the same job in China.

So a lot of Taiwanese companies like Foxconn are adopting a "China+1" strategy for manufacturing, i.e. factories in China plus one other lower wage country in Asia. Indonesia seems like a good bet for this.

Actually another thing that's interesting is that in places like Indonesia most people have a phone. Smartphone penetration is lower but it is growing fast

http://www.emarketer.com/Artic...

From 12% to 24% in one year. 84% of people have a mobile phone though.

Also if you look here

http://mashable.com/2013/08/27...

There are a lot places with more smartphones per capita than the US (56%). And a lot of them are in Asia - Hong Kong(62%), South Korea(73%), Singapore(71%) being the obvious ones. So the odds are that most Indonesians will buy a smartphone sooner or later. Importing stuff in Asia is a nightmare because of duties and bureaucracy. So one way around that is to make things in country instead of importing them. Foxconn are a contract manufacturer so they make things for other people's brands. It may well be that those brands think that manufacturing in Indonesia is a good bet because of a mix of low costs and the fact that getting a "Made in Indonesia" stamp on the device means they can avoid import duty on the devices they sell there. Also most likely they can get some assistance from the government given that they're building a factory which can employee a lot of people.

Another thing is that Indonesia may have its issues but it is probably easier to get your profits back from Indonesia to Taiwan. I've talked to people in Taiwan who've pointed out that doing that from China is non trivial. The Chinese RMB for example isn't convertible but the Indonesian Rupiah is.

They have been convicted or are in court in multiple places for deliberatily going around users' privacy settings in Safari and Internet Explorer.

if you read up on why it happened, it was to "to ensure things like the Google+ '+1' buttons that appear on third-party sites still work" which isn't some sinister plot to grab every bit of information from you. read about the when/how/why and you make understand it better: http://mashable.com/2013/01/25...

it's easy to hype things to make them sound like they were trying to steal your first born child (sensationalism) but seriously, it was harmless. they fixed it up so that stuff still works without bypassing anything.

Actually, if you do a google image search and actually look at SnapChat's "CAPTCHA", it's unbelievable, like a piece of work from the nineties.

It shows you nine images and asks you to select the ones where the ghost appears. (Random selections net 1 success in 512 right there, and they probably won't show you zero, one, eight, or nine ghosts, increasing success rates to 492 to 1.)

Notice that a ghost or its impostor is always the only white shape in the image. (Sometimes there are also a few white stars, moons, etc.) To improve from random guessing, isolate the white blob, select its center of mass, transform the outline into polar coordinates, perform a Fourier transform, prepare a vector from the Fourier coefficients, and all the ghosts will cluster together in that vector space. (There will also be a star cluster, an apple cluster, a tree trunk cluster, a top hat cluster, a full moon cluster, etc.)

My guess is there are more cell phones sold each year than automobiles. OH NO, CARS ARE DYING!

Ding! Ding! Ding!

The point here is Apple. This is an Apple press release.

You notice it doesn't mention that in 2014 a billion Android devices will be sold. So, the headline should be, "Android Devices to Reach Parity with PC's in 2014".

Or maybe, "Android Devices Outsell iOS Devices" but that one would make some readers cry and we can't have that 'round here..

http://mashable.com/2014/01/07/google-android-device-sales-1-billion/

At this point, the only real annoyance is Twitter. Whenever the person is on TV, writes an article/book, or a movie about them is aired, I get a nice little run of DMs. Sigh.

You need to follow someone before they can DM you on twitter. Tell another lie.

Unless you allow them to DM you without having to follow them.

Certainly I was not playing games. This is the first time I've been accused of using a straw man argument, but I suspect you may be correct about it. I always thought that logical fallacies were more of a debating tactic, but now I guess they are usually just made in error. Oops. :-)

Anyway, I think my reasoning and arguments have so far been rather poor, perhaps mostly because I've been flailing around in the fog of my own opinions: something that I'm sure is more likely if you don't put enough effort into listening (or in this case reading) what is actually being said. Again, my bad.

I'll give it another try. In your first reply to me you were very clear and there was no need for me to search for analogies: "Compare parts of the US to parts of the US if you want to talk about the US statistics. You cannot compare states across national lines with any credibility." That was your apples and oranges argument all along and and I should have recognized it immediately. My apologies for the lengthy and unnecessary digression.

Instead, I should have immediately pointed out to you that I see nothing scientifically wrong with making numerical comparisons like that between countries; something that is in fact done all the time. Here are more than a dozen examples:

• List of countries by HIV/AIDS adult prevalence rate
• List of countries by traffic-related death rate
• The 15 Countries With the Highest Smartphone Penetration
• List of countries by electricity production from renewable sources
• Countries with the Highest / Lowest Average IQ
• Obesity country comparison
• Cancer rates: see how countries compare worldwide
• Paid Vacation Around the World
• Average temperature in the countries of the world
• List of countries by rail transport network size
• Highways > Total (per capita) (most recent) by country
• Total Water Use per capita by Country
• List of countries by suicide rate
• List of countries by incarceration rate
• Drug Use Death Rate Per 100,000
• Teenage pregnancy (most recent) by country
• Snakebite in The Americas

Why would it be unscientific to make comparisons like these? As long as the numbers are always collected in the same way, then they are just numbers and don't attempt to explain anything about differences that may be cultural, legal, socioeconomic, etc. In all cases it's left up to the reader to explain the differences ("it's a police state", "it's probably a poor country", "perhaps they

Something like this? The price is a bit much, but it certainly solves the problem quickly.

You may want to pose that question to Netflix. They account for about 1/3 of the traffic on the internet and all that traffic is served from FreeBSD servers.

Netflix may use freebsd internally, but the movies are stored on amazon s3 and served from there. So, no, freebsd doesn't account for 1/3 of the internet traffic.

I have nothing against freebsd and have used it extensively in business.

You may want to pose that question to Netflix. They account for about 1/3 of the traffic on the internet and all that traffic is served from FreeBSD servers.

Also, Mac OS X is essentially a fork of FreeBSD.

The OS on all Juniper equipment is a modified version of FreeBSD.

The Playstation 3 and 4 OS are both modified FreeBSD.

Plus more.

"How can I spy without spying on a particular subset of people I'm not supposed to spy on?"

But that's the very rub... To even know, who to spy on, he has to spy on all. It used to be much harder to wage war and even to commit one-time atrocities — it used to require a state's backing. The pool of people to, possibly, have such a backing was relatively narrow.

Not any more. Conventional explosives can be made cheaply and easily — the information on making them is easily transfered electronically (the clowns searching our data at the border-crossings are just justifying their own jobs). Deadly poisons can be created at home too — easier than growing one's own marijuana or cooking meth. Compared to such dangers, an occasional shooter — even with an "assault" rifle — that the usually libertine-minded people wish to see outlawed, are merely a nuisance.

More importantly, a conspiracy requires communication, but it is only in the past two decades that strong encryption is available to the masses — before that it was possible to listen and read, what the suspects are saying and writing. Now, if properly done, it requires cooperation not just from the service-providers, but the suspects themselves. This was always anticipated by the government — they treated encryption as a weapon and not for nothing. When the genie was out of the lamp, Clinton's Administration — twenty years ago — tried to compel the use of NSA-approved, explicitly "backdoored" technology, but failed.

So, given the possibility, that

1. just about anyone may be up to no good — with means to do it;
2. thanks to encryption, it is often technically impossible to obtain actual data — the contents of a letter or a phone call — when reasonable suspicion justifies a formal warrant;

the only two choices remain: rely on the (legally-collected) meta-data — when was a message sent, from where, how long was it, what were the headers — collected about everyone, or simply accept the increased risks to life and health of all residents of the country.

The second option is up to the said residents themselves (that's you and me) — whose representatives in Congress can tell the Admiral just that, if they want to. But, as long as he has that job, he sees no other way to do it, but to collect the metadata. Do you?

None of the angry comments in this thread so far are offering a viable alternative — maybe, we really ought to stop trying to prevent a terrorist act and try to build up instead the perception, that punishment will be inevitable afterwards, for example. But NSA are currently charged with prevention...

Nice deflection attempt but I wasn't talking about regular cars. I was talking about Musk's bullshit over fuel cell cars and his FUD mongering over the tanks carrying hydrogen.

> $1000 for a track being played 24/7? No wonder
> artists all think Spotify is a sick joke.

Old news. Check out this chart from 3 years ago.

Another fun fact: Spotify has 20 million songs. Twenty percent of them -- four million songs -- have never been played.

It is 'free' if you own OSX. Therefore it is a free update. In terms of the number of changes it may be larger, but in actuality it is no different than windows 8.1 or a Service Pack.

It's more like an upgrade from Windows 7 or XP to Windows 8 - it's a complete OS installer, not a mere upgrade, and you can do a clean install.

Neat maybe, but how safe would it really be for those in China?
http://mashable.com/2013/10/21/google-uproxy-internet-freedom/

Dixon notes that it's important to remember what uProxy is not and does not do. It doesn't anonymize traffic like Tor, it doesn't allow for file sharing, and it doesn't provide encrypted, secure communications like tools Silent Circle and Cryptocat.

If you're in China and afraid of the Chinese government I think you need something better than uproxy.

Use the "wrong" peer proxy and you're screwed. How are you going to know who is or is not the "wrong proxy"? Certificates? Guess who has their CA certs in every browser? Guess who has their certs signed by common US CAs so if you trust those CAs you trust their cert.

Unless they figure a way to solve this problem, all it really allows is more people to use the web and damn the consequences.

Sure. Why not

And Apple already has curved glass patents.

http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2013/08/apple-granted-37-patents-today-covering-a-projection-system-curved-glass-macbooks-with-cellular-antennas-much-more.html
http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/25/apple-patents-a-method-to-refine-curved-glass/
http://mashable.com/2013/10/02/apple-patent-glass-cylinder/

... snake-like lizards that are also living in some inhospitable-sounding places for wildlife: at a vacant lot in downtown Bakersfield, among oil derricks in the lower San Joaquin Valley...

• Inhospitable? Ha. Try....
• An NRA convention
• Detroit
• Mark Zuckerbert's backyard

Yes, if you have the materials to print a solar panel (I estimate it will take about 5 years until somebody successfully prints a primitive one).

you mean like this solar panel?

http://mashable.com/2013/05/17/print-a3-sized-solar-cells/

Amateur hour is over! Blackberry's gonna come in and show you how it's done!

* I almost kept a straight face while typing this post.

I take it you're just not totally impressed with the Darth Trashcan?

A quick search reveals this:

http://mashable.com/2012/08/07/google-driverless-cars-safer-than-you/

And their math says 165,000 miles per accident for a person.

This one below says 5.7 crashes per million miles driven for women and 5.1 crashes per million miles. That gives you 175K or women and 196,078 for men. A bit off from the first, but not too far off.

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/19980516133725data_trunc_sys.shtml

There are a few other links. So while you say 300,000 miles without a single at fault incident is not that good, it is almost twice what people do from the articles I can find.

While having any accidents will trigger panic and people screaming how terrible this is and how it should be banned, if people examine the data it says that at the present 300K we would reduce accidents by nearly 30%-50%. If it goes to 600K without an incident, we just reduced accidents and deaths to 25-30%% of what they were.

As long as we are showing off design concepts, howabout more luxury:
http://mashable.com/2013/06/06/migaloo-submarine/

Identify yourself...

and get shot... http://mashable.com/2011/11/10/mexico-blogger/

"No one has been tried for the crimes uncovered by Manning."

what crimes?

Child prostitution -SOMEONE at Dyncorp and the US government for employing them to do so.
Blackmail -SOMEONE at Pfizer.
Smuggling -SOMEONE at Chevron.
Espionage Hilary Clinton and the State department.
It goes on and on. It's almost as if there's a systematic flaw that's so pervasive it's hard to see the trees for the forest. Seriously, haven't you looked at any of this?

"No one has been tried for the crimes uncovered by Snowden."

it's on going, and he uncovered very few crimes.

Perjury - James Clapper.
Illegal warrantless espionage against US citizens on US soil. And no, FISA is not looking over their shoulder.

As a culture we haven't even decided if information sent though multiple servers around the globe IS private.

Yet as a legal body we HAVE decided that email is private for the first 180 days. At least by US law. And we're pretty damn sure even as an amorphous cultural body of billions of people that encrypted communications is private, so suck it.

You can try to refute all that citation (and hey, some of it might even be off), but you'd best bring a big-ass list of citeable sources and have a DAMN good argument for why I shouldn't believe what appears to be really bloody obvious to me.

Nope. But they can shut down abruptly, like Groklaw and Lavabit did.

No, they are part of a much larger conglomerate. Said conglomerate may choose to cooperate with NSA/TLA agency, and choose not to divulge the fact to their users. (This being said, Slashdot has had problems of that nature before, although much less dire). The only solution would then be for the Slashdot crew to take the high road and resign "en masse", while publicly stating why as the Lavabit founder did.

I bet a LOT of people would be freaked and outraged by such an event.

I am not so sure of that, unfortunately. (sigh)

Hell, imagine the fallout if something like Wikipedia were to suddenly shut down with no explanation beyond a message like the one currently sitting on Groklaw.

Been there, done that. Maybe that is what is needed: worldwide protest against the NSA? Black pages everywhere? Again, I am not sure that this would change anything, but one can dream.

Post what you know to their white-hate system

Facebook says that white hate also violates the TOS.

It'll take about two years for this problem to disappear.

There's an enormous monetary incentive for cloud services to implement good privacy. Anyone who doesn't implement it will get their lunch eaten by someone who does.

There's already a massive exodus away from US based servers, both at home and abroad. People are thinking through the ramifications of having their sensitive information used as "incentives" to help business. Your client lists, sales information, costs and accounting - if any part of your local network is in the cloud, the US can rifle through it and trade the information to another company in return for help fighting terrorism. Many people will choose to believe that this is not happening, but what the heck - who can tell any more?

This is a self-correcting problem.

Mega has announced an encrypted E-mail service, the client software will be open for public inspection, and none of it will be hosted on US servers.

Google has admitted in court that they don't think users have an expectation of privacy.

Which E-mail service would you rather use? The one from a sleazy convicted criminal, but with impenetrable security? Or the one from a company that always rifles through the contents, but promises to only do it for the better good?

I know how much they don't pay:

http://mashable.com/2013/05/21/apple-taxes-senat/

Wrong. Apple is far and away the biggest local taxpayer in the bay area.

HORSEshit.

http://mashable.com/2013/05/21/apple-taxes-senat/

SkyDrive (formerly Windows Live Folders when it came out in August 2007) predates Google Drive by 5 years, Apples iCloud by 4 years and DropBox by a year. So how exactly is it a "me too" service?

Because it was a totally useless piece of shit that no one used (I generalize), or cared about. Ballmer himself probably has never even heard of it. Fact check ... Google Drive was a rebranding, btw.

Google Drive was definitely not a rebranding, it was Google's first launch of a general purpose cloud storage with features ala the already existing DropBox/SkyDrive/iCloud services (and though people struggle to place that tag on Google it was a major me-too launch adding little if anything new). They did integrate pre-existing Google Docs into it, which is different. http://mashable.com/2012/04/24/google-drive/

I think they can and will.

The US military will provide a baseline. Successful "affiliations" (Read: Gangs) Will adapt and overcome. Anywhere from 1 to several to many will develop a "base instinct" and a portion of those will wind up serving our country, in one of the several branches, whether or not they are colored as "Military" because its the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, or other Nun-such.

This isn't stating that the Military and the supporting organizations are "good" or "Bad", it's recognizing that this is a viable recruiting method, and it will have results that are looked upon as positive. Folks with talent get recruited.

If you are going to be successful for the long-term, you look for talent, and adapt that talent any way you can. Ironic isn't it, that Google walks away from one thing. http://mashable.com/2013/06/20/google-stopped-asking-brainteasers/
Makes you wonder what they moved on to?