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From:

"No ISP Filtering Under New RIAA Copyright Strategy"

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/no-isp-filterin.html

        "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo facilitated the deal between the RIAA and the ISPs."

He also was behind the shutdown of Usenet access by the ISPs.

What's next? Internet filtering by the ISPs at Cuomo's prodding? Locking out users who use proxies?

Why isn't anybody calling this Cuomo guy out?

Red Dog Linux been doing this for awhile now!

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/10/ps3_supercomputer

I'm not trying to be a smartass, but why did he mention in TFA that his supercomputer cost $4000 if the 8 consoles were "Sony-donated"?

Oh come on, you are being pedantic. Clearly what he meant was "$4000 worth of consoles", never mind that they were donated. $X worth of consoles is a useful number if someone is considering buying PS3s and setting up a supercomputer; it's also a fun number to compare to the cost of renting time on some large supercomputer.

The original Wired article is informative:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/10/ps3_supercomputer

He asked for Sony to donate the PS3s because he didn't think the NSF would give him grant money to buy video game systems. Now that he has actually built the supercomputer and it does everything he hoped it would do, perhaps other researchers will be able to justify the money to set up their own clusters (without donations from Sony).

The numbers are a no-brainer: he used to spend $5000 to do a single simulation run using rented supercomputer time. For less than the cost of a single simulation run, you can set up your own supercomputer and make simulation runs whenever you feel like it.

ALso, like the iPod example at the top of the post, most research use of the technology won't come from actual iPods or consoles

Um, he is using actual PS3 consoles to do actual research.

If one wanted to build their own home "super" computer then why not just use CUDA and a few Nvidia cards?

If you think that is a good way to make a super computer, why don't you go ahead and do it, and make a web site explaining how it is done?

Meanwhile, he thought he had a good way to go with the PS3, and it did in fact work as he expected, so what's the problem?

Anyway, here's why he thought it was a good idea. From the above linked Wired article:

According to Rimon, the Cell processor was designed as a parallel processing device, so he's not all that surprised the research community has embraced it. "It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time," Rimon says.

Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.

steveha

It won't last though. There's a generation of children being born who will take economic prosperity for granted. It's the nature of humanity, and by that same token they'll want more than just that. With economic power in their hands they'll want political power, and that's when the government will be in trouble.

Maybe, maybe not.

Taiwan went from single-party (and single-family) rule to a full-fledged democracy in the course of about 15 years. The old farts who had been running (and robbing) the country were quietly retired and a generation which was willing to allow more political pluralism were seated in their place. This happened with a lot of protests, legislative fistfights, and more than a few cracked heads on the street, but it did not involve putting the heads of the Old Guard up on a post in the process.

On the other side, Singapore has become wildly prosperous, with no sign of democracy or pluralism anywhere in sight. The People's Action Party (read: Senior Minister Harry Lee and his son Lee Hsien Loong) still run everything. It's a weird place. It's clean, it's modern. People go in, people go out. If living in the Lees's Disneyland pisses you off, you're free to go to Australia, or the US, or wherever you like. Everyone knows the rules, and nobody rocks the boat.

Ahh! The Google Sneakernet approach.

Sun paid $1 billion for MySQL AB. It has been estimated that MySQL AB revenue was around $80 million (source) Let's be optimistic and assume $100m. But revenue is irrelevant - what matters is profit. In a normal industry a company should expect to make around 10% profit a year - this is obviously a very, very rough figure, but the company needs to return more to shareholders than they would get from a safer bank savings account, or bonds, which usually hover around 5% or so. Again, these figures are very rough, but if we're in the in the right magnitude we should be okay in generating a rough estimate.

The Price/Earnings Ratio historically hovers around 16 (the last decade was a historical anomaly which looks like it is rapidly being corrected) I think at the moment we are somewhere around 18. That means that the share price, relative to the rest of the market, should be somewhere near 18. If it's higher, Sun overpaid, less, Sun got a bargain. We don't know the profit margin of MySQL AB, but we can probably assume that 10% is an optimistic estimate for an open source services company in the current economic climate. That means annual profits of around $10m based on $100m revenue. Which makes the P/E ratio (1*10**9)/(0.10*100*10**6)=100. This is quite an amazing ratio - more than five times the current market average - so my conclusion is that Sun massively overpaid.

I am not an economics expert, just an enthusiastic amateur, so I am happy if anyone can poke any serious holes in the numbers I came up with. To get the P/E to a reasonable figure MySQL AB would have to be generating profits of $50m at 50% of revenue, which seems totally unrealistic. On the other hand, I can't see why Sun would pay so much when they had access to all the figures, so I feel like I must be missing something here...

Verizon DID add visual voicemail, and yep, they charge a monthly fee for it

Hilarious.

Wired has a good summary of the controversy.

That quote references Sergey's role as "the moral compass" for the company. It strikes me that it is way better to have a single individual acting in this role than a committee, or than letting morality be determined by the currents of popular opinion, and here is why I think that:

If it is granted that no morality will be accepted universally as good, but rather individuals will judge the good and evil of someone else's morality according to their own, then it seems reasonable that we don't expect Google to never be considered evil by anyone. Rather, what seems most important about about a corporation trying to have a morality that is independent of (and governs over) their inherent purely capitalistic (not a bad thing) motives/actions, is that their morality remain consistent.

Consistency, and the reasonable expectations it produces, seems to be at the core of developing any relationship that requires trust. For example, I (like most people) avoid making friends with people who believe that it is a good thing to steal things of great value from their friends, but I also avoid making friends with people who flip-flop on their "stealing valuables" stance. That's pretty basic, right? What's relevant here, though, is that I would much rather that my friends/acquaintances/etc be consistent about their beliefs, than being a flip-flopper, that way if I can adjust my own expectations and actions accordingly (i.e. lock up the valuables when they're coming over).

Well, when it comes to businesses, by default I expect them to always be trying to do whatever they can to make the most money. And I have no problem with this - I love the free-market. But, I have an additional attraction to companies that try to restrict their capitalistic tendencies for the sake of the betterment of society and the individuals that compose it, especially the more I agree with their definition of betterment, or "good". However, it seems that one of the better ways for a company to be consistent in its morality would be for that morality to be defined by one person. Although a single person can develop contrary/inconsistent positions within their own morality no matter how hard they're trying to be consistent, this likelihood of inconsistency generally increases all the more, the more individuals you add to the mix.

It would be absurd of me to expect Google's morality to be identical with mine. There will be plenty of things we disagree about. As long as they're consistent, though, I'll at least feel confident in supporting them when I agree with them, and not, when I don't.

Mine too. After the OCR machine acknowledged my ballot was readable, they gave me a sticker that said "I voted".

It may well have been readable, but the first articles I saw on this make it clear that being readable is not a guarantee of your vote actually being included in the result.

The first articles make it clear that votes were counted and then, in some circumstances, From that article:

The ballots even showed up in preliminary tallies counted on election night on November 4 and in a report printed out on November 23. But some time after this point, the tabulation software inexplicably deleted the ballots without election officials ever knowing.

Still sure your vote counted?

The point is that the machine failed at identifying the ballots, not just identifying votes.

Not true. The machine counted the ballots and then later, the software deleted them along with any record that they ever existed.

Unlike you I'm smarter than to cherry-pick one month and say anything one way or the other. Look at the long term trends.

Generally speaking, the 360 has outsold the PS3 month by month. The long term trends are going to be irrelevant if you look at it from a generation point of view, which almost everyone does. Now if you want to combine PS2 and PS3 sales, then yes, Sony is beating Microsoft, but look at that, they need the power of two consoles, one a whole generation behind, to try and stay relevant. The PS2 just isn't relevant. You rarely hear anything about PS2 games still being made (some studios still do it...). This is actually how it's been for Sony for at least a year, if not longer. It's just not cherry-picking one month, the trend is there. The Wii continues to outsell the 360, the 360 continues to outsell the PS3, and the PS3 barely manages to outsell the PS2.

Newer PS3's don't officially support backwards compatibility, which in of itself is going to be cumbersome for developers. Do I develop for the PS2? For the PS3? For both? Do I ignore Sony all together? How many people bought their PS3 just for blu-ray?

And what's even more sad about the PS3 is that it's selling less units in a sales heavy month than it did the previous year, while the other two competitors have sold more. This is just in North America alone. Sony needs to address why the sales of their current generation console are barely outselling their last generation console. People might think that the long term sales is a good thing, but I'm not entirely sure it is in this scenario. Sony has a bad name for themselves for everyone else but Sony lovers, and the number of those people are dwindling, if NPD numbers are any indication here.

http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/12/november-game-s.html

I said "_the_ millions" which means the infected millions. I would have left out the "the", if I meant something different. I put it there for a reason.

If I were talking about uninfected+infected users a different phrase would be more appropriate.

A user who is prone to infection is different from a user who isn't. A user prone to infection is just as likely to be infected whether they ran Windows or Ubuntu.

The number of infected windows computers may even rival the number of Desktop Linux computers worldwide :) [1].

Macs have 10% market share and they ARE getting the same shit, just not so often _yet_:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/11/mac_trojan
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/06/new_trojan_leverages_unpatched.html

If they hit 20-30% share, things will start to heat up for OSX, since with a 3:1 or 2:1 ratio - not targeting OSX becomes a significant missed "opportunity" - your botnets would not grow as fast if you just targeted Windows.

Lastly, you said the registry was bad because stuff could be hidden there.

But to most "windows class" users there would be little difference between "hiding stuff" in the registry or /etc. Most of them won't even know that either exist in the first place!

Whereas you'd have just as much luck hiding stuff in the registry from the experts as you would in /etc or wherever.

So I don't see this "hiding" thing as a problem.

If you suspect your system is compromised, the safe thing to do is reinstall and update from a trusted source, then restore data and documents from backups.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=47DDCFA9-645D-4495-9EDA-92CDE33E99A9&displaylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e0f27260-58da-40db-8785-689cf6a05c73&displaylang=en

A lot of windows machines don't run windows update and so don't run that tool. Some of them because they have an invalid license.

My brother bought GTA4, and we simply can't get to run it on his 2 year old PC. He now faces the choice: pay about 1500 for a new rig in order to play GTA4 at acceptable rates. Or spend +/-450 on a PS3 and buy the game again....

Uhhh in October I built a PC that can run GTA4 smoothly for about 550.00 USD. I could have easily brought the price down and still run the game "at acceptable rates". I dunno where you pulled that exorbant price figure from, but you can see the recommended system specs here - http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/10/gta-iv-pc-delay.html

You can meet or exceed those recommended specs for PC for the price of a PS3 + USB keyboard + USB mouse + buying the game again. Just check out some systems on an online PC store (tigerdirect is the only comparable option to newegg and zipzoomfly that ships outside the USA that I know of) or by building it yourself.

Well, apparently outside of Maryland, the issue appears to be pretty well settled: If users are notified, it affords them a chance to protest the subpoenas in court and, if successful, keep their identities secret and avoid being sued or targeted by somebody claiming defamation, copyright, privacy or other breaches. When individuals challenge subpoenas, the lawyers seeking their identity sometimes drop the case. And the courts routinely quash challenged subpoenas if they conclude there were no legal violations to begin with, privacy experts said. "The notice gives you the opportunity to speak privately, by filing a motion to quash," said Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The courts, before somebody's identity is released, are requiring a legitimate claim against you." Still, if the subpoenas go unchallenged, the ISPs comply with them. " http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2007/09/vw_parody_ad It sounds to me that this process works a lot like a motion for summary judgment. You can't just IGNORE a lawsuit against you, but you can motion for summary judgment, basically saying, "the case against me is so weak, please just throw it out." It sounds like these internet subpoenas are being treated basically the same way. You can't IGNORE them if you are served with a subpoena, and companies must have the ABILITY to get your identity via a subpoena, but if they have a total bullshit case, the judge can just decline to issue a subpoena. That sounds TOTALLY reasonable to me. Maybe we are just arguing past each other now... But my basic point is that companies (and people) must have some way to "unmask" your IP/user handle for those cases where it is necessary to determine if you violated their legal rights.

...an advisor has officially rejected the earlier suggestion that he used a Zune as his primary music player. Instead, he clarified Obama's position as an Apple fan and an owner of an iPod, which he most often uses when working out.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/zunegate-day-tw.html

Isn't it that game where you use real life money to buy virtual items, like a couch, house, or a virtual whore so you can ruin your marriage?

According to Wired, an Obama advisor says he's an iPod man.

According to the following article in Wired he is in fact an iPod guy:

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/zunegate-day-tw.html

NSA's mission is foreign intelligence.

Then explain this: AT&T's Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens.

Why would Obama still have a phone? He has people for that now. Giving the president a cell phone probably constitutes a national security risk. He's already had his privacy breached once. Don't forget you can track people with those things too.

Most artists who create a song (under the current terms) will be dead before their works enter the public domain.

That's a given. It's life of the author + 75 years, IIRC. The irony is that Disney, one of the prime backers of each new extension, wouldn't have been able to make a lot of their classic movies if current copyright terms had been in effect at the time, like Jungle Book. And the neat factoid that every content industry, with the exception of software, was itself founded on piracy. For example, Hollywood didn't just settle in California for the nice weather - studios set up shop on the west coast to avoid having to make patent payments on cameras to Thomas Edison.

Content industries don't have a problem with violations of the law - they have a problem when the violations of the law don't make them money.

MS and NSA partnering over domestic spying WOPR?

If that doesn't make the hair on the back of your head stand up like a soldier on Viagra, nothing will.

Plus, most such efforts so far are nothing but money pits.

There is also at least one company that gleans this kind of information from various file-sharing networks and sells it as market data. Their focus is music, but it certainly could have been quietly expanded to include other media (and/or other companies may be doing the same kind of data mining).

actually, i can't because my sources are mainly: a.) my boss, who runs his own record label and has been working in the music industry for close to 30 years, and b.) a friend & former co-worker who now manages a bar/venue out in L.A.

however, if you do a google search for "ASCAP" and "public domain" you'll find a lot of articles that support these claims. for instance, here's one that discusses the ASCAP holding some 40 Beethoven songs on their catalog along with 80 versions of Row, Row, Row Your Boat and countless other works that should be in public domain by now.

you might also take a look at this Wired article. the Wired content itself isn't particularly interesting, but the comments are very telling of how the ASCAP screws over indie artists and venue owners. and i'm sure if you talk to local venue owners in your area you'll here the same kind of stories.

the fact of the matter is, the ASCAP may have been created out of a real need, but over the years this unregulated monopoly (they even faced an anti-trust case a while back, i believe) has devolved into a protection racket of sorts. it's similar to the situation with the RIAA suing alleged file sharers. it doesn't matter whether you're guilty or not, the threat of lawsuit (and the subsequent legal costs) itself is enough to coerce most venue owners to pay their licensing fees, even if they only intend on playing original music or material that's already in public domain.

It is the same company behind both initiatives.

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi

It is one thing when Digg or someone else scoops Slashdot a day or two early, but Wired wrote about this three months ago.

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi

> Violating a company's EULA is not illegal. Period. Full stop.

I would have agreed with you until this happened. Wired even interviewed the jurors and found that they didn't question whether breaking a EULA should be illegal, only what "tortuous" meant. Here's the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act if you want to read it.

Here's one quote from the Groklaw story (which itself is a quote from Orin Kerr, one of Drew's attorneys)

The jury agreed that it is a federal crime to intentionally violate the Terms of Service on a website, and that Drew directly or indirectly did so, but it acquitted Drew of having violated Terms of Service in furtherance of the tortious act. That is, the jury ruled that Drew is guilty of relatively lower-level crimes for violating MySpacs Terms of Service (for being involved in the setting up of a fake MySpace account). It acquitted Drew for any role in inflicting distress on Meier or for anything related to Meier's suicide. The maximum allowed penalty for the misdemeanor violations are one year in prison for each violation, although the majority of federal misdemeanors result in a sentence of probation.

(emphasis added)

Yes, this is a bad precedent. Terrible, in fact. But someone has, in fact, been convicted merely for breaking a ToS. Worse, when MySpace reserves in that ToS the sole right to determine whether or not someone is violating it!

Let me get this straight... I'm supposed to believe OS X is invulnerable to viruses.. because apple says so... while at the same time understanding that even though the iPhone 3G was advertised being twice as fast, that I'm a fool to believe that statement to be true?

Apple DOESN'T say the Mac is "invulnerable" to viruses, and never has. FAIL.

PS: I've seen 3G vs EDGE data services on the new iPhones, and it is about twice as fast, which is what is supposed to be faster about the new iPhones. How come you're not complaining about Microsoft's "Windows: Life Without Walls" campaign, if you think Apple's ad was so fucking deceptive?

Let me get this straight... I'm supposed to believe OS X is invulnerable to viruses.. because apple says so... while at the same time understanding that even though the iPhone 3G was advertised being twice as fast, that I'm a fool to believe that statement to be true?

Apple have started sucking already: the newest Macbooks block you from playing back movies you own on a non-Hollywood-approved display, and there is no way to turn off this 'feature'.

Apart from updating Quicktime.

The issue is so big that people from the entire IT industry, people driving the entire Internet can sit in same room at MS HQ which I believe was chosen for maximum security against espionage and agree on something and simultaneusly release updates without backstabbing eachother.

It must be one of the first in history.

That detail in page 3 ( http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-12/ff_kaminsky?currentPage=3 ) impressed me.

Speaking of which, I'm surprised the editor didn't link to Jade is black? and the previous discussion here.

Apple have started sucking already: the newest Macbooks block you from playing back movies you own on a non-Hollywood-approved display, and there is no way to turn off this 'feature'. Once you start getting a captive market you forget who your real customers are.

That's the best part. Rewind to Dec 1998 -- You're surfing with Netscape 4.5, you're searching with AltaVista (Google had just been founded in September), posting as AC on the year-old /., you might be using Red Hat 5.2 on a PI 266mHz, or Mac OS 8 on a beige G3, and Slick Willy is just being cornered by Congress over the Lewinsky debacle.

The cover article of Wired is "83 Reasons Why Bill Gates's Reign Is Over". Number 14 is Linux.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.12/

Oh, you meant prioritize by politics, not geography.

No. You can try reading the summary, asshole. Here, I'll repost it here in case you were too lazy to read it above:

"While I live in S.Korea and have virtually unlimited bandwidth in and out of the country, not all my Asian friends are so lucky. Many of the SE Asian and African countries have small international pipes. Even when a user has a high-speed local connection, downloads from abroad will trickle in.
Bittorrent clients apparently don't prioritize other users on the same ISP or at least in the same country. Why is that? Is it difficult to manage? If I were to write a plug-in for, say, Deluge, what hurdles would I be likely to come across? If this functionality is available in other clients or through plug-ins, please chime in."

110 posts and not one mentions that Chen is a smoking hot Asian chick:
http://164.67.192.163:81/faces/Hsiang-Yu%20Chen%20(Fishier).JPG
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/12/gallery_photodetector?slide=2&slideView=2

Yes, you're right for the most part that educational games do suck. But, I think that's mostly due to poor game design rather than a bad core concept. Here's my counter example: Wired Article. You also make some good points on how to make the learning process fun or motivating instead of a tiring marketing drone :). Maybe the developers will follow your advice if they read slashdot, heh.

Not exactly. From the account of Grills' testimony in Wired:

Grills was in the kitchen with Drew and Sarah, Lori Drew's then-13-year-old daughter, when she proposed creating a fake MySpace account to get information on Megan. Drew applauded the plan, and thought it was funny, but did not herself conceive it, Grills said. The three of them crowded around Drew's computer as Grills set up the account.

So, yes, it was Grills who actually did the work of creating the account, but Drew was present and involved. According to Grills' testimony, Drew not only urged them (Grills and Sarah Drew) on but helped write the messages to Megan.

since the motive (revenge/humiliation) was established and intent to harm was also established, its time for them to pay the piper.

Yeah, the only problem with that is that you are completely and utterly wrong.

"The jury unanimously rejected the three felony computer hacking charges that alleged the unauthorized access was part of a scheme to intentionally inflict emotional distress on Megan." (citation)

Hint: generally speaking, when the jury in a criminal case unanimously reject something, that suggests it has not been established.

True. But where were her parents? Pretty sad the girl lived in a household where she couldn't talk to her folks about what was going on.

I'm usually on the side of parents taking responsibility for the welfare of their children. It bothers me to no end when parents seem to think others should assume that responsibility. However, I'm not so sure this is one of those situations.

From the Wired blog:

Then on October 15, Josh sent Megan a message saying that he didn't want to be friends anymore. The next day, Josh told her he'd heard she wasn't nice to her friends, and that's why he wanted to sever their ties.

Megan became upset and Meier, who had to leave the house to take her other daughter to an orthodontist appointment, told Megan to shut down the computer. Megan didn't do as she was told, however, and got embroiled in an electronic brawl when at least two other people began attacking her online, culminating in the final message from "Josh".

When Meier came home she found Megan still online and in tears. When she appealed to her mother for support, Meier chastised her for being on the computer when she'd been instructed to shut it down, and suggested that Megan had brought some of the attacks on herself by continuing to communicate with her attackers.

Megan, in mental anguish at this point, told her mother, "You're supposed to be my mom. You're supposed to be on my side."

Thirty minutes later, Megan hanged herself, Meier testified.

I'm sure the mother wishes she could have had that moment back; handled it differently. However, this certainly doesn't seem like a case of an inattentive parent who didn't communicate with their children.

Yeah, it's not like anybody's ever been beaten up for a Runescape password.

Have you listened to the clipping on a modern audio CD?

You might have a point that convienience trums fidelity in this case, except that the labels have been throwing fidelity away for years.

Cray just announced a new closed-source $25K supercomputer two months ago.
IBM is going open source on its supercomputers, but last August is not what I would call "the last few years".

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/smart_software

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/smart_software

The Dual-N-Back cognative exercise wont help you with your long term memory, but it is excellent for keeping your short term memory sharp. It's the only exercise proven to really do anything.
You can read about it in wired

You can also read the
full paper if you want to pay or just read the abstract.

iPhone version

Online (requires silverlight)
This one doesn't require a plugin

Yeah. Some methods do work. Wired published a lengthy article earlier this year about how to remember everything. Apparently, a Polish guy named Piotr Wozniak sells a program called SuperMemo that does the trick.

There's no way Windows should be running a ship of war.

Well, Windows does:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1998/07/13987

On cross examination, defense attorney H. Dean Steward quizzed Chu on why she didn't report the two conversations to the police or FBI after Megan's suicide. Chu didn't become a witness in the case until the FBI phoned her up for the first time last Thursday, even though she has a relative in the Bureau.

Chu answered that she thought her boss at the salon had been in touch with the FBI and prosecutors. "I understood that she was taking care of it." Hairdresser: Drew Thought MySpace Hoax Made a 'Funny Story'

Maybe evidence that the DA needed was withheld.