That said, if you want to see an app that reflects political reality more precisely, you'll have to wait for v2.0. It will have two (or more) versions of the positioning statement, depending on what it thinks you want to hear.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that this particular politician is two-faced, but statistically, the politicians who aren't two-faced are in such a minority that they rarely appear as a non-zero quantity in any random sampling. Just saying.
I agree that compressing the final track sucks, for multiple reasons. You should never do much (if any) dynamic compression after mixdown, as it tends to result in odd problems where the drum hits cause your vocals to sound different.
That said, you can get the same level of loudness by doing heavier dynamic compression on the individual tracks. The most important decision is choosing the right amount of compression, rather than choosing whether to compress on the way into the mix or on the way out.:-)
If you did the "loudness war" thing with an LP, the stylus wouldn't track.
I don't know why people think this. The loudness war didn't make the loud parts louder. It made the soft parts louder. If anything, the more consistent excursion should make it easier to adjust your hardware.
I couldn't disagree more. Uncompressed music works fine for a very thin mix (e.g. guitar and voice, piano and voice, etc.). Add in drums, and it sounds like ass without compression unless you're listening at 24-bit resolution. The tops of the peaks for drums are so high relative to the area under them that you blow all your dynamic range on them just trying not to clip. The result is that everything sounds weak and distant.
Now I'm not saying today's music isn't massively overcompressed dynamically, but it's just as bad to undercompress stuff that needs it.
BTW, LP audio can be just as overcompressed as audio from any other source. They just tend not to be because anybody doing a vinyl recording is likely working from an analog tape master that already builds in some tape compression, because they are mostly older recordings, and because there is no consumer demand for them to be so compressed. (More on this later.)
More to the point, your comment about overcompressing to vinyl breaking the vinyl is just plain backwards. If you don't compress audio enough when going to vinyl, it won't play. There's only so much loudness you can achieve on vinyl before the cutter excursion is too great and it breaks through into the next track over. And you have to leave a certain amount of wall thickness between tracks, or else the needle will break through while you're playing the LP. This means that there is an absolute limit for maximum loudness on vinyl (at least for any given duration and RPM setting).
Add to this the baseline noise caused by mechanical imprecision during the cutting process, and you get a typical SNR of about 60-75 dB on average (Source: itrax). And many albums have even lower SNR because if they compress the audio more and lower the maximum volume, they can cram more tracks per side. Thus, if we're talking about the ability of the medium to reproduce the sound, LPs must be compressed more than CDs, not less.
In short, the only reason CD audio tends to be worse than LP audio is because the industry thinks people want to listen to music that way. And unfortunately, with the number of people listening to music in cars or on iPods while walking around loud city streets, they're probably right. People who listen to music in an environment that lends itself to high dynamic range are, unfortunately, a rarity, and modern digital music production merely reflects that unfortunate reality.
That said, I'd really like to see the overcompression moved into a special hint track and implemented by the player instead of permanently marring the sound. This would require some significant retooling, but it's not inconceivable. Alternatively, provide two separate mixes: a high compression track and a low compression track. Either solution would let the audience decide when they listen rather than when they buy the CD.
The other alternative is of course to create some sort of selective breeding program to create a society of engineers, but it would be politically impossible to implement and certainly not see any results over one presidential term. So yeah, show us the money.
Yeah, but admit it, if any politician promised to get lots of women to breed with engineers, just about everyone here on Slashdot would vote for him/her (probably including people who aren't even citizens of that country). Just saying.
Actually, there is no evidence that a free market will help. In every non-urban area I've seen that has allowed additional telcos or cable companies to provide service, the result has been the same: the incumbent carrier, whose lines are long since paid for, undercuts the new carrier to the point that they cannot make any money. The new carrier goes under and sells their lines in a bankruptcy sale to the incumbent carrier, the backers of the new company get screwed, and the incumbent carrier gets a free infrastructure upgrade. Then, they raise rates above where they were before.
Last-mile infrastructure is expensive. Except for large cities, it isn't feasible for anyone other than the government to roll it out. This is why the government provides grants and tax breaks to subsidize the construction of last-mile infrastructure. The only feasible alternative to this that has actually been shown to work is government construction and maintenance of the relevant wire infrastructure. In places where the government owns and maintains the wires, free market competition tends to work very well among the various ISPs that lease access. Those ISPs need only provide blocks of IPs, routing infrastructure, and upstream connectivity from a central office. This makes competition much more feasible than having hundreds of companies trenching your yard and laying cables.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who realize that there is too much government intervention for the free market to operate are also the same people who oppose any government-run wire infrastructure projects (because that would be increasing government interference in their minds) and thus actively thwart the one solution that would actually allow the free market to operate in any useful way. As a result, with the exception of a few very rare, forward-thinking communities, telecom in the United States is a train wreck in slow motion, with emphasis on "slow".
I'm pretty sure there have been studies that show that people only adapt up to a certain yellow light duration, but I don't have the time or energy to dig them out right now.
From a user's perspective, no, they really aren't. Yes, they have a CPU, but no, it isn't under the user's control in any useful fashion. I can't download applications and run them on my printer. I can't write notes to myself with my printer. And so on. A printer is a dumb device from a user's perspective, regardless of how much actual computing power is under the hood.
That's not at all like an iPod (Touch), iPhone, or iPad, all of which are basically general-purpose computers.
Your numbers are out of date. For the quarter ending in February (HP) and April (Apple) of 2011, HP's revenue was about $32.2 billion, and Apple's was about $24.67 billion, and almost all of that difference comes from HP's printer division. In fact, if you subtract out printers, the HP services group (IT support, etc.), and the HP financial services group, HP would have brought in only $16.42 billion net in that same quarter.
If it were about safety, the cameras would go into places where your safety is most likely to be compromised.
No, if it were about safety, they would not be putting up cameras at all, but rather would be doing the one thing that has actually been proven to reduce red light violations: making the yellow cycle longer. Instead, they put in cameras to raise revenue, then make the yellow cycles as short as they can to maximize revenue. They also write tickets for provably safe violations like a rolling right turn just as the light turns red. And so on.
Want to improve road safety? Raise the minimum yellow cycle length to 7 seconds, or 10 seconds on roads with speeds of 40 MPH and up. Add a countdown timer above the light in large numbers that tells how long before the light turns red. Finally, add a minimum two-second all-ways-red cycle before the light in the other direction turns green.
It's about like the county Sheriff in Cupertino, CA ticketing people as they "jaywalk". It's a highly traveled corner, and despite not having a true pedestrian island, there are places that a pedestrian could go if they get stuck in the middle. People therefore walk halfway out while the left turn light is on. This allows them to be halfway to the other side when the light turns green. This is provably safe because (ignoring people turning right on red) no vehicle can legally cross that pedestrian crossing at that point in the cycle. In short, it's pure revenue generation.
And they ticketed my boss for not stopping long enough at a stop sign. The guy claimed that you need to stop for a full 5 seconds. If I stopped for 5 seconds, the people in the other direction would assume that I was yielding the right of way, and they would start driving the moment I did, and we'd probably have a wreck. I guarantee that the cop wouldn't have spent five seconds at that corner.
Ultimately, what needs to happen is this: police should not see one penny of traffic ticket revenue, and neither should cities. The state is licensing drivers, so the state should collect all of the revenue, and should distribute it proportionally by population. That would eliminate the incentive to write tickets for things that are not truly unsafe, and more to the point, would eliminate the incentive to reduce yellow cycles to unsafe levels to increase traffic camera revenue.
Fortunately, glass or plastic fiber doesn't rust, unlike old iron water mains. Of course, newer pipes aren't usually made out of iron, either, but it will take a while for all the old pipe to go away.
Contrast this with a for-profit utility company, in which a gas main exploded, 8 people were killed, and 38 homes were destroyed, all because of a leak that had been reported several times and had never been fixed. Worse, the city emergency officials were not even aware of the pipe's existence, and nobody knew how to turn the gas off, which likely made the damage far worse than it would otherwise have been.
There's only one thing worse than the government running things, and that's a for-profit corporation running things. The government is out to break even. The corporation is out to make a profit for its shareholders and its executives. Guess which one inevitably cuts more corners. Here's a hint: it's not the government. Just saying.
Basically, in such a situation, you get copy-cat trolls instead of patent trolls. How would you propose to solve this problem, if patents are eliminated all together?
You seem to be under the mistaken notion that this is something that someone needs to protect against.
Writing good software is not trivial. If somebody can knock off your "invention" in six weeks of coding, then your "invention" can't possibly be sufficiently non-obvious or non-trivial to be worthy of patent protection anyway. And if it takes them a couple of years, by that point, your software should be two years ahead, which means that it should not be possible for them to realistically catch up.
In short, as Bill Gates once said, "Innovate or Die." That's the software business. If you are resting on your laurels, you aren't contributing anything useful to society, and you should not be able to continue profiting from it for an extended period of time.
Well, what one wonders is why this guy got caught? Did he actually have it upload pics to his own account? Did he fail to create a nightly launchd job that delayed an arbitrary number of days (from a month to six months) before enabling his background daemon? Did he brag about it on Facebook? Did he post the pictures somewhere? Where? No, wait.... I mean where did he hide the daemon? Or was it an application (obvious)?
Inquiring perverts^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hminds want to know.
Sure they will, if you have compromised the browser completely.
You start the transaction that requires you to enter a code.
Attacker creates a malicious transaction in the background that also requires you to enter a code.
Attacker puts up a fake copy of the bank's dialog that tells you it will have to confirm the transaction and asks you to choose a phone number for them to text or whatever.
You do whatever you need to do there.
Attacker posts the malicious transfer form and performs the query to tell the bank to send out a text message.
Attacker displays a fake copy of the verification form where you are supposed to enter the info from the text message.
You enter the verification code.
Attacker submits the verification code for the malicious transaction.
Attacker displays a fake "verification code failed message" repeatedly until you tell the bank to send a new code.
Attacker passes on that request for a new code to your bank.
Your bank sends a new code.
Attacker displays the real verification page for your transaction.
At this point, as far as the user knows, the bank just sent a broken code. Meanwhile, $20,000 has been transferred to a bank in Zurich.
Well, ex post facto laws and bills of attainders are interesting, but they do not apply here.
An ex post facto law would retroactively make it illegal to have performed or sold copies of a work during the time in which it was out of copyright. This law change did not do that.
Similarly, a bill of attainder is a bill that declares someone guilty of a crime and strips them of rights without a jury trial. This only does half of that, as it does not declare them guilty of a crime, but merely deprives them of property (IP rights) and grants them to someone else. That somewhat narrower right has been upheld in SCOTUS decisions before, with Kelo v. City of New London being the canonical example.
It's actually the fourth amendment that applies here, not the ex post facto clause, nor the bill of attainder clause. What this law changed was future use of the work. This means that copies of the work that you recorded while it was not under copyright can no longer legally be sold or performed.
By any reasonable interpretation of the fourth amendment, this is an unwarranted, unreasonable seizure of property (intellectual property rights) held by thousands (if not millions) of people. Your right to continue to use sheet music that you own (music that you are physically in possession of) ceased to exist when this law was passed. Your right to play CDs, tapes, DVDs, and LPs that contain recordings of this music no longer exists. Your right to sell recordings of these works recorded during that era no longer exists (whether you are the performer or someone who previously acquired a copy) because doing so is considered criminal commercial violation of copyright.
In effect, the government came and seized every copy of this music, not by court trial, not by armed infiltration, but by signing a law. And afterwards, they gave that property, not to the public, not to a private company or individual for public use, but to an individual with the intent of preventing existing public use and extracting money in exchange for future public use. That's contrary to both the spirit and the letter of the fourth amendment by any reasonable standards. And that's the key to understanding why this case is neither like Eldred v. Ashcroft nor Kelo v. City of New London.
No, the meaning is not clear. The prefix "ir" in English words means "not". So to people who actually understand the rules of the English language, "irregardless" means "not regardless".
If I say "Irregardless of the snow, I'm going outside," it means that I'm only going outside, but only if it doesn't snow. This is the exact opposite of what people who say this made up word actually mean by it.
Frankly, I find the use of "irregardless" to be confusing as h***. If you mean "regardless", you should say "regardless".
It doesn't matter if there are a billion guesses from a billion people... for 15 minutes there can be only 5.
My point was that nobody implements password handling like this because that creates a trivial avenue for denial of service for the account. All I'd have to do is have a botnet of one computer trying five passwords every 15 minutes, and you would never be able to log into your account ever again. I don't need to know your password at all to permanently deny you the use of your account. I need only to learn your username.
Instead, what everyone actually implements in practice is five attempts per 15 minutes per account per IP. So if you have ten million distinct IPs, you have fifty million password attempts per account every 15 minutes, 200 million attempts per account per hour, 4.8 billion attempts per account per day. That's 1.44 trillion total attempts per day, assuming the computers and networks are fast enough to handle this.
The smarter companies implement a limit per IP per unit of time as well, which tends to lower that number considerably.
Now to be fair, what's more common (and what probably got my account) are dictionary attacks and variations on dictionary attacks (common word + a number, substitution of common letters, etc.) rather than true brute force attacks. In my mind, though, I consider brute force attacks and dictionary attacks to be the same thing; the only real difference is the algorithm used for choosing which passwords to try first.
Even a 15 minute x5 attempt cool down would prevent the brute force of all but the most trivial of passwords such as - 1234, password, qwerty, "insert last name here".
Not when you have a botnet of several million machines, each one trying to gain access to the account. The only way you can prevent a distributed password guessing attack is to block accounts after a number of failed guesses. However, this would also result in locking legitimate users out of their accounts.
I seldom use Facebook anywhere other than on my own home network, my company's network, or a cellular network (none of which are very likely to result in cookie attacks). It's certainly possible that it was attacked in some other way, but the likelihood of that is fairly low.
Slashdot Mirror
If he is like most politicians, then yes, sadly.
That said, if you want to see an app that reflects political reality more precisely, you'll have to wait for v2.0. It will have two (or more) versions of the positioning statement, depending on what it thinks you want to hear.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that this particular politician is two-faced, but statistically, the politicians who aren't two-faced are in such a minority that they rarely appear as a non-zero quantity in any random sampling. Just saying.
I agree that compressing the final track sucks, for multiple reasons. You should never do much (if any) dynamic compression after mixdown, as it tends to result in odd problems where the drum hits cause your vocals to sound different.
That said, you can get the same level of loudness by doing heavier dynamic compression on the individual tracks. The most important decision is choosing the right amount of compression, rather than choosing whether to compress on the way into the mix or on the way out. :-)
I don't know why people think this. The loudness war didn't make the loud parts louder. It made the soft parts louder. If anything, the more consistent excursion should make it easier to adjust your hardware.
Why would you have to re-rip your CDs?
I couldn't disagree more. Uncompressed music works fine for a very thin mix (e.g. guitar and voice, piano and voice, etc.). Add in drums, and it sounds like ass without compression unless you're listening at 24-bit resolution. The tops of the peaks for drums are so high relative to the area under them that you blow all your dynamic range on them just trying not to clip. The result is that everything sounds weak and distant.
Now I'm not saying today's music isn't massively overcompressed dynamically, but it's just as bad to undercompress stuff that needs it.
BTW, LP audio can be just as overcompressed as audio from any other source. They just tend not to be because anybody doing a vinyl recording is likely working from an analog tape master that already builds in some tape compression, because they are mostly older recordings, and because there is no consumer demand for them to be so compressed. (More on this later.)
More to the point, your comment about overcompressing to vinyl breaking the vinyl is just plain backwards. If you don't compress audio enough when going to vinyl, it won't play. There's only so much loudness you can achieve on vinyl before the cutter excursion is too great and it breaks through into the next track over. And you have to leave a certain amount of wall thickness between tracks, or else the needle will break through while you're playing the LP. This means that there is an absolute limit for maximum loudness on vinyl (at least for any given duration and RPM setting).
Add to this the baseline noise caused by mechanical imprecision during the cutting process, and you get a typical SNR of about 60-75 dB on average (Source: itrax). And many albums have even lower SNR because if they compress the audio more and lower the maximum volume, they can cram more tracks per side. Thus, if we're talking about the ability of the medium to reproduce the sound, LPs must be compressed more than CDs, not less.
In short, the only reason CD audio tends to be worse than LP audio is because the industry thinks people want to listen to music that way. And unfortunately, with the number of people listening to music in cars or on iPods while walking around loud city streets, they're probably right. People who listen to music in an environment that lends itself to high dynamic range are, unfortunately, a rarity, and modern digital music production merely reflects that unfortunate reality.
That said, I'd really like to see the overcompression moved into a special hint track and implemented by the player instead of permanently marring the sound. This would require some significant retooling, but it's not inconceivable. Alternatively, provide two separate mixes: a high compression track and a low compression track. Either solution would let the audience decide when they listen rather than when they buy the CD.
Yeah, but admit it, if any politician promised to get lots of women to breed with engineers, just about everyone here on Slashdot would vote for him/her (probably including people who aren't even citizens of that country). Just saying.
AT&T is a bad example because the government subsidized the crap out of the building of those phone lines. Standard Oil, however, is a good example.
Actually, there is no evidence that a free market will help. In every non-urban area I've seen that has allowed additional telcos or cable companies to provide service, the result has been the same: the incumbent carrier, whose lines are long since paid for, undercuts the new carrier to the point that they cannot make any money. The new carrier goes under and sells their lines in a bankruptcy sale to the incumbent carrier, the backers of the new company get screwed, and the incumbent carrier gets a free infrastructure upgrade. Then, they raise rates above where they were before.
Last-mile infrastructure is expensive. Except for large cities, it isn't feasible for anyone other than the government to roll it out. This is why the government provides grants and tax breaks to subsidize the construction of last-mile infrastructure. The only feasible alternative to this that has actually been shown to work is government construction and maintenance of the relevant wire infrastructure. In places where the government owns and maintains the wires, free market competition tends to work very well among the various ISPs that lease access. Those ISPs need only provide blocks of IPs, routing infrastructure, and upstream connectivity from a central office. This makes competition much more feasible than having hundreds of companies trenching your yard and laying cables.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who realize that there is too much government intervention for the free market to operate are also the same people who oppose any government-run wire infrastructure projects (because that would be increasing government interference in their minds) and thus actively thwart the one solution that would actually allow the free market to operate in any useful way. As a result, with the exception of a few very rare, forward-thinking communities, telecom in the United States is a train wreck in slow motion, with emphasis on "slow".
It has nothing to do with how many components the manufacturer buys. However, I never said that it did.
I'm pretty sure there have been studies that show that people only adapt up to a certain yellow light duration, but I don't have the time or energy to dig them out right now.
From a user's perspective, no, they really aren't. Yes, they have a CPU, but no, it isn't under the user's control in any useful fashion. I can't download applications and run them on my printer. I can't write notes to myself with my printer. And so on. A printer is a dumb device from a user's perspective, regardless of how much actual computing power is under the hood.
That's not at all like an iPod (Touch), iPhone, or iPad, all of which are basically general-purpose computers.
Your numbers are out of date. For the quarter ending in February (HP) and April (Apple) of 2011, HP's revenue was about $32.2 billion, and Apple's was about $24.67 billion, and almost all of that difference comes from HP's printer division. In fact, if you subtract out printers, the HP services group (IT support, etc.), and the HP financial services group, HP would have brought in only $16.42 billion net in that same quarter.
Executives are not very computer savvy. And this is a surprise because....
No, if it were about safety, they would not be putting up cameras at all, but rather would be doing the one thing that has actually been proven to reduce red light violations: making the yellow cycle longer. Instead, they put in cameras to raise revenue, then make the yellow cycles as short as they can to maximize revenue. They also write tickets for provably safe violations like a rolling right turn just as the light turns red. And so on.
Want to improve road safety? Raise the minimum yellow cycle length to 7 seconds, or 10 seconds on roads with speeds of 40 MPH and up. Add a countdown timer above the light in large numbers that tells how long before the light turns red. Finally, add a minimum two-second all-ways-red cycle before the light in the other direction turns green.
It's about like the county Sheriff in Cupertino, CA ticketing people as they "jaywalk". It's a highly traveled corner, and despite not having a true pedestrian island, there are places that a pedestrian could go if they get stuck in the middle. People therefore walk halfway out while the left turn light is on. This allows them to be halfway to the other side when the light turns green. This is provably safe because (ignoring people turning right on red) no vehicle can legally cross that pedestrian crossing at that point in the cycle. In short, it's pure revenue generation.
And they ticketed my boss for not stopping long enough at a stop sign. The guy claimed that you need to stop for a full 5 seconds. If I stopped for 5 seconds, the people in the other direction would assume that I was yielding the right of way, and they would start driving the moment I did, and we'd probably have a wreck. I guarantee that the cop wouldn't have spent five seconds at that corner.
Ultimately, what needs to happen is this: police should not see one penny of traffic ticket revenue, and neither should cities. The state is licensing drivers, so the state should collect all of the revenue, and should distribute it proportionally by population. That would eliminate the incentive to write tickets for things that are not truly unsafe, and more to the point, would eliminate the incentive to reduce yellow cycles to unsafe levels to increase traffic camera revenue.
Fortunately, glass or plastic fiber doesn't rust, unlike old iron water mains. Of course, newer pipes aren't usually made out of iron, either, but it will take a while for all the old pipe to go away.
Contrast this with a for-profit utility company, in which a gas main exploded, 8 people were killed, and 38 homes were destroyed, all because of a leak that had been reported several times and had never been fixed. Worse, the city emergency officials were not even aware of the pipe's existence, and nobody knew how to turn the gas off, which likely made the damage far worse than it would otherwise have been.
There's only one thing worse than the government running things, and that's a for-profit corporation running things. The government is out to break even. The corporation is out to make a profit for its shareholders and its executives. Guess which one inevitably cuts more corners. Here's a hint: it's not the government. Just saying.
You seem to be under the mistaken notion that this is something that someone needs to protect against.
Writing good software is not trivial. If somebody can knock off your "invention" in six weeks of coding, then your "invention" can't possibly be sufficiently non-obvious or non-trivial to be worthy of patent protection anyway. And if it takes them a couple of years, by that point, your software should be two years ahead, which means that it should not be possible for them to realistically catch up.
In short, as Bill Gates once said, "Innovate or Die." That's the software business. If you are resting on your laurels, you aren't contributing anything useful to society, and you should not be able to continue profiting from it for an extended period of time.
Assuming the transfer is for the same dollar amount, most folks won't notice that the account number doesn't match until it's too late.
Well, what one wonders is why this guy got caught? Did he actually have it upload pics to his own account? Did he fail to create a nightly launchd job that delayed an arbitrary number of days (from a month to six months) before enabling his background daemon? Did he brag about it on Facebook? Did he post the pictures somewhere? Where? No, wait.... I mean where did he hide the daemon? Or was it an application (obvious)?
Inquiring perverts^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hminds want to know.
Sure they will, if you have compromised the browser completely.
At this point, as far as the user knows, the bank just sent a broken code. Meanwhile, $20,000 has been transferred to a bank in Zurich.
Well, ex post facto laws and bills of attainders are interesting, but they do not apply here.
An ex post facto law would retroactively make it illegal to have performed or sold copies of a work during the time in which it was out of copyright. This law change did not do that.
Similarly, a bill of attainder is a bill that declares someone guilty of a crime and strips them of rights without a jury trial. This only does half of that, as it does not declare them guilty of a crime, but merely deprives them of property (IP rights) and grants them to someone else. That somewhat narrower right has been upheld in SCOTUS decisions before, with Kelo v. City of New London being the canonical example.
It's actually the fourth amendment that applies here, not the ex post facto clause, nor the bill of attainder clause. What this law changed was future use of the work. This means that copies of the work that you recorded while it was not under copyright can no longer legally be sold or performed.
By any reasonable interpretation of the fourth amendment, this is an unwarranted, unreasonable seizure of property (intellectual property rights) held by thousands (if not millions) of people. Your right to continue to use sheet music that you own (music that you are physically in possession of) ceased to exist when this law was passed. Your right to play CDs, tapes, DVDs, and LPs that contain recordings of this music no longer exists. Your right to sell recordings of these works recorded during that era no longer exists (whether you are the performer or someone who previously acquired a copy) because doing so is considered criminal commercial violation of copyright.
In effect, the government came and seized every copy of this music, not by court trial, not by armed infiltration, but by signing a law. And afterwards, they gave that property, not to the public, not to a private company or individual for public use, but to an individual with the intent of preventing existing public use and extracting money in exchange for future public use. That's contrary to both the spirit and the letter of the fourth amendment by any reasonable standards. And that's the key to understanding why this case is neither like Eldred v. Ashcroft nor Kelo v. City of New London.
Probably. NetBSD runs on just about everything else....
No, the meaning is not clear. The prefix "ir" in English words means "not". So to people who actually understand the rules of the English language, "irregardless" means "not regardless".
If I say "Irregardless of the snow, I'm going outside," it means that I'm only going outside, but only if it doesn't snow. This is the exact opposite of what people who say this made up word actually mean by it.
Frankly, I find the use of "irregardless" to be confusing as h***. If you mean "regardless", you should say "regardless".
My point was that nobody implements password handling like this because that creates a trivial avenue for denial of service for the account. All I'd have to do is have a botnet of one computer trying five passwords every 15 minutes, and you would never be able to log into your account ever again. I don't need to know your password at all to permanently deny you the use of your account. I need only to learn your username.
Instead, what everyone actually implements in practice is five attempts per 15 minutes per account per IP. So if you have ten million distinct IPs, you have fifty million password attempts per account every 15 minutes, 200 million attempts per account per hour, 4.8 billion attempts per account per day. That's 1.44 trillion total attempts per day, assuming the computers and networks are fast enough to handle this.
The smarter companies implement a limit per IP per unit of time as well, which tends to lower that number considerably.
Now to be fair, what's more common (and what probably got my account) are dictionary attacks and variations on dictionary attacks (common word + a number, substitution of common letters, etc.) rather than true brute force attacks. In my mind, though, I consider brute force attacks and dictionary attacks to be the same thing; the only real difference is the algorithm used for choosing which passwords to try first.
Not when you have a botnet of several million machines, each one trying to gain access to the account. The only way you can prevent a distributed password guessing attack is to block accounts after a number of failed guesses. However, this would also result in locking legitimate users out of their accounts.
I seldom use Facebook anywhere other than on my own home network, my company's network, or a cellular network (none of which are very likely to result in cookie attacks). It's certainly possible that it was attacked in some other way, but the likelihood of that is fairly low.