De Beers and jewelers try to convince us that diamonds are an investment and that they hold their value. Completely and utterly false. I remember this great article from years ago:
All rockets are built using government subsidies. And they always have been. How many companies ate the pork that drove the space shuttle program?
Seems like SpaceX has managed to do more with their government contracts than any other company in decades. This is the sort of government-sponsored thing I can support.
Fueling a rocket with people in it? Not so much. I'm sure they'll be forced to abandon that particular bad idea. They seem to learn from their mistakes, and hopefully they can continue to make mistakes with people well clear.
Yes that's true that a copyright holder may choose to cut off options 1 and 2 after a violation occurred. And if you get caught there are monetary damages that can be awarded to the copyright holder, and the violator has to cease violating. In other words they have to stop selling the software and remove the GPL'd code from it. Despite the wording of the GPL, the copyright holder could, if they choose, still negotiate options 1 or 2. The copyright holder has the right to enforce or negate parts of the GPL if he or she wishes.
Anyway violation of source code licenses is actually quite common and often companies will wait to get sued, then settle and negotiate with the copyright holder. If the product has real monetary value then usually they can pay the damages and negotiate a licensing deal. That's certainly the ideal option for any GPL code author.
This is absolutely false. Please stop posting this kind of FUD. Using a piece of GPL'd software does not magically infect your copyrighted code with the GPL. Using code under the terms of the GPL is absolutely no different from using code under *any other* source code license. If you use GPL'd code inappropriately you will find yourself in a copyright violation situation. Again I repeat this is no different than if you violated Microsoft's copyright or any other proprietary code license. When you are in a copyright violation situation you have three choices:
1. comply with the license by making your code also GPL 2. negotiate a suitable license with the copyright holders 3. remove the GPL'd code and write your own code
The copyright holders can demand monetary compensation form the violator, but they can't force a company to GPL their own proprietary code.
Not sure why you say that. Computers haven't advanced that much in the last 5 years. My x220 runs a normal desktop with fancy compiz effects. And I regularly run Windows 7 in a virtual machine. It can handle that just fine. And I'm sure Docker would be fine. Gnome 3 also runs just fine. You can pretty much load up the RAM on the x220 as much as some current laptops. It's got 4 cores at 2.6 GHz and can handle 8 GB RAM. Besides more cores and more RAM, current laptops are not any faster. In fact the x230 doesn't offer much more than the x220 did, except a crappier keyboard.
To me this VW emissions scandal, and many others, kind of shows just how difficult if not impossible it is to set standards that apply at all time under all conditions in the real world. The only way to monitor emissions in real-world conditions is to monitor them in real time as we drive. Every car across the planet, and then relay that information to some central location. And then what I think you'll find is that most engines don't meet the strictest standards a lot of the time. And it will vary as much on people's driving habits as anything. Punch it off the light and you're going to emit a lot more particulates than cruising. Drive it hard while cold and you'll pollute regardless. And even gasoline engines likely emit much more particulate pollution than we thought before, especially with direct injection.
That's not to say pollution standards aren't good. A car that meets standards under controlled conditions is going to be a lot cleaner under any circumstances than an engine that didn't meet those standards under controlled circumstances.
You were misreading the OP's tenses. There once was a gold standard. And he was saying that under the gold standard, when it was in place, everyone agreed to say a particular currency is worth X amount of gold. Under such a system, the value of the gold is not under a free market, or else the currency would be too.
I used to use the wonderful Readability add-on in firefox before it went all cloud-based and commercial. I still use a fork of Readability called Enjoy Reading, but it's not maintained and not available anymore. I sure enjoy using it to read articles, though. I can set the font and make it clear and have all the contrast I want. Even better, often times by stripping out all the cruft, it can display a page that displays in parts normally all in one page. It also tends to cut through those popups that say I can't read the article unless I turn off my ad-blocker, which I refuse to do because it's not worth the risk.
Anyway I hope this add-on gets picked up again some day. I understand Safari has this functionality built-in (at least it used to).
I'm not sure that's quite right. With most home routers you have to go to some effort to place your IoT devices live on the internet. Besides that, most IoT companies already offer cloud access via their own app which doesn't require the IoT device to be open on the internet itself. I'd say this is the standard method of operation of IoT these days (a third-party service), especially for the unwashed masses. For example I've played with a WeMo switch that was cloud enabled but certainly wasn't out on the internet itself. Many of these companies don't do a good job with security, but that's not really what we're talking about here. So there has to be more to this story.
I came here to post the same question. I know that 15 or 20 years ago when IPv4 addresses were plentiful that nearly everything was publically-addressable (though often firewalled at the gateway), but I thought nearly everyone from institutions to households had moved to private IPv4 networks. Most IoT devices that I know of that are cloud-enabled connect into a cloud control server from within a private network. Still a security risk, especially if malware gets inside the private network it can attack these devices from the inside.
IPv6 is a bit different of course; were these exploited devices accessed via IPv6?
So inquiring minds want to know, how were these IoT devices compromised? Were they sitting out on the open internet? Hacked from other devices or computers inside the private lan?
Just recently I listened to the old radio show X Minus One's adaptation of Philip K Dick's short story, "The Defenders" which is appropriate to this story. In the story a brief nuclear war forces nearly everyone on the planet to live underground while robots continue the fight and the nuclear bombardment on the surface. Unknown to the humans, the robots figured out early on that the war was really stupid, so they stopped fighting and began to repair and renew the world, all the while sending fake war reports back to the humans and telling them that the radiation levels were toxic, when in fact there was no radiation left. Very interesting story.
Here's hoping that if every nation and group in the world starts making robots to fight for us, maybe the robots will realize how stupid this all is and refuse to listen to us until we all come to our senses.
If Wikileaks' work is so important, I'm sure it can continue on without Assange in the loop, surely. In fact it would regain a lot of credibility were this to happen. Lately I think Assange's narcissism is more of a liability than an asset to Wikileaks and its cause.
Yup you can apt-get install anything in the Ubuntu repositories. Including many things that won't yet run properly, since the Linux layer isn't complete.
I've run Xming and many graphical apps in it, though, including Firefox, and many apps from the Mate Desktop (requires fiddling to fix dbus though).
I've used Cygwin for many years and it's still useful like it always was, mainly for scripting and remote-access stuff (sshd). It's obviously not for you since you, but it's been invaluable for me. Of course it serves a different purpose than the linux emulation layer does for Windows.
Vulnerabilities exist on Linux too. And they always will exist. Prevention is most important of course, but for the bad guys who break past that, we'll likely need active threat monitoring on Linux as well before too long. And just handing someone Linux isn't magically going to improve their personal security. Bad habits can own a Linux install as much as it can Windows. Social engineering can work just as well against the unwitting Linux user as it can Windows or Mac users.
I remember dabbling in Linux about RedHat 5 times. I think my first home install was 5.1. Back then the default desktop for RH was FVWM, which in hindsight was pretty good. But coming from Windows 95, it was pretty bewildering and somewhat disjointed and not well integrated. I think it was about this time I started reading slashdot and heard about this new KDE desktop. KDE 1.0. Somehow there were packages for RH 5.1 or 5.2, so I downloaded them and installed. I was stunned. Except for the one-click nonsense I finally had a workable desktop with an integrated file manager, start menu, removable disk management and it looked kind of like Windows 95. Combine that with the release of WordPerfect 8 for Linux, and suddenly I had everything I needed to stay in Linux for my everyday work as a student. I quickly moved on to Gnome 1.x, although I can't for the life of me remember why as the first Gnome releases were horrible--maybe it was because gnome used proper double clicks. But I remember KDE 1.0 with fondness.
A few years later another couple of landmark applications (at the time anyway) to come out of the KDE world that changed my life as a neophyte Linux programmer were the releases in the 2.0 days of kdevelop and kdbg. Especially the latter, as I found command-line debugging difficult, and I found ddd to be too complicated at the time. kdbg did the job and was easy to use. And Kdevelop helped introduce me to the world of Linux programming in C and C++. Now I just use vim and the command line, but Kdevelop, like KDE 1.0 before it, offered me a familiar environment to ease the learning curve of moving to Linux. I know it did the same for many of our students at university too after I deployed it along with the full KDE 2.0 (and also Gnome) suite in our labs.
I did the same thing at Uni. The problem with CDE was that by the timeframe we are talking about here, CDE was showing its age. Incoming students all came from Windows 9x, which when compared to CDE was positively advanced (in their minds anyway). KDE 2.0 provided a much more familiar environment to work in, plus it offered an integrated way to deal with removable media, which CDE simply knew nothing about. Long-time users of course would use the mtools on the command-line.
KDE 2.0 breathed new life into our Solaris computer labs and suddenly they went from being hardly used (let's face it, the HPUX machines were simply better) to much more heavily used.
About that time, when Linux was finally coming into its own, that we set up a lab of RedHat 6.2 machines, and really that was the beginning of the end for both HPUX and Solaris in our department.
If true then that means the phones certainly were defective by design and should be a lesson to all manufacturers. So it wouldn't be funny at all, but hopefully would be a strong lesson.
In this case, we know that the problems stem from a bad physical design primarily.
I am probably not the only one that has a drawer full of devices and SOCs with ARM processors on them that I thought would be more useful than they turned out to be. There's nothing wrong with the ARM processor itself, it's just the funky bootloaders and proprietary peripherals with proprietary firmware, and custom kernels that make them a lot less useful to me than if someone made a little x86 SOC with a full complement of I/O pins (including a ADC) with a normal EFI/BIOS.
For some things like my router/firewall, I thought a little ARM-based device would be perfect, but it turned out that a Intel NUC with an micro SD card ended up being easier to deal with (though an order of magnitude more expensive). Easier to keep updated, and can run a stock distro.
I just saw that GlobalScale is producing a new ARM board aimed at networking, which looks interesting, but it's the nearly the same hardware as their old Plug computer products (only 1.2 GHz but with a lot more RAM), married to a 3-port gigabit switch fabric. Still means dealing with a custom/proprietary uboot loader, flashing kernels, etc. Not something I care to deal with anymore.
Of course other devices are different and easy to boot off an SD card. But that's the problem, isn't it. There's no such thing as an ARM version of Debian that runs on all ARM devices. We have to have custom spins for each board. They may as well be their own complete platform, which is impossible for Linus and crew to deal with. So we have to rely on vendors to supply custom versions of the kernel and matching distro.
But for me, yes thinness is an issue. Larger phones might make up for it in some way but I find it difficult to grasp the thin phones by their edges in a secure way, especially if I'm in a risky place like somewhere high or over water. And I used to like holding my phone with my shoulder while I switch something in my hands. I'd be it could be a challenge for even 20 year olds.
But no fear, with my new Apple bluetooth earbuds I can have a hands free experience now. Wake me up when we all put a insignia on our chests and just use that. Except that you can't text on it very well. How did Star Trek get that so wrong!?
Well if a contract can be renegotiated at any party's whim that seems to cheapen and weaken the whole point of contracts. No wonder dishonesty is so entrenched in the business world. Contracts seem to be good as long as they benefit me. The moment they start to move against me, it's time to renegotiate! If both parties agree, then I have no problems with that, of course. I deal with contracts in another industry all the time and, once the deal is signed, we follow the terms. There is an out of course, but in order for it to be fair, it involves monetary compensation. If Amazon could do that I wouldn't complain. I agree Amazon did a a poor job negotiating their contract in the first place.
Yes I am, bot not for long. But you see this service is so successful because of people like me. Ones who don't really want to keep paying Amazon, but I have enough money to not really miss it each month and forget to unsubscribe from month to month. Plus there's the issue of those 2 or 3 books in my unlimited selection I've been meaning to read but haven't yet. The psychology Amazon uses really works! I don't fault them for this. There's no contract here, so they aren't holding me over a barrel. I just need to walk away.
The contract with authors in Japan is a completely different story.
Sure but having it already on a Arduino board (with maybe jumpers to select voltage) would just make it so much easier. Much of what you can do with Arduino can be done with very little external circuitry. That's what makes it so appealing to would-be hobbyists like me.
from time to time. Remember this is partly based on user reports.
I'm sure the majority of Slashdot users are savvy and looking for specific things (like free Linux ISOs or creative commons content... right). I would bet a nickle there are threats that people have encountered downloading things willy-nilly from the PirateBay. I've heard of music and movie files that were really executables, for example. I'm also fairly confident that malware comes through ads from time to time which many less-experienced users are going to be seeing.
So for many Windows users I would rate many torrent indexing sites as high risk for malware infection. Sad thing is, that's pretty meaningless though as commonly used "legitimate" commercial sites get malware in their ad networks from time to time. uBlock (origin?), and ghostery are standard installs for any computer I work on for friends and family. Just can't risk it today.
Slashdot Mirror
De Beers and jewelers try to convince us that diamonds are an investment and that they hold their value. Completely and utterly false. I remember this great article from years ago:
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
(turn off javascript to view the article so the anti-ad blocker won't pop up... it's just not safe to disable ad blocking).
The entire demand for diamonds was created by De Beers. It's a marketing scam.
All rockets are built using government subsidies. And they always have been. How many companies ate the pork that drove the space shuttle program?
Seems like SpaceX has managed to do more with their government contracts than any other company in decades. This is the sort of government-sponsored thing I can support.
Fueling a rocket with people in it? Not so much. I'm sure they'll be forced to abandon that particular bad idea. They seem to learn from their mistakes, and hopefully they can continue to make mistakes with people well clear.
Yes that's true that a copyright holder may choose to cut off options 1 and 2 after a violation occurred. And if you get caught there are monetary damages that can be awarded to the copyright holder, and the violator has to cease violating. In other words they have to stop selling the software and remove the GPL'd code from it. Despite the wording of the GPL, the copyright holder could, if they choose, still negotiate options 1 or 2. The copyright holder has the right to enforce or negate parts of the GPL if he or she wishes.
Anyway violation of source code licenses is actually quite common and often companies will wait to get sued, then settle and negotiate with the copyright holder. If the product has real monetary value then usually they can pay the damages and negotiate a licensing deal. That's certainly the ideal option for any GPL code author.
This is absolutely false. Please stop posting this kind of FUD. Using a piece of GPL'd software does not magically infect your copyrighted code with the GPL. Using code under the terms of the GPL is absolutely no different from using code under *any other* source code license. If you use GPL'd code inappropriately you will find yourself in a copyright violation situation. Again I repeat this is no different than if you violated Microsoft's copyright or any other proprietary code license. When you are in a copyright violation situation you have three choices:
1. comply with the license by making your code also GPL
2. negotiate a suitable license with the copyright holders
3. remove the GPL'd code and write your own code
The copyright holders can demand monetary compensation form the violator, but they can't force a company to GPL their own proprietary code.
Not sure why you say that. Computers haven't advanced that much in the last 5 years. My x220 runs a normal desktop with fancy compiz effects. And I regularly run Windows 7 in a virtual machine. It can handle that just fine. And I'm sure Docker would be fine. Gnome 3 also runs just fine. You can pretty much load up the RAM on the x220 as much as some current laptops. It's got 4 cores at 2.6 GHz and can handle 8 GB RAM. Besides more cores and more RAM, current laptops are not any faster. In fact the x230 doesn't offer much more than the x220 did, except a crappier keyboard.
And how is battery life compared to the new 16 GB MacBook Pro? I will be surprised if it's as good or better.
To me this VW emissions scandal, and many others, kind of shows just how difficult if not impossible it is to set standards that apply at all time under all conditions in the real world. The only way to monitor emissions in real-world conditions is to monitor them in real time as we drive. Every car across the planet, and then relay that information to some central location. And then what I think you'll find is that most engines don't meet the strictest standards a lot of the time. And it will vary as much on people's driving habits as anything. Punch it off the light and you're going to emit a lot more particulates than cruising. Drive it hard while cold and you'll pollute regardless. And even gasoline engines likely emit much more particulate pollution than we thought before, especially with direct injection.
That's not to say pollution standards aren't good. A car that meets standards under controlled conditions is going to be a lot cleaner under any circumstances than an engine that didn't meet those standards under controlled circumstances.
You were misreading the OP's tenses. There once was a gold standard. And he was saying that under the gold standard, when it was in place, everyone agreed to say a particular currency is worth X amount of gold. Under such a system, the value of the gold is not under a free market, or else the currency would be too.
I used to use the wonderful Readability add-on in firefox before it went all cloud-based and commercial. I still use a fork of Readability called Enjoy Reading, but it's not maintained and not available anymore. I sure enjoy using it to read articles, though. I can set the font and make it clear and have all the contrast I want. Even better, often times by stripping out all the cruft, it can display a page that displays in parts normally all in one page. It also tends to cut through those popups that say I can't read the article unless I turn off my ad-blocker, which I refuse to do because it's not worth the risk.
Anyway I hope this add-on gets picked up again some day. I understand Safari has this functionality built-in (at least it used to).
I'm not sure that's quite right. With most home routers you have to go to some effort to place your IoT devices live on the internet. Besides that, most IoT companies already offer cloud access via their own app which doesn't require the IoT device to be open on the internet itself. I'd say this is the standard method of operation of IoT these days (a third-party service), especially for the unwashed masses. For example I've played with a WeMo switch that was cloud enabled but certainly wasn't out on the internet itself. Many of these companies don't do a good job with security, but that's not really what we're talking about here. So there has to be more to this story.
I came here to post the same question. I know that 15 or 20 years ago when IPv4 addresses were plentiful that nearly everything was publically-addressable (though often firewalled at the gateway), but I thought nearly everyone from institutions to households had moved to private IPv4 networks. Most IoT devices that I know of that are cloud-enabled connect into a cloud control server from within a private network. Still a security risk, especially if malware gets inside the private network it can attack these devices from the inside.
IPv6 is a bit different of course; were these exploited devices accessed via IPv6?
So inquiring minds want to know, how were these IoT devices compromised? Were they sitting out on the open internet? Hacked from other devices or computers inside the private lan?
Just recently I listened to the old radio show X Minus One's adaptation of Philip K Dick's short story, "The Defenders" which is appropriate to this story. In the story a brief nuclear war forces nearly everyone on the planet to live underground while robots continue the fight and the nuclear bombardment on the surface. Unknown to the humans, the robots figured out early on that the war was really stupid, so they stopped fighting and began to repair and renew the world, all the while sending fake war reports back to the humans and telling them that the radiation levels were toxic, when in fact there was no radiation left. Very interesting story.
Here's hoping that if every nation and group in the world starts making robots to fight for us, maybe the robots will realize how stupid this all is and refuse to listen to us until we all come to our senses.
If Wikileaks' work is so important, I'm sure it can continue on without Assange in the loop, surely. In fact it would regain a lot of credibility were this to happen. Lately I think Assange's narcissism is more of a liability than an asset to Wikileaks and its cause.
Yup you can apt-get install anything in the Ubuntu repositories. Including many things that won't yet run properly, since the Linux layer isn't complete.
I've run Xming and many graphical apps in it, though, including Firefox, and many apps from the Mate Desktop (requires fiddling to fix dbus though).
I've used Cygwin for many years and it's still useful like it always was, mainly for scripting and remote-access stuff (sshd). It's obviously not for you since you, but it's been invaluable for me. Of course it serves a different purpose than the linux emulation layer does for Windows.
Vulnerabilities exist on Linux too. And they always will exist. Prevention is most important of course, but for the bad guys who break past that, we'll likely need active threat monitoring on Linux as well before too long. And just handing someone Linux isn't magically going to improve their personal security. Bad habits can own a Linux install as much as it can Windows. Social engineering can work just as well against the unwitting Linux user as it can Windows or Mac users.
I remember dabbling in Linux about RedHat 5 times. I think my first home install was 5.1. Back then the default desktop for RH was FVWM, which in hindsight was pretty good. But coming from Windows 95, it was pretty bewildering and somewhat disjointed and not well integrated. I think it was about this time I started reading slashdot and heard about this new KDE desktop. KDE 1.0. Somehow there were packages for RH 5.1 or 5.2, so I downloaded them and installed. I was stunned. Except for the one-click nonsense I finally had a workable desktop with an integrated file manager, start menu, removable disk management and it looked kind of like Windows 95. Combine that with the release of WordPerfect 8 for Linux, and suddenly I had everything I needed to stay in Linux for my everyday work as a student. I quickly moved on to Gnome 1.x, although I can't for the life of me remember why as the first Gnome releases were horrible--maybe it was because gnome used proper double clicks. But I remember KDE 1.0 with fondness.
A few years later another couple of landmark applications (at the time anyway) to come out of the KDE world that changed my life as a neophyte Linux programmer were the releases in the 2.0 days of kdevelop and kdbg. Especially the latter, as I found command-line debugging difficult, and I found ddd to be too complicated at the time. kdbg did the job and was easy to use. And Kdevelop helped introduce me to the world of Linux programming in C and C++. Now I just use vim and the command line, but Kdevelop, like KDE 1.0 before it, offered me a familiar environment to ease the learning curve of moving to Linux. I know it did the same for many of our students at university too after I deployed it along with the full KDE 2.0 (and also Gnome) suite in our labs.
I did the same thing at Uni. The problem with CDE was that by the timeframe we are talking about here, CDE was showing its age. Incoming students all came from Windows 9x, which when compared to CDE was positively advanced (in their minds anyway). KDE 2.0 provided a much more familiar environment to work in, plus it offered an integrated way to deal with removable media, which CDE simply knew nothing about. Long-time users of course would use the mtools on the command-line.
KDE 2.0 breathed new life into our Solaris computer labs and suddenly they went from being hardly used (let's face it, the HPUX machines were simply better) to much more heavily used.
About that time, when Linux was finally coming into its own, that we set up a lab of RedHat 6.2 machines, and really that was the beginning of the end for both HPUX and Solaris in our department.
If true then that means the phones certainly were defective by design and should be a lesson to all manufacturers. So it wouldn't be funny at all, but hopefully would be a strong lesson.
In this case, we know that the problems stem from a bad physical design primarily.
I would assume that if the fuel is carbon-neutral then so is the ICE.
I am probably not the only one that has a drawer full of devices and SOCs with ARM processors on them that I thought would be more useful than they turned out to be. There's nothing wrong with the ARM processor itself, it's just the funky bootloaders and proprietary peripherals with proprietary firmware, and custom kernels that make them a lot less useful to me than if someone made a little x86 SOC with a full complement of I/O pins (including a ADC) with a normal EFI/BIOS.
For some things like my router/firewall, I thought a little ARM-based device would be perfect, but it turned out that a Intel NUC with an micro SD card ended up being easier to deal with (though an order of magnitude more expensive). Easier to keep updated, and can run a stock distro.
I just saw that GlobalScale is producing a new ARM board aimed at networking, which looks interesting, but it's the nearly the same hardware as their old Plug computer products (only 1.2 GHz but with a lot more RAM), married to a 3-port gigabit switch fabric. Still means dealing with a custom/proprietary uboot loader, flashing kernels, etc. Not something I care to deal with anymore.
Of course other devices are different and easy to boot off an SD card. But that's the problem, isn't it. There's no such thing as an ARM version of Debian that runs on all ARM devices. We have to have custom spins for each board. They may as well be their own complete platform, which is impossible for Linus and crew to deal with. So we have to rely on vendors to supply custom versions of the kernel and matching distro.
I agree about size bloat!
But for me, yes thinness is an issue. Larger phones might make up for it in some way but I find it difficult to grasp the thin phones by their edges in a secure way, especially if I'm in a risky place like somewhere high or over water. And I used to like holding my phone with my shoulder while I switch something in my hands. I'd be it could be a challenge for even 20 year olds.
But no fear, with my new Apple bluetooth earbuds I can have a hands free experience now. Wake me up when we all put a insignia on our chests and just use that. Except that you can't text on it very well. How did Star Trek get that so wrong!?
Well if a contract can be renegotiated at any party's whim that seems to cheapen and weaken the whole point of contracts. No wonder dishonesty is so entrenched in the business world. Contracts seem to be good as long as they benefit me. The moment they start to move against me, it's time to renegotiate! If both parties agree, then I have no problems with that, of course. I deal with contracts in another industry all the time and, once the deal is signed, we follow the terms. There is an out of course, but in order for it to be fair, it involves monetary compensation. If Amazon could do that I wouldn't complain. I agree Amazon did a a poor job negotiating their contract in the first place.
Yes I am, bot not for long. But you see this service is so successful because of people like me. Ones who don't really want to keep paying Amazon, but I have enough money to not really miss it each month and forget to unsubscribe from month to month. Plus there's the issue of those 2 or 3 books in my unlimited selection I've been meaning to read but haven't yet. The psychology Amazon uses really works! I don't fault them for this. There's no contract here, so they aren't holding me over a barrel. I just need to walk away.
The contract with authors in Japan is a completely different story.
Sure but having it already on a Arduino board (with maybe jumpers to select voltage) would just make it so much easier. Much of what you can do with Arduino can be done with very little external circuitry. That's what makes it so appealing to would-be hobbyists like me.
from time to time. Remember this is partly based on user reports.
I'm sure the majority of Slashdot users are savvy and looking for specific things (like free Linux ISOs or creative commons content... right). I would bet a nickle there are threats that people have encountered downloading things willy-nilly from the PirateBay. I've heard of music and movie files that were really executables, for example. I'm also fairly confident that malware comes through ads from time to time which many less-experienced users are going to be seeing.
So for many Windows users I would rate many torrent indexing sites as high risk for malware infection. Sad thing is, that's pretty meaningless though as commonly used "legitimate" commercial sites get malware in their ad networks from time to time. uBlock (origin?), and ghostery are standard installs for any computer I work on for friends and family. Just can't risk it today.