(Threaten to) sue you and force you to choose between a settlement or crushing legal fees.
They usually prefer the "threaten" route: less paperwork for them when they extort you. Really, of course, it is about creating fear in the hearts of people so they avoid anything the RIAA and kin dislike, so an actual suite is counter-productive and they usually avoid it unless they have a pretty solid case.
Literally why does this story even exist? This code takes out nuclear reactors and "researchers ask programmers for help"? Really?! (Does "Ask" imply they want the answer FREE?!)
So the Dept of Homeland Security is busy helping yank down file share sites and they have no time for this?
Why would DHS have anything to do with this? DuQu so far hasn't done anything to American interests (in fact, so far as I can tell, it has helped them). The people in TFA looking at the code are Kaspersky: a Russian anti-virus company. They don't even recognize the language the code is written in, much less how it works, and they are wondering if anyone of the billions of people on the Internet knows (specifically, if it is a a specialized language used in some niche industry or something). If no one does, they can be pretty sure it was a custom created language, and proceed accordingly. They aren't asking for someone to do their work for them: they are saying "hey, this look like anything anyone knows?" DHS might be looking at it too, if they didn't create it: but the story has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with them, in any way. Not even the same continent.
Also, I don't know where you got "takes out nuclear reactors." Stuxnet did damage to nuclear centrifuges. AFAICT all DuQu seems to be doing is stealing data (private keys, actually). Bad for people who get infected, yes. Not like it is causing nuclear meltdowns or something.
So I can't type on my iPad at all? Shit. What the hell does this virtual keyboard thingie do then?
Idiot.
The simple truth is that most people don't do any "content creation" above blog entries, tweets, etc on their full-sized computers. So why single out the iPad? Or do you just have a hard-on for bashing Apple?
Did he mention Apple in his post? Or did you miss the "large media conglomerate" part, or that it applies equally well to Android (or WP7, if you prefer that route).
I'm thinking the only person with a hard-on here is you, and for Apple.
And how well did that work out for Sabu? He may have been used to find the identities of other hackers, but I haven't seen any evidence he was caught that way, which means that while it is easier for the FBI to use CIs, they certainly don't need them to catch Anon/Lulzsec members.
DVD's are already digital. No "digitization" is required.
...people who own standard DVDs will have the option of getting a high-definition digital copy for an extra fee.
Oh right. "HD." Is that upscaled-DVD "HD" or barely 720p "HD"?
Eventually, consumers will be able to put DVDs into PCs or certain Blu-ray players that will upload a copy, similar to the way people turn music CDs into MP3 files.
Yes. That already exists. Except they want to put it in the cloud, so the movie you bought, then paid extra for to have in non-physical form, can still be completely controlled by them. Sure, that'll work./sarcasm
Someone who knows the difference between legality and ethics is far more trustworthy than someone who doesn't.
Yes. And if we were talking about Ghandi, that would be extremely applicable, but I've seen no evidence Lulzsec knows the tiniest bit about "ethics." They certainly didn't claim that is why they acted.
Yeah, because the Underground Railroad totally helped slaves escape because it was fun, and that is in no way a terrible analogy that degrades the actions of people who risked life and property to help slaves escape by comparing them to people who, by their own admission, caused random havoc "for teh lulz."
I do have to say, though, props for not actually Godwinning the thread. You could have, too, oh so easily.
Would you characterize an atheist as one who denies the existence of god outright, or someone who, in the absence of proof, does not allow himself to accept the positive claims of others?
The former is an atheist. The latter is an agnostic. How, exactly, is this relevant though?
The same way a course in "Star Trek" makes its way into Georgetown University. Or "Art History" or "Golf Management" or dozens of other courses at dozens of other universities. Because higher education stopped being about actual education and more about a) making money and b) making the students feel good about themselves.
Probably started around the time Philosophy classes stopped reading and teaching Neitzsche, Bacon, Aristotle, and Kant, and started being about... well, slacking off, wondering randomly about whatever, and getting high. Biggest contributing factor, IMO, was when people started to feel they need college degrees, but weren't smart enough or dedicated enough to actually study seriously. So, colleges started making up stupid courses people could take, without requiring them to actually do any work. This allows everyone to get a degree, but makes half of them worthless. But hey, now most people at least have a college degree, right?
This is Sony. Their idea of a Captcha is, well, this (Google, BTW, returns the Captcha letters in plaintext if you search for it. Yeah, not so good on the "stopping bots" there Sony). Sony is simply incompetent when it comes to security: there is no other way to put it. Their vaunted PS3 secure bootloader? Yeah, turns out they don't know how to properly sign their keys (instead of using random numbers in the signature, they always used the same number, allowing anyone to discover their private signing key with basic algebra). These aren't difficult-to-implement, advanced security: this is literally the basic concept behind these types of security, which you can find explained on Wikipedia, implemented well in open source software which they could use, and they still can't get it right.
They probably have the source for all their software hosted on an unsecured FTP server somewhere, so that their developers can access it easily, relying on no-one knowing the IP to keep it secure. It would literally not surprise me, at this point.
You know, if the state legislatures selecting their senators worked so well, we'd still be doing it that way.
As it turned out, the 17th Amendment was so popular that it passed very quickly. This should tell you something.
Yes, because people aren't smart enough to know what is and isn't good for them. Kinda the whole point of the story. We also passed a Constitutional Amendment banning alcohol and elected George Bush Jr. twice (and gave him some of the best popular approval ratings of any president). Popularity says nothing whatsoever about how good an idea is/was. And it cannot be denied that Senators today are quite often beholden to and act at the behest of special interest groups, an issue which at least partly stems from their direct election by the people.
Because we haven't modified the US government system in any way, shape, or form since it was first instituted, like through, say, direct election of Senators. No, definitely wouldn't do that, it might turn out that Senators who rely on popular opinion to get elected might spend most of their time pandering to their district's interests. Certainly, we would never set things up so that could happen, that was one of the things the republican (again, not the party) Senatorial system was set up to avoid!
No, that isn't far fetched at all, and it is entirely possible (maybe even likely). However, the philosophical principles that guide science dictate that we should reduce effects to the fewest possible number of causes. If two causes suffice to explain the phenomenon, one should not introduce a third. You can introduce new principles/causes/etc ad infinitum, but unless they are required to explain the observations, they are more or less worthless. In other words, one should postulate only as many kinds of matter as have been observed (but not that there are definitely only those kinds).
Depends on what the limit of the product of the no. of channels by the capacity of the channel becomes as they approach infinity. Calculus, basically: one thing can approach zero and another can approach infinity, but their product can approach a finite number in between. It all depends on how they approach zero and infinity. Could also mean the bandwidth is effectively infinite, or effectively zero, in the extreme case, although the latter would be unexpected, to say the least.
That wasn't the problem, actually. The problem was he held a position at the company simultaneous with holding a position (as editor-in-chief) with a highly regarded and influential bioethics magazine. The result was a conflict of interest: the company pushes to perform unproven operations, and it is the job of bioethics to make sure they don't go into an ethical violation with the treatments. If one person is involved in both, the safeguards against unethical behavior are called into question, whether or not ethical violations actually take place.
From the second linked article:
They argue that in holding both posts, McGee has a conflict of interest between his responsibilities to the journal [of Bioethics] and his new employer’s desire to promote the clinical application of stem-cell treatments that are not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.
Ah, well then. That sucks. I have no problem with MS playing with new interfaces so long as they allow us to shut it off and go back to the regular desktop, but if they don't allow that I may well not move to Windows 8 (might not anyways unless there is a good reason to).
"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer" in regedit, set "RPEnabled" to "0". Haven't tried it myself (don't have Win8), but supposedly it completely disables all the Metro and Ribbon stuff in Explorer.
They did get conditional approval and lots of praise from the FCC, though. The problem was using bandwidth for terrestrial stations that close to the GPS spectrum was always a bad idea. The spectrum was always intended to be used for satellite transmissions: the FCC themselves designated it for that. For them to offer conditional approval later shows someone was pushing for Lightsquared to succeed. Not even that could get past the fact that their system interferes with most GPS systems, though, and it would be nearly impossible to fix that problem.
You've obviously not been looking hard enough. The Ars Technica article sums up the science behind it pretty well (basically, they did a test run of the terrestrial base-stations and it interfered with ~75% of GPS devises, after LightSquared reduced the stations power to try to fix the problem). There is a ton of proof that they actually interfere with GPS signals, namely, actual experiments.
First, Bluray is 1080p, not 720. Second, not all 1080p is the same. If you compress a 1080p movie into an H264 file, it will have visible compression artifacts that don't exist on the DVD..
Just FYI, at least some Blu-Ray movies already are H264 (I think that is the standard of choice), so of course you will lose further quality if you compress it more. On the other hand, I happen to have a 720P x264 rip of Game of Thrones that is only ~400MB for each 60 minute video and it looks pretty decent on a 24" monitor 2 feet from my face (not amazing, but much better than any ~350MB xvid files), so you can make them look good if you use the right settings and tweak the encoder a bit.
Skin the the biggest organ in the human body and one can not have part of one organ be part of another organ.
Why not? The penis is an organ by every definition (common and medical) I can find, and it most certainly includes another organ (the skin, unless you want to try arguing the skin isn't part of the penis, which would be an odd argument). Also, the ear (absolutely an organ) includes skin as well. The arm is more usually considered an "appendage" and medically speaking it might be more precisely called an "organ system" or part of a system. And the arms certainly perform special functions (grasping objects). Organ is a fairly general term. IMO it can certainly be applied to the arm, although you may want to use another term so as to avoid any confusion.
Slashdot Mirror
(Threaten to) sue you and force you to choose between a settlement or crushing legal fees.
They usually prefer the "threaten" route: less paperwork for them when they extort you. Really, of course, it is about creating fear in the hearts of people so they avoid anything the RIAA and kin dislike, so an actual suite is counter-productive and they usually avoid it unless they have a pretty solid case.
Of course, IANAL.
Literally why does this story even exist? This code takes out nuclear reactors and "researchers ask programmers for help"? Really?! (Does "Ask" imply they want the answer FREE?!) So the Dept of Homeland Security is busy helping yank down file share sites and they have no time for this?
Why would DHS have anything to do with this? DuQu so far hasn't done anything to American interests (in fact, so far as I can tell, it has helped them). The people in TFA looking at the code are Kaspersky: a Russian anti-virus company. They don't even recognize the language the code is written in, much less how it works, and they are wondering if anyone of the billions of people on the Internet knows (specifically, if it is a a specialized language used in some niche industry or something). If no one does, they can be pretty sure it was a custom created language, and proceed accordingly. They aren't asking for someone to do their work for them: they are saying "hey, this look like anything anyone knows?" DHS might be looking at it too, if they didn't create it: but the story has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with them, in any way. Not even the same continent.
Also, I don't know where you got "takes out nuclear reactors." Stuxnet did damage to nuclear centrifuges. AFAICT all DuQu seems to be doing is stealing data (private keys, actually). Bad for people who get infected, yes. Not like it is causing nuclear meltdowns or something.
So I can't type on my iPad at all? Shit. What the hell does this virtual keyboard thingie do then?
Idiot.
The simple truth is that most people don't do any "content creation" above blog entries, tweets, etc on their full-sized computers. So why single out the iPad? Or do you just have a hard-on for bashing Apple?
Did he mention Apple in his post? Or did you miss the "large media conglomerate" part, or that it applies equally well to Android (or WP7, if you prefer that route).
I'm thinking the only person with a hard-on here is you, and for Apple.
And how well did that work out for Sabu? He may have been used to find the identities of other hackers, but I haven't seen any evidence he was caught that way, which means that while it is easier for the FBI to use CIs, they certainly don't need them to catch Anon/Lulzsec members.
DVD's are already digital. No "digitization" is required.
...people who own standard DVDs will have the option of getting a high-definition digital copy for an extra fee.
Oh right. "HD." Is that upscaled-DVD "HD" or barely 720p "HD"?
Eventually, consumers will be able to put DVDs into PCs or certain Blu-ray players that will upload a copy, similar to the way people turn music CDs into MP3 files.
Yes. That already exists. Except they want to put it in the cloud, so the movie you bought, then paid extra for to have in non-physical form, can still be completely controlled by them. Sure, that'll work. /sarcasm
Someone who knows the difference between legality and ethics is far more trustworthy than someone who doesn't.
Yes. And if we were talking about Ghandi, that would be extremely applicable, but I've seen no evidence Lulzsec knows the tiniest bit about "ethics." They certainly didn't claim that is why they acted.
Yeah, because the Underground Railroad totally helped slaves escape because it was fun, and that is in no way a terrible analogy that degrades the actions of people who risked life and property to help slaves escape by comparing them to people who, by their own admission, caused random havoc "for teh lulz."
I do have to say, though, props for not actually Godwinning the thread. You could have, too, oh so easily.
Would you characterize an atheist as one who denies the existence of god outright, or someone who, in the absence of proof, does not allow himself to accept the positive claims of others?
The former is an atheist. The latter is an agnostic. How, exactly, is this relevant though?
Who do you think gave Nigeria the idea in the first place?
Easy solution -- don't smartphones drive.
Until they get a bit smarter, at least...
I'd rather have the phone be driving than most people on the road, to be honest.
I don't stare at my beer or have a conversation with it.
Clearly you need to start drinking better beer.
Or just more of it.
The same way a course in "Star Trek" makes its way into Georgetown University. Or "Art History" or "Golf Management" or dozens of other courses at dozens of other universities. Because higher education stopped being about actual education and more about a) making money and b) making the students feel good about themselves.
Probably started around the time Philosophy classes stopped reading and teaching Neitzsche, Bacon, Aristotle, and Kant, and started being about... well, slacking off, wondering randomly about whatever, and getting high. Biggest contributing factor, IMO, was when people started to feel they need college degrees, but weren't smart enough or dedicated enough to actually study seriously. So, colleges started making up stupid courses people could take, without requiring them to actually do any work. This allows everyone to get a degree, but makes half of them worthless. But hey, now most people at least have a college degree, right?
This is Sony. Their idea of a Captcha is, well, this (Google, BTW, returns the Captcha letters in plaintext if you search for it. Yeah, not so good on the "stopping bots" there Sony). Sony is simply incompetent when it comes to security: there is no other way to put it. Their vaunted PS3 secure bootloader? Yeah, turns out they don't know how to properly sign their keys (instead of using random numbers in the signature, they always used the same number, allowing anyone to discover their private signing key with basic algebra). These aren't difficult-to-implement, advanced security: this is literally the basic concept behind these types of security, which you can find explained on Wikipedia, implemented well in open source software which they could use, and they still can't get it right.
They probably have the source for all their software hosted on an unsecured FTP server somewhere, so that their developers can access it easily, relying on no-one knowing the IP to keep it secure. It would literally not surprise me, at this point.
You know, if the state legislatures selecting their senators worked so well, we'd still be doing it that way.
As it turned out, the 17th Amendment was so popular that it passed very quickly. This should tell you something.
Yes, because people aren't smart enough to know what is and isn't good for them. Kinda the whole point of the story. We also passed a Constitutional Amendment banning alcohol and elected George Bush Jr. twice (and gave him some of the best popular approval ratings of any president). Popularity says nothing whatsoever about how good an idea is/was. And it cannot be denied that Senators today are quite often beholden to and act at the behest of special interest groups, an issue which at least partly stems from their direct election by the people.
Because we haven't modified the US government system in any way, shape, or form since it was first instituted, like through, say, direct election of Senators. No, definitely wouldn't do that, it might turn out that Senators who rely on popular opinion to get elected might spend most of their time pandering to their district's interests. Certainly, we would never set things up so that could happen, that was one of the things the republican (again, not the party) Senatorial system was set up to avoid!
No, that isn't far fetched at all, and it is entirely possible (maybe even likely). However, the philosophical principles that guide science dictate that we should reduce effects to the fewest possible number of causes. If two causes suffice to explain the phenomenon, one should not introduce a third. You can introduce new principles/causes/etc ad infinitum, but unless they are required to explain the observations, they are more or less worthless. In other words, one should postulate only as many kinds of matter as have been observed (but not that there are definitely only those kinds).
Depends on what the limit of the product of the no. of channels by the capacity of the channel becomes as they approach infinity. Calculus, basically: one thing can approach zero and another can approach infinity, but their product can approach a finite number in between. It all depends on how they approach zero and infinity. Could also mean the bandwidth is effectively infinite, or effectively zero, in the extreme case, although the latter would be unexpected, to say the least.
See Wikipedia for details. It isn't polarization, but I can't exactly explain how it isn't.
They argue that in holding both posts, McGee has a conflict of interest between his responsibilities to the journal [of Bioethics] and his new employer’s desire to promote the clinical application of stem-cell treatments that are not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.
Ah, well then. That sucks. I have no problem with MS playing with new interfaces so long as they allow us to shut it off and go back to the regular desktop, but if they don't allow that I may well not move to Windows 8 (might not anyways unless there is a good reason to).
"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer" in regedit, set "RPEnabled" to "0". Haven't tried it myself (don't have Win8), but supposedly it completely disables all the Metro and Ribbon stuff in Explorer.
They did get conditional approval and lots of praise from the FCC, though. The problem was using bandwidth for terrestrial stations that close to the GPS spectrum was always a bad idea. The spectrum was always intended to be used for satellite transmissions: the FCC themselves designated it for that. For them to offer conditional approval later shows someone was pushing for Lightsquared to succeed. Not even that could get past the fact that their system interferes with most GPS systems, though, and it would be nearly impossible to fix that problem.
You've obviously not been looking hard enough. The Ars Technica article sums up the science behind it pretty well (basically, they did a test run of the terrestrial base-stations and it interfered with ~75% of GPS devises, after LightSquared reduced the stations power to try to fix the problem). There is a ton of proof that they actually interfere with GPS signals, namely, actual experiments.
First, Bluray is 1080p, not 720. Second, not all 1080p is the same. If you compress a 1080p movie into an H264 file, it will have visible compression artifacts that don't exist on the DVD..
Just FYI, at least some Blu-Ray movies already are H264 (I think that is the standard of choice), so of course you will lose further quality if you compress it more. On the other hand, I happen to have a 720P x264 rip of Game of Thrones that is only ~400MB for each 60 minute video and it looks pretty decent on a 24" monitor 2 feet from my face (not amazing, but much better than any ~350MB xvid files), so you can make them look good if you use the right settings and tweak the encoder a bit.
Skin the the biggest organ in the human body and one can not have part of one organ be part of another organ.
Why not? The penis is an organ by every definition (common and medical) I can find, and it most certainly includes another organ (the skin, unless you want to try arguing the skin isn't part of the penis, which would be an odd argument). Also, the ear (absolutely an organ) includes skin as well. The arm is more usually considered an "appendage" and medically speaking it might be more precisely called an "organ system" or part of a system. And the arms certainly perform special functions (grasping objects). Organ is a fairly general term. IMO it can certainly be applied to the arm, although you may want to use another term so as to avoid any confusion.