From the article, it seems like there's a couple of reasons:
- Identify areas that are actively absorbing CO2 emissions. This is important because we can use it to figure out what the best way to naturally absorb CO2 is for use in things like city planning. For instance, we know that forests and the ocean absorb CO2, but we probably don't know which plants are the most efficient at doing so. If we find out which are the most efficient, they could probably be used in "green roof" projects in cities and in urban planning to alleviate CO2 output from cars.
- Study the difference in natural CO2 emissions (ie; not from burning fossil fuels) through the seasons, presumably to better identify man-made CO2 emissions.
- Find out what happens to the CO2 we emit once it reaches the atmosphere. Obviously, there Is always going to be CO2 in the atmosphere, but where it is and how it moves is a different story.
The best system for voting I've seen is the one my town uses. They use paper ballots and black marker, and the ballots are fed through a glorified scanner (similar to the ones used for standardized testing) which automatically counts the votes. The machine even automatically puts the ballots in a box so that there is a paper trail of the original ballots. The good part about these is that they're very easy to set up, much lighter than the old mechanical voting machines, and there's no need for instructions.
Wouldn't matter. The police search to produce evidence that is admissible in court. If they were to search a cell phone illegally, they could not use any of the evidence obtained from it in court, thus making the search useless in the first place.
From the Wikipedia article, it seems like CRISPR works by injecting a strand of "neutral" genetic material into a genome and cause genes to not be transcribed - so you can "turn off" an improperly expressed gene, but can't actually replace it with a normal one. The NPR article, however, has people mentioning the idea of replacing improperly expressed genes with normal ones.
From what I understand, the difference between the two is that if Wikipedia is correct, CRISPR would only be useful in humans (once they get it to be accurate) to cure diseases that arise from a gene being expressed when it shouldn't be, for things like sickle cell or Huntington's. However, if NPR is correct, CRISPR can also cure diseases that arise from a gene not being expressed when it should, such as hemophilia.
Which one of these is correct? What is CRISPR actually good for?
My best guess is, they wouldn't even need to get that far in terms of cancelling the exemption. As far as I know, every state has a law (usually in their constitution) that says that public servants cannot hold jobs in the private sector that they would regulate as part of their duties as a public servant. It's called a conflict of interest.
From what the article claims about these "LECs", they're governed by a board of directors. The article implies that all of the members of the board of directors of the LECs are police chiefs. Police chiefs are appointed public servants, and part of their duty as a public servant is to regulate law enforcement in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Presumably, they are drawing a paycheck from the LEC. At that point, there is an automatic conflict of interest - the LEC is essentially a private law enforcement agency within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and something the police chiefs are supposed to be regulating.
There's also likely to be an issue with misappropriation of funds. The article states that the LECs are funded with public money given to them by their members - the various local police departments in Massachusetts. Funneling public money to a private corporation, where it is likely being used to pay public servants, could (and should) be considered embezzlement. This would go doubly if they're also on the public payroll at the same time.
I would not be surprised if, after an investigation by the Massachusetts state legislature, many of the people involved in these LECs are fired.
The headline implies that alcohol is the sole killer of 1 in 10 adult deaths, but that's just not true. It's 1 in 10 preventable deaths, which is a subset of all deaths that occur. In reality, alcohol probably accounts for 10% of all adult deaths.
Also, they tracked things like car accidents and homicides, which are not deaths caused by alcohol - they're deaths caused by the laws of physics. The only real deaths that can be directly attributed to alcohol are things like alcohol poisoning, cirrhosis of the liver, some forms of liver cancer, and a few other diseases directly related to the consumption of alcohol.
A better headline would've been "CDC: Alcohol contributes to 10% of preventable adult deaths in the US"
The reason prosthetics are so simple is because of all the FDA testing they have to undergo before they can be sold. More parts means more time and money spent getting the FDA to approve of every single item on the list. By keeping prosthetics simple, the companies that design them manage to avoid a lot of that - there are, after all, only so many questions the FDA can ask about a metal pole or a wooden stick.
3D printing is a great way to get around this, because the FDA (as far as I know) can't regulate things that people make themselves to use for themselves.
If you read the ruling, the court admits that the only reason they said the defendant could be compelled to decrypt his data was because he had already admitted to the police that he was involved in the case, and that the details of his involvement were on the hard drive. I'm sure if he had kept silent the entire time and told them nothing, it would've been a different story.
If it costs the government thousands of dollars a year, maybe the UK should just look into jailing anyone accused of filesharing, even without proof. Bankrupting the government would be a very effective way to plan for a possible re-election of Mike Weatherley as an MP, and would be 100% effective against piracy to boot, in that if the government goes bankrupt the people will be too busy rioting in the streets to pirate anything.
This debacle with people complaining about Silicon Valley's low female/minority hiring rate sounds to me like a case of segregation by choice - Facebook, Google, et al are not actually discriminating against females or minorities. There's just no evidence of it, because if there was, there would be federal lawsuits pending. What this sounds like is a case of segregation by choice - there aren't a whole lot of female or minority CS grads out there applying to Silicon Valley firms. Attempting to regulate segregation by choice is never a good idea, because it can't be fixed without a complete social upheaval.
To get an idea of how much trying to regulate this kind of thing can screw stuff up, all you have to do is look at Connecticut. In CT, about 20 years ago, we had a major lawsuit known as Sheff v. O'Neill. The suit concerned the fact that schools in the urban areas of Connecticut have a very high minority population - I believe that when the suit was filed, Hartford (our capitol city) had schools with a 90% minority population, and the plaintiff (an eight year old boy named Milo Sheff) couldn't get state aid to go to a school in another area where the schools weren't 90% minority populated. Hartford's schools are also well-known for being some of the lowest-performing in the state.
The state lost that lawsuit, and their solution to the problem so far has been to spend millions of dollars subsidizing magnet schools to attract white students to Hartford and bussing students long distances to try to meet the racial quotas set by the Sheff suit. They really haven't been successful, because the population demographics continue to remain the same, and there's only so much the state can do to fix that.
The same thing is true for tech companies - they can subsidize computer science education for girls and minority students all they want, but that doesn't mean that the girls and minority students are going to take that offer.
What frightens me is the idea that they could get the wrong information and give that to my doctor or insurance company. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, my car broke down. While it was in the shop, I was getting a ride to work with a co-worker. They stopped at Dunkin' Donuts every morning and got a coffee and a donut, and I would usually pay for it (along with their gas) in exchange for giving me a ride. This means my purchase history would show me buying a coffee and a donut every morning for around five days, even though I didn't actually consume either of them.
With a system like this in place, I'm sure my insurance company would see that and go "He's buying donuts, raise the premiums!" even though the donut I'm not consuming doesn't really effect me in any way.
One thing I'd be curious to find out is whether or not the Neanderthals were doing this because they preferred vegetables, or because they had nothing else around to eat.
You would think so, but that's usually not the case. The problem is that there are only so many viable spots for solar and wind. They're great as a source of supplementary power, but they're simply not viable everywhere.
At the same time, there really are no valid arguments against properly funded nuclear power. By that, I mean money to upgrade the plants to use the latest technology, ensure proper maintenance, perform research into new types of plants (breeder reactors, thorium) and figure out how to use the fuel as much as possible before storing it in a responsible location (there was nothing wrong with Yucca Mountain).
That's the problem with plants like the one in Fukushima - they're old, they haven't been properly maintained because no one wants to pay for it, and in many cases are operating well past their expected lifecycle when they should've been decommissioned years ago in favor of more modern plants.
It's definitely copy-protection. There are a bunch of instances of games that were actually made harder in the United States to discourage rentals - compare, for instance, the Japanese version of Battletoads to the United States version. The Japanese version is MUCH, MUCH easier. Battletoads doesn't have a continue code, but it does have the "Mega Warps" that I believe are mentioned in the manual but are very well hidden from the average player.
I think the reason they don't have cheats anymore is not because they can sell them as DLC, but because they CAN'T sell them anymore. If you look at it, cheats were first invented as a method of copy-protection, rather than a testing device.
It's most evident in a lot of older NES games (usually ones that were made before battery-backed saves) where the most commonly used "cheats" were so-called continue codes - button inputs that could be used to continue after a game over. These things were all over the place, and were usually listed in the way back of the game's manual. This was mostly a tactic to stop rentals and re-sale, since there was no easy way to look up the codes and unless you had the manual or knew someone who did, you'd be out of luck. Even the Konami Code is an example of this: unless you are very highly skilled at Contra, which was one of the first games to feature the code, you are probably not going to finish Contra without the extra lives granted by the code.
It's probably because of League's "mass-market" appeal. League of Legends runs on Adobe Air, and will run on pretty much any given set of hardware no matter how outdated it is. In contrast, most of League's competitors require a somewhat powerful computer to run or aren't free - Starcraft 2 is still $60 as far as I know (I never bought it) and requires significantly more resources to run, as does DOTA2. They also purposely market their game as "casual friendly", and it definitely works - many of the people I know who used to talk about how much time they spent playing Angry Birds are now playing League.
I'd also be willing to bet a significant sum of money that this scholarship was not an original idea by the school. Riot Games essentially depends on popularity to make money - they do so by giving away the game itself, and then charging money to buy characters in the game to remain competitive. They tend to go for things that create headlines, things like starting their own tournament league (which they did several years ago). They also advertise the game heavily, especially on Twitch (where they're usually the #1 most streamed game, although there have been accusations of Riot using bots to inflate their viewer count over DOTA2).
With all that taken into account, it's not hard to see why LoL got picked.
One thing I don't really understand, and the article doesn't mention, is how exactly they know this was a targeted attack. The way the article reads, it sounds like a bunch of people got infected with a Zeus variant and had their banking details stolen off their computers, and coincidentally, a bunch of them happened to use the same large European bank. I'm willing to bet that some of those victims probably didn't use the bank in question, and that there are financial losses ranging outside of that one bank.
That said, this isn't a very good article, because it doesn't mention how they think the malware got onto these people's computers or even which bank was supposedly "targeted".
The likely reason the Chinese want to build factories here is that most states will bend over backwards to accommodate them. In this case, the town of Pine Hill is offering the Chinese factory a massive tax break - probably zero taxes for something like 20 years - and a place where their company has more financial freedom. I wouldn't be surprised if the town or state is also offering them tax money to stay. It's a problem all over the US: companies holding jobs hostage because someone else is offering them a better tax package.
I don't remember, to be honest. I think it was a few weeks after the initial release of the game on the Xbox One. I'm at work so I can't go searching through the gaming blogs, but I know at least one of the major ones covered it as a story.
It still has some use, but they're just not doing it right. The City admitted that people can rent out their driveways or private garages as parking spaces, so I could easily see a revision of this app that works sort of like Uber but for parking spaces.
People who have parking spaces to spare (apartment blocks, businesses, private homeowners) sell their driveways or parking lots as parking spaces. The people buying pay the property owner a given amount, and a percentage of that comes back to the company as a "finder's fee". You could even have businesses buy parking spaces in people's driveways nearby that are only valid for that business, ie;
Business A has a parking lot that isn't big enough to meet customer capacity at peak hours. They're in a position that would make it very difficult to expand their parking,but there are nearby homes that have large, unused driveways. Business A can rent some of those driveways and mark them as specifically for use for their customers, so that their customers now have a place to park during peak hours.
I bet you could still make some pretty good money with it, since I'm sure apartment owners would love to get money for letting people use spaces that would otherwise go unused. The only real problem would be enforcement, but I'm sure there's some way around that.
Correction, the filer apparently only paid around $6,300 for it. Still, that's 12.6 BTC, which is probably still rather difficult to mine, just to break even.
According to the article, the TerraMiner IV had a pricetag of $13,999, which the filer of the lawsuit clearly paid. A single bitcoin is (and correct me if I'm wrong here) around $500. For this guy to break even, not counting the power that thing drains, he would need to mine at least 28 BTC. From what I understand, mining that kind of BTC, even with an extremely high-powered miner, is not an easy task. It seems like he would've lost money even if the machine had performed at the specifications listed by the company.
I can remember just a couple of months ago, when Microsoft hosted a tournament for Killer Instinct on the Xbox One. There was a bit of an uproar from the competitors and from the various streaming websites covering the event because Microsoft banned non-Windows phones at the competition venue (and, of course, gave out Windows phones to all of the competitors so they could have product placement on the streaming sites). As far as I know, that ban was never lifted and the tournament went on that way.
The idea that MS would then turn around and release an Android phone after pushing their Windows phones that hard seems like a complete turnaround.
I honestly think that texting and cell phone bans are just using the "third brake light" effect. To get what I'm talking about, cars made before a certain year (I forget exactly when this was) only had two brake lights, one on each side of the rear of the car. Then, one year, the federal government decreed that all cars made that year and in the future needed to have a third brake light, the theory being that the third light would reduce accidents by making it more obvious when a driver was braking.
The year that regulation went into effect, there was a significant drop in the number of accidents nation-wide. The numbers increased but were still lower than normal for each of the next three or so years, and then suddenly all of the benefit from the third brake light was gone and accidents were back up to normal numbers. Most people who have studied it believe the reason was that the third brake light was something strikingly different from what people were used to, and caused them to pay more attention to the lights - but then people got used to it and the benefits of the third brake light went away.
The same thing is apparent with texting-while-driving laws. Accidents go down a little when the law is first enacted, then go back up afterward.
I don't get why the EFF would think that this would have any implications on the NSA. The difference here is that the search was done with a warrant looking for something very specific - information on the accountant's computers related to criminal activity by his clients. The FBI searched for data not covered under the warrant, and the courts correctly slapped them for it. The NSA doesn't use warrants, so they don't have any limitations placed on them. This is one of the key issues of warrantless surveillance, because it allows the NSA to use anything they find, even if it was not the target of their original investigation.
Is this a step forward for civil liberties? Yes. Is it going to impact the NSA in any way? Probably not.
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From the article, it seems like there's a couple of reasons:
- Identify areas that are actively absorbing CO2 emissions. This is important because we can use it to figure out what the best way to naturally absorb CO2 is for use in things like city planning. For instance, we know that forests and the ocean absorb CO2, but we probably don't know which plants are the most efficient at doing so. If we find out which are the most efficient, they could probably be used in "green roof" projects in cities and in urban planning to alleviate CO2 output from cars.
- Study the difference in natural CO2 emissions (ie; not from burning fossil fuels) through the seasons, presumably to better identify man-made CO2 emissions.
- Find out what happens to the CO2 we emit once it reaches the atmosphere. Obviously, there Is always going to be CO2 in the atmosphere, but where it is and how it moves is a different story.
The best system for voting I've seen is the one my town uses. They use paper ballots and black marker, and the ballots are fed through a glorified scanner (similar to the ones used for standardized testing) which automatically counts the votes. The machine even automatically puts the ballots in a box so that there is a paper trail of the original ballots. The good part about these is that they're very easy to set up, much lighter than the old mechanical voting machines, and there's no need for instructions.
Wouldn't matter. The police search to produce evidence that is admissible in court. If they were to search a cell phone illegally, they could not use any of the evidence obtained from it in court, thus making the search useless in the first place.
From the Wikipedia article, it seems like CRISPR works by injecting a strand of "neutral" genetic material into a genome and cause genes to not be transcribed - so you can "turn off" an improperly expressed gene, but can't actually replace it with a normal one. The NPR article, however, has people mentioning the idea of replacing improperly expressed genes with normal ones.
From what I understand, the difference between the two is that if Wikipedia is correct, CRISPR would only be useful in humans (once they get it to be accurate) to cure diseases that arise from a gene being expressed when it shouldn't be, for things like sickle cell or Huntington's. However, if NPR is correct, CRISPR can also cure diseases that arise from a gene not being expressed when it should, such as hemophilia.
Which one of these is correct? What is CRISPR actually good for?
My best guess is, they wouldn't even need to get that far in terms of cancelling the exemption. As far as I know, every state has a law (usually in their constitution) that says that public servants cannot hold jobs in the private sector that they would regulate as part of their duties as a public servant. It's called a conflict of interest.
From what the article claims about these "LECs", they're governed by a board of directors. The article implies that all of the members of the board of directors of the LECs are police chiefs. Police chiefs are appointed public servants, and part of their duty as a public servant is to regulate law enforcement in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Presumably, they are drawing a paycheck from the LEC. At that point, there is an automatic conflict of interest - the LEC is essentially a private law enforcement agency within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and something the police chiefs are supposed to be regulating.
There's also likely to be an issue with misappropriation of funds. The article states that the LECs are funded with public money given to them by their members - the various local police departments in Massachusetts. Funneling public money to a private corporation, where it is likely being used to pay public servants, could (and should) be considered embezzlement. This would go doubly if they're also on the public payroll at the same time.
I would not be surprised if, after an investigation by the Massachusetts state legislature, many of the people involved in these LECs are fired.
The headline implies that alcohol is the sole killer of 1 in 10 adult deaths, but that's just not true. It's 1 in 10 preventable deaths, which is a subset of all deaths that occur. In reality, alcohol probably accounts for 10% of all adult deaths.
Also, they tracked things like car accidents and homicides, which are not deaths caused by alcohol - they're deaths caused by the laws of physics. The only real deaths that can be directly attributed to alcohol are things like alcohol poisoning, cirrhosis of the liver, some forms of liver cancer, and a few other diseases directly related to the consumption of alcohol.
A better headline would've been "CDC: Alcohol contributes to 10% of preventable adult deaths in the US"
The reason prosthetics are so simple is because of all the FDA testing they have to undergo before they can be sold. More parts means more time and money spent getting the FDA to approve of every single item on the list. By keeping prosthetics simple, the companies that design them manage to avoid a lot of that - there are, after all, only so many questions the FDA can ask about a metal pole or a wooden stick.
3D printing is a great way to get around this, because the FDA (as far as I know) can't regulate things that people make themselves to use for themselves.
If you read the ruling, the court admits that the only reason they said the defendant could be compelled to decrypt his data was because he had already admitted to the police that he was involved in the case, and that the details of his involvement were on the hard drive. I'm sure if he had kept silent the entire time and told them nothing, it would've been a different story.
If it costs the government thousands of dollars a year, maybe the UK should just look into jailing anyone accused of filesharing, even without proof. Bankrupting the government would be a very effective way to plan for a possible re-election of Mike Weatherley as an MP, and would be 100% effective against piracy to boot, in that if the government goes bankrupt the people will be too busy rioting in the streets to pirate anything.
This debacle with people complaining about Silicon Valley's low female/minority hiring rate sounds to me like a case of segregation by choice - Facebook, Google, et al are not actually discriminating against females or minorities. There's just no evidence of it, because if there was, there would be federal lawsuits pending. What this sounds like is a case of segregation by choice - there aren't a whole lot of female or minority CS grads out there applying to Silicon Valley firms. Attempting to regulate segregation by choice is never a good idea, because it can't be fixed without a complete social upheaval.
To get an idea of how much trying to regulate this kind of thing can screw stuff up, all you have to do is look at Connecticut. In CT, about 20 years ago, we had a major lawsuit known as Sheff v. O'Neill. The suit concerned the fact that schools in the urban areas of Connecticut have a very high minority population - I believe that when the suit was filed, Hartford (our capitol city) had schools with a 90% minority population, and the plaintiff (an eight year old boy named Milo Sheff) couldn't get state aid to go to a school in another area where the schools weren't 90% minority populated. Hartford's schools are also well-known for being some of the lowest-performing in the state.
The state lost that lawsuit, and their solution to the problem so far has been to spend millions of dollars subsidizing magnet schools to attract white students to Hartford and bussing students long distances to try to meet the racial quotas set by the Sheff suit. They really haven't been successful, because the population demographics continue to remain the same, and there's only so much the state can do to fix that.
The same thing is true for tech companies - they can subsidize computer science education for girls and minority students all they want, but that doesn't mean that the girls and minority students are going to take that offer.
What frightens me is the idea that they could get the wrong information and give that to my doctor or insurance company. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, my car broke down. While it was in the shop, I was getting a ride to work with a co-worker. They stopped at Dunkin' Donuts every morning and got a coffee and a donut, and I would usually pay for it (along with their gas) in exchange for giving me a ride. This means my purchase history would show me buying a coffee and a donut every morning for around five days, even though I didn't actually consume either of them.
With a system like this in place, I'm sure my insurance company would see that and go "He's buying donuts, raise the premiums!" even though the donut I'm not consuming doesn't really effect me in any way.
One thing I'd be curious to find out is whether or not the Neanderthals were doing this because they preferred vegetables, or because they had nothing else around to eat.
You would think so, but that's usually not the case. The problem is that there are only so many viable spots for solar and wind. They're great as a source of supplementary power, but they're simply not viable everywhere.
At the same time, there really are no valid arguments against properly funded nuclear power. By that, I mean money to upgrade the plants to use the latest technology, ensure proper maintenance, perform research into new types of plants (breeder reactors, thorium) and figure out how to use the fuel as much as possible before storing it in a responsible location (there was nothing wrong with Yucca Mountain).
That's the problem with plants like the one in Fukushima - they're old, they haven't been properly maintained because no one wants to pay for it, and in many cases are operating well past their expected lifecycle when they should've been decommissioned years ago in favor of more modern plants.
It's definitely copy-protection. There are a bunch of instances of games that were actually made harder in the United States to discourage rentals - compare, for instance, the Japanese version of Battletoads to the United States version. The Japanese version is MUCH, MUCH easier. Battletoads doesn't have a continue code, but it does have the "Mega Warps" that I believe are mentioned in the manual but are very well hidden from the average player.
I think the reason they don't have cheats anymore is not because they can sell them as DLC, but because they CAN'T sell them anymore. If you look at it, cheats were first invented as a method of copy-protection, rather than a testing device.
It's most evident in a lot of older NES games (usually ones that were made before battery-backed saves) where the most commonly used "cheats" were so-called continue codes - button inputs that could be used to continue after a game over. These things were all over the place, and were usually listed in the way back of the game's manual. This was mostly a tactic to stop rentals and re-sale, since there was no easy way to look up the codes and unless you had the manual or knew someone who did, you'd be out of luck. Even the Konami Code is an example of this: unless you are very highly skilled at Contra, which was one of the first games to feature the code, you are probably not going to finish Contra without the extra lives granted by the code.
It's probably because of League's "mass-market" appeal. League of Legends runs on Adobe Air, and will run on pretty much any given set of hardware no matter how outdated it is. In contrast, most of League's competitors require a somewhat powerful computer to run or aren't free - Starcraft 2 is still $60 as far as I know (I never bought it) and requires significantly more resources to run, as does DOTA2. They also purposely market their game as "casual friendly", and it definitely works - many of the people I know who used to talk about how much time they spent playing Angry Birds are now playing League.
I'd also be willing to bet a significant sum of money that this scholarship was not an original idea by the school. Riot Games essentially depends on popularity to make money - they do so by giving away the game itself, and then charging money to buy characters in the game to remain competitive. They tend to go for things that create headlines, things like starting their own tournament league (which they did several years ago). They also advertise the game heavily, especially on Twitch (where they're usually the #1 most streamed game, although there have been accusations of Riot using bots to inflate their viewer count over DOTA2).
With all that taken into account, it's not hard to see why LoL got picked.
One thing I don't really understand, and the article doesn't mention, is how exactly they know this was a targeted attack. The way the article reads, it sounds like a bunch of people got infected with a Zeus variant and had their banking details stolen off their computers, and coincidentally, a bunch of them happened to use the same large European bank. I'm willing to bet that some of those victims probably didn't use the bank in question, and that there are financial losses ranging outside of that one bank.
That said, this isn't a very good article, because it doesn't mention how they think the malware got onto these people's computers or even which bank was supposedly "targeted".
The likely reason the Chinese want to build factories here is that most states will bend over backwards to accommodate them. In this case, the town of Pine Hill is offering the Chinese factory a massive tax break - probably zero taxes for something like 20 years - and a place where their company has more financial freedom. I wouldn't be surprised if the town or state is also offering them tax money to stay. It's a problem all over the US: companies holding jobs hostage because someone else is offering them a better tax package.
I don't remember, to be honest. I think it was a few weeks after the initial release of the game on the Xbox One. I'm at work so I can't go searching through the gaming blogs, but I know at least one of the major ones covered it as a story.
It still has some use, but they're just not doing it right. The City admitted that people can rent out their driveways or private garages as parking spaces, so I could easily see a revision of this app that works sort of like Uber but for parking spaces.
People who have parking spaces to spare (apartment blocks, businesses, private homeowners) sell their driveways or parking lots as parking spaces. The people buying pay the property owner a given amount, and a percentage of that comes back to the company as a "finder's fee". You could even have businesses buy parking spaces in people's driveways nearby that are only valid for that business, ie;
Business A has a parking lot that isn't big enough to meet customer capacity at peak hours. They're in a position that would make it very difficult to expand their parking ,but there are nearby homes that have large, unused driveways. Business A can rent some of those driveways and mark them as specifically for use for their customers, so that their customers now have a place to park during peak hours.
I bet you could still make some pretty good money with it, since I'm sure apartment owners would love to get money for letting people use spaces that would otherwise go unused. The only real problem would be enforcement, but I'm sure there's some way around that.
Correction, the filer apparently only paid around $6,300 for it. Still, that's 12.6 BTC, which is probably still rather difficult to mine, just to break even.
According to the article, the TerraMiner IV had a pricetag of $13,999, which the filer of the lawsuit clearly paid. A single bitcoin is (and correct me if I'm wrong here) around $500. For this guy to break even, not counting the power that thing drains, he would need to mine at least 28 BTC. From what I understand, mining that kind of BTC, even with an extremely high-powered miner, is not an easy task. It seems like he would've lost money even if the machine had performed at the specifications listed by the company.
I can remember just a couple of months ago, when Microsoft hosted a tournament for Killer Instinct on the Xbox One. There was a bit of an uproar from the competitors and from the various streaming websites covering the event because Microsoft banned non-Windows phones at the competition venue (and, of course, gave out Windows phones to all of the competitors so they could have product placement on the streaming sites). As far as I know, that ban was never lifted and the tournament went on that way.
The idea that MS would then turn around and release an Android phone after pushing their Windows phones that hard seems like a complete turnaround.
I honestly think that texting and cell phone bans are just using the "third brake light" effect. To get what I'm talking about, cars made before a certain year (I forget exactly when this was) only had two brake lights, one on each side of the rear of the car. Then, one year, the federal government decreed that all cars made that year and in the future needed to have a third brake light, the theory being that the third light would reduce accidents by making it more obvious when a driver was braking.
The year that regulation went into effect, there was a significant drop in the number of accidents nation-wide. The numbers increased but were still lower than normal for each of the next three or so years, and then suddenly all of the benefit from the third brake light was gone and accidents were back up to normal numbers. Most people who have studied it believe the reason was that the third brake light was something strikingly different from what people were used to, and caused them to pay more attention to the lights - but then people got used to it and the benefits of the third brake light went away.
The same thing is apparent with texting-while-driving laws. Accidents go down a little when the law is first enacted, then go back up afterward.
I don't get why the EFF would think that this would have any implications on the NSA. The difference here is that the search was done with a warrant looking for something very specific - information on the accountant's computers related to criminal activity by his clients. The FBI searched for data not covered under the warrant, and the courts correctly slapped them for it. The NSA doesn't use warrants, so they don't have any limitations placed on them. This is one of the key issues of warrantless surveillance, because it allows the NSA to use anything they find, even if it was not the target of their original investigation.
Is this a step forward for civil liberties? Yes. Is it going to impact the NSA in any way? Probably not.