if he was an independent researcher doing this it might be one thing, but in this case he's not revealing the vulnerability based on full disclosure principals, he's doing it to give his employer's largest competitor a black eye.
Motives matter
The motive is not bad PR. It's money.
If Microsoft decided to pay for potential exploits (like Google does, or like criminal organizations do), I have no doubt that the researcher in question would be holding off on full disclosure just so he could collect on his bounty. Also, the summary is a bit misleading. He did give Microsoft five days three years ago. Five days is not a lot of time, but considering he isn't getting paid for his find, he probably doesn't care.
And yes, you could attribute this malice to his employer Google, but my guess is that he was doing this kind of thing long before he joined Google. That's probably how he got noticed and hired by Google in the first place.
That hardly answers the question. Why does he think he'd be in so much more danger in Sweden? Why is being in the UK, where extradition is easy, better than being in Sweden, where extradition is hard?
Is Julian Assange really afraid of extradition? Personally, I think he's more afraid of indefinite detention in a Swedish government facility while being stuck in indefinite legal limbo.
In any case, does extradition even matter anymore? Sweden just went against common sense, against its own body of laws, and against existing precedents to redefine what a "rape" is supposed to be viewed like. Do you think that's just a coincidence? In my opinion, that's what Julian Assange should really be afraid of, the redefinition of law for his own "special" case and the prospect of being stuck indefinitely in a prison facility (where contact with the outside world is severely controlled and limited and your visitors are harassed and stripped-searched, assuming visitors are even allowed at all).
Why is being in Ecuador, where the CIA doesn't mind sending in assassins, better than being in Sweden?
Because the probability that the CIA will be successful in killing him in Ecuador is less than 100%, but should he return to Sweden, the probability that he will have to lose his freedom, be forced to stop most of his work, and be prosecuted under dubious just-made-up legal theory, is much closer to 100%.
It would have been terribly easy for the USA to extradite him directly from Britain.
Are you kidding me? If Assange was really extradited to the US. London would have a huge riot on its hands (and rightly so). And the current government would probably have to step down (or at least, make sure Assange never actually makes it on that plane, so that things can get back to normal without having the government needing to resign).
In any case, the extradition itself is a strawman. The threat of extradition and the legal limbo it creates, or the redefinition of "rape" and the legal limbo it creates, are more than enough to put Julian Assange under ice and out of commission for a number of years, even if none of those proceedings ever finally go through.
Except that if one digs down deep enough, it wasn't the fact that he entered too many science fairs that was the problem (nor the sequence of the entries as the author of the article tries to imply, after all, even in science fairs, an element of chance is involved, since the judges are different and also your competition is different for each regional you enter).
It's the fact that he entered the very same science project multiple times to the same science fair competition through its different affiliated regional competitions. In other words, it's the fact that he tried to game the system (with the complicity of his high school) and tried gain an advantage over his fellow contestants (and then tried to feign ignorance, or simple-minded reasoning, or victimhood at having that unfair advantage taken away from him and thrown back into the pool).
Probably, this teenager will be financially successful later in life, but to me, as a potential employer, this tells me that his kid (now almost already an adult) won't have any problem skirting the rules and double-dipping when it comes to applying for research grants, or double-dipping when it comes to submitting expense reports, or receiving benefits/incentives, and then whining about it endlessly like a baby when some of those risky decisions catch up back to him and bite him in the ass.
First, there is an expectation of privacy inside one's office, and secondly Kentucky is a one party notify state when it comes to recording, so one party to the discussions taking place in the office needed to know that they were being recorded. Public records searches don't apply here.
His office? The location was a regional campaign headquarters with noone sitting at the reception desk (after an alleged press conference) and Sen. Mitch McConnell was having an all-hands meeting in a conference room with a window opened into the hallway.
Granted, that Senator may still have had an expectation of privacy, but the Kentucky statute for eavesdropping is certainly not on his side for this one.
A conversation which is loud enough to be heard through the wall or through the heating system without the use of any device is not protected by the statute, since a person who desires privacy can take the steps necessary to ensure that his conversation cannot be overheard by the ordinary ear. Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. 526.020.
Nor is the other statute for hidden cameras any help to the Senator either, since it explicitly narrows itself to "unattended hidden cameras" (see pdf), not hidden cameras on one's person.
So not only it was the right idea for the blogger activist to use a handheld flip-cam to record the words from the politician (at least for Kentucky), but that entire recording may be the only thing that ends up saving him since its obvious flaws in audio are evidence that the recorder was of cheap quality and wasn't ever stationary -- nor left unattended, and the video part is the only reliable proof that he wasn't trespassing and that the conference room window was open.
Had he had not this video recording of himself doing this, he would probably be in jail right now for trespassing, for wiretapping, and probably for a hundred different false crimes thought up by the Senator's team.
Who do you think both employees are going to sue, thus costing your company millions in unrecoverable legal fees (even if you win, you ain't going to see that money again).
Millions? That's a little much. Were their laptops even worth that much?
And has this actually happened? The legal system in the US is bad enough, we don't need to start making up new scary stories about it.
No doubt one parent could have submitted the bug and gotten the money if it had just been a question of money, but how will the child be able to claim credit for discovery to his friends, to a school he will apply to, or on his resume, if instead of his own name, the name of one of his parents is listed on PayPal's web site as the person responsible for the bug discovery.
This is not a knock against the quality of F/OSS. However, I can take a piece of commercial software and show auditors that it is FIPS or Common Criteria certified, which is important for the legal eagles, especially with regs like Sarbanes-Oxley, FERPA, PCI-DSS, and other items.
This is a super silly argument.
Certification of F/OSS happens quite frequently. It's in fact often easier to certify a F/OSS project than a proprietary project because the certification process usually demands full access to the source code (that the original vendor may not even be able to grant access to, since his own software may be depending on other proprietary software library binary blobs under the hood).
Also, F/OSS can be "commercial" software, just like proprietary software can be "freeware". And it's equally correct to assume that a person can get fired if he chose a perfectly working unknown freeware proprietary solution with no certification backed by a one-man team over a well-known heavily used F/OSS commercial solution backed by a large company with certifications up the wazzoo.
considering it costs $1400 USD to file complaint, its more likely the cheapest option
They could have offered to buy the domain from the current owner for $1000, and saved 20% off the cost of the complaint fee, and avoided the costs that will be incurred for the legal representation altogether.
How do you know they didn't offer the owner $1,000, or even $50,000 for that matter? Only the seller would know how much he expected to squeeze out of Microsoft (or/and its anonymous intermediaries).
This is a list of the top 16 highest prices paid for domain names. Insure.com $16 million in 2009 [1], Sex.com for $14 million in October 2010[1][2], Fund.com 2008 £9.99 million[1], Porn.com 2007 $9.5 million[1], Fb.com by Facebook for $8.5 million in November 2010[3], Business.com for $7.5 million in December 1999[1], Diamond.com 2006 $7.5 million[1], Beer.com 2004 $7 million[1], Israel.com 2008 $5.88 million[1], Casino.com 2003 $5.5 million[1], Slots.com 2010 for $5.5 million [4], Toys.com: Toys 'R' Us by auction for $5.1 million in 2009[1][5], Asseenontv.com 2000 for $5.1 million [6], iCloud.com by Apple for $4.5 million in April 2011[7], GiftCard.com by CardLab for $4 million in October 2012[8], AltaVista.com for $3.3 million in August 1998, Candy.com for $3.0 million in June 2009[9], Gambling.com for $2.5 million in 2011[10], Tom.com for $2.5 million in 1999[11]
Also, the slashdot summary is misleading. Xbox came out in 2001 (and I assume was probably registered as an official trademark worldwide). The domain name XboxOne.com was registered in 2011, and hasn't even been used as a real web site since then.
The only mistake Microsoft's lawyers made was in not going after this trademark infringement sooner, but I suppose they were probably hoping that this domain was just going to be developed as a fan site and was not going to be used just as some kind of speculative investment.
Had it been developed as a legitimate fan web site? Then yes, just for PR, it could be worth buying out the owner for a couple thousands of dollars (even if they were not required by law to do so), but in this case, I don't feel any sympathy for the registered owner. The registered owner should just have transferred the ownership of the domain name for free as soon he was contacted by Microsoft. That would have been the decent thing to do.
Except I'm fairly certain this guy is actually legitimately mentally ill, and some of his statements were quite worrisome -- my personal suspicion is that someone he knew spoke up to get him picked up so he could get helped.
This is the US, "legitimately mentally ill" people don't get detained against their will for more than 24 hours anymore (even if a loved one gets involved). Rightly, or wrongly, Reagan made sure of that. The big difference here is that he threatened Generals, which is actually not illegal either (threatening the President is a crime, threatening Generals is not).
His training doesn't matter either. If a mentally ill person and a former trained killer threatens his ex-wife or his classmates, at best, the person being targeted can get a restraining order, and the mentally ill person can be detained for 24 hours and his property searched, but that's it.
I realize that many laws have been flaunted or ignored ever since 9/11, but that doesn't change the fact that there is a political process for changing the law (assuming you believe it needs changing).
I also vote that we start using liters at the pump instead of gallons.
For consumers, it will make it look like the price of gas has decreased, plus for gas stations it means they won't have to upgrade their signage when the price reaches $10+ per gallon. It's a win-win all around. I'm just surprised that politicians haven't realized the wisdom of this proposal yet.
I know Slashdot is a US centric site but please remember that there are many non-native-US-English speakers reading it as well. I'm a native English speaker but I don't know what "scooped" means in the context of TFS.
The term scooped means "first one to get the credit for a discovery". It's usually used in the context of journalism, but the term still works in this case.
It's just like when French scientists first discovered the HIV virus (or so they claim). They mailed their blood samples to American scientists so the American scientists could confirm their findings and replicate their results, but the exact same American scientists who received those samples and the methodology the French scientists used, just used the same samples and ended up publishing the same results -- claiming the original discovery for themselves (at least, that's the story being told from the French side).
It's not just a question of ownership, although that's a part of it too, it's also a question of who gets the original credit (or shared credit) for the discovery (since that also determines who ends up getting mountains of public funding and/or royalties). And even public institutions are capable of stealing credit even if there are no patents/royalties involved, since reputation and public funding are just as important to them (as profits are to a private corporation).
I'm working in Hong Kong, and youtube has been bombarding me with ads for finding a foreign husband, which is pretty funny considering I'm a straight married guy.
Are you sure your wife hasn't been using your computer?
I have an idea around assigning attendees to quasi-random teams based on their skill sets, then giving them 48 hours to complete a serious coding / engineering challenge (probably in the not-for-profit space) — but maybe you've got some better ideas?
Whatever you do. Do not assign teams! Let team members select each other.
Let me decide who my partners are going to be. You certainly don't know me, you probably don't know which skillset I lack and which I have (even if you ask me in the most general terms), and you probably don't know how to screen potential partners like I do. Assigning team members would probably work in a classroom environment, where your students are a captive audience, and need your class to graduate, but assigning team members in a real technical hackathon will just ensure that the strongest developers/designers walk away from your hackathon before it even begins.
Also in the last non-profit code for good hackathon I went to, the organizer let people pitch project ideas (for projects that they were not even going to join). That was the worst hackathon I went to. If someone suggests an idea that they themselves are not willing to work on, then the idea is probably not that good anyway and the idea will lose its strongest motivated backer -- the person who originally had the idea and the person who knew the problem space the best.
And finally, do not run an Hackathon like a BarCamp. Personally, I love Hackathons and I love BarCamps, but each type of event are a very different type of animal. Also, I would suggest that you participate in a few more hackathons run by different people before you actually run your own. That way, you'll have a pretty good idea of what can go wrong if you have a wide cross section of examples to draw from, and believe me, there are many things that can go wrong in an Hackathon (not just the problems you've highlighted with the pitch-night you went to).
It won't help rescue the drowning victim because the actual people who could rescue aren't going to be any closer to the victim than currently and a 20 minute response time will REMAIN a 20 minute response time for that reason.
Sure, I used the wrong word. I should have said "soon-to-drown" victim, not "drowning" victim. Also in theory, the quadrocopter itself could carry a rescue buoy and/or it could also be paired up with a water rescue bot like Emily.
This presumes
a) that the drone is taken out there (if it's on a charging station), but if they knew that then they could also send humans out there at that time instead
A bot could be sitting in a launching station ready to deploy at a moment's notice 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year. I don't think you could say the same thing for a human being. In any case, I'm not saying that a bot would be ideal for all use cases. That's certainly not the case.
....you don't need autonomous charging stations for city-wide surveillance. You can just fly the drone back home.
Don't forget about quick deployment either.
A well placed charging station with a drone already inside ready to deploy at any time could shave off a number of minutes for getting first eyes on the scene. And sometimes, that very short initial lead time could be crucial in locating a drowning victim, or identifying a fleeing bank robber, or seeing what's going on just a few milliseconds after some gunshots are heard.
Personally, I'd rather have more healthy snacks like fresh fruits and nuts.
But either way, if upper management takes away free sodas (without the CEO having to make a similar sacrifice like giving up his corporate jet, or giving up his bonus), upper management and HR better brace themselves for an internal email shit storm that could take down its internal network for a couple of days, if not for a couple weeks, and that could potentially cost the company millions of dollars in loss of productivity and loss of sales (not to mention the eventual loss of key employees, the ones that are in demand enough -- not to be afraid to look for employment elsewhere).
And if those key employees are developers, good luck replacing them. Code bases and developers are not so easily interchangeable. Please read the book "Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks (if you haven't already).
The problem is that Ubuntu touch doesn't support the 1x1 screen resolution.
1x1 screen resolution is so last year!
If my kid wants higher resolution scrolling bars, or higher resolution ascii porn (bigger than 1 by 1 pixel at least), he'll just have to simulate that higher resolution by shaking/spinning/blinking the led fast enough.
Yes, she did. She used a "led" as a demo device for her super battery.
Basically, a led is the equivalent a cell phone without a screen, without an antenna, without sensors, without memory (except for one bit), without a gps, without a speaker, without a microphone, without an amplifier, without a cpu, without a gpu, etc. Plus, it's a great device for simulating the power consumption of an actual cell phone.
A "led" is a also a great device to give your kids instead of a cell phone. It doesn't have a great range, may be just a couple of meters. And it needs to be in the constant line of sight of the person your kid is communicating with. But barring those two little constraints, it's a good tool for your kid to learn morse code (provided that "led" is the only piece of electronics/toy your kid has access to), it works great at night, it comes with uncapped/unlimited data, and it doesn't come with an expensive bill no matter how much your kids do texting with it.
Our IT Staff just threw their hands in the air, and now we just use a public bulletin board for our all our internal electronic communications (with private messaging disabled). And once in a while just to be thorough, we let a spammer come in to post viagra ads on it, just to remind all of our employees that our bulletin board is completely opened to the outside world and nothing posted on it will ever be private.
No, blame the schools because they let out the kids out at 4 PM.
If schools let them out at 1 PM instead of 4 PM, then cartoon time and prime time can be moved forward 3 hours, and then little school children everywhere could go to bed at 8 PM instead of 11 PM, and nobody would be having this problem of not enough sleep.
Slashdot Mirror
if he was an independent researcher doing this it might be one thing, but in this case he's not revealing the vulnerability based on full disclosure principals, he's doing it to give his employer's largest competitor a black eye.
Motives matter
The motive is not bad PR. It's money.
If Microsoft decided to pay for potential exploits (like Google does, or like criminal organizations do), I have no doubt that the researcher in question would be holding off on full disclosure just so he could collect on his bounty. Also, the summary is a bit misleading. He did give Microsoft five days three years ago. Five days is not a lot of time, but considering he isn't getting paid for his find, he probably doesn't care.
And yes, you could attribute this malice to his employer Google, but my guess is that he was doing this kind of thing long before he joined Google. That's probably how he got noticed and hired by Google in the first place.
That hardly answers the question. Why does he think he'd be in so much more danger in Sweden? Why is being in the UK, where extradition is easy, better than being in Sweden, where extradition is hard?
Is Julian Assange really afraid of extradition? Personally, I think he's more afraid of indefinite detention in a Swedish government facility while being stuck in indefinite legal limbo.
In any case, does extradition even matter anymore? Sweden just went against common sense, against its own body of laws, and against existing precedents to redefine what a "rape" is supposed to be viewed like. Do you think that's just a coincidence? In my opinion, that's what Julian Assange should really be afraid of, the redefinition of law for his own "special" case and the prospect of being stuck indefinitely in a prison facility (where contact with the outside world is severely controlled and limited and your visitors are harassed and stripped-searched, assuming visitors are even allowed at all).
Why is being in Ecuador, where the CIA doesn't mind sending in assassins, better than being in Sweden?
Because the probability that the CIA will be successful in killing him in Ecuador is less than 100%, but should he return to Sweden, the probability that he will have to lose his freedom, be forced to stop most of his work, and be prosecuted under dubious just-made-up legal theory, is much closer to 100%.
It would have been terribly easy for the USA to extradite him directly from Britain.
Are you kidding me? If Assange was really extradited to the US. London would have a huge riot on its hands (and rightly so). And the current government would probably have to step down (or at least, make sure Assange never actually makes it on that plane, so that things can get back to normal without having the government needing to resign).
In any case, the extradition itself is a strawman. The threat of extradition and the legal limbo it creates, or the redefinition of "rape" and the legal limbo it creates, are more than enough to put Julian Assange under ice and out of commission for a number of years, even if none of those proceedings ever finally go through.
Except that if one digs down deep enough, it wasn't the fact that he entered too many science fairs that was the problem (nor the sequence of the entries as the author of the article tries to imply, after all, even in science fairs, an element of chance is involved, since the judges are different and also your competition is different for each regional you enter).
It's the fact that he entered the very same science project multiple times to the same science fair competition through its different affiliated regional competitions. In other words, it's the fact that he tried to game the system (with the complicity of his high school) and tried gain an advantage over his fellow contestants (and then tried to feign ignorance, or simple-minded reasoning, or victimhood at having that unfair advantage taken away from him and thrown back into the pool).
Probably, this teenager will be financially successful later in life, but to me, as a potential employer, this tells me that his kid (now almost already an adult) won't have any problem skirting the rules and double-dipping when it comes to applying for research grants, or double-dipping when it comes to submitting expense reports, or receiving benefits/incentives, and then whining about it endlessly like a baby when some of those risky decisions catch up back to him and bite him in the ass.
First, there is an expectation of privacy inside one's office, and secondly Kentucky is a one party notify state when it comes to recording, so one party to the discussions taking place in the office needed to know that they were being recorded. Public records searches don't apply here.
His office? The location was a regional campaign headquarters with noone sitting at the reception desk (after an alleged press conference) and Sen. Mitch McConnell was having an all-hands meeting in a conference room with a window opened into the hallway.
Granted, that Senator may still have had an expectation of privacy, but the Kentucky statute for eavesdropping is certainly not on his side for this one.
A conversation which is loud enough to be heard through the wall or through the heating system without the use of any device is not protected by the statute, since a person who desires privacy can take the steps necessary to ensure that his conversation cannot be overheard by the ordinary ear. Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. 526.020.
Nor is the other statute for hidden cameras any help to the Senator either, since it explicitly narrows itself to "unattended hidden cameras" (see pdf), not hidden cameras on one's person.
So not only it was the right idea for the blogger activist to use a handheld flip-cam to record the words from the politician (at least for Kentucky), but that entire recording may be the only thing that ends up saving him since its obvious flaws in audio are evidence that the recorder was of cheap quality and wasn't ever stationary -- nor left unattended, and the video part is the only reliable proof that he wasn't trespassing and that the conference room window was open.
Had he had not this video recording of himself doing this, he would probably be in jail right now for trespassing, for wiretapping, and probably for a hundred different false crimes thought up by the Senator's team.
Who do you think both employees are going to sue, thus costing your company millions in unrecoverable legal fees (even if you win, you ain't going to see that money again).
Millions? That's a little much. Were their laptops even worth that much?
And has this actually happened? The legal system in the US is bad enough, we don't need to start making up new scary stories about it.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. If Facebook is really doing what you describe:
...for making your profile "like" advertisements in your friends' newsfeeds that you never "liked" without your knowledge.
Then not liking anything on Facebook shouldn't protect you at all.
Don't ever like anything on facebook, or your friends' newsfeed will be spammed by advertisements falsely linked to you.
So how did he avoid these terms of service?
It's a thing called parental supervision.
No doubt one parent could have submitted the bug and gotten the money if it had just been a question of money, but how will the child be able to claim credit for discovery to his friends, to a school he will apply to, or on his resume, if instead of his own name, the name of one of his parents is listed on PayPal's web site as the person responsible for the bug discovery.
There is only one reason to restrict it...legal CYA.
"PayPal security is sooo bad, even a six years old can break it. "
That would be another reason for placing an age limit on people who submit bugs, possible embarrassment.
This is not a knock against the quality of F/OSS. However, I can take a piece of commercial software and show auditors that it is FIPS or Common Criteria certified, which is important for the legal eagles, especially with regs like Sarbanes-Oxley, FERPA, PCI-DSS, and other items.
This is a super silly argument.
Certification of F/OSS happens quite frequently. It's in fact often easier to certify a F/OSS project than a proprietary project because the certification process usually demands full access to the source code (that the original vendor may not even be able to grant access to, since his own software may be depending on other proprietary software library binary blobs under the hood).
Also, F/OSS can be "commercial" software, just like proprietary software can be "freeware". And it's equally correct to assume that a person can get fired if he chose a perfectly working unknown freeware proprietary solution with no certification backed by a one-man team over a well-known heavily used F/OSS commercial solution backed by a large company with certifications up the wazzoo.
considering it costs $1400 USD to file complaint, its more likely the cheapest option
They could have offered to buy the domain from the current owner for $1000, and saved 20% off the cost of the complaint fee,
and avoided the costs that will be incurred for the legal representation altogether.
How do you know they didn't offer the owner $1,000, or even $50,000 for that matter? Only the seller would know how much he expected to squeeze out of Microsoft (or/and its anonymous intermediaries).
This is a list of the top 16 highest prices paid for domain names.
Insure.com $16 million in 2009 [1], Sex.com for $14 million in October 2010[1][2], Fund.com 2008 £9.99 million[1], Porn.com 2007 $9.5 million[1], Fb.com by Facebook for $8.5 million in November 2010[3], Business.com for $7.5 million in December 1999[1], Diamond.com 2006 $7.5 million[1], Beer.com 2004 $7 million[1], Israel.com 2008 $5.88 million[1], Casino.com 2003 $5.5 million[1], Slots.com 2010 for $5.5 million [4], Toys.com: Toys 'R' Us by auction for $5.1 million in 2009[1][5], Asseenontv.com 2000 for $5.1 million [6], iCloud.com by Apple for $4.5 million in April 2011[7], GiftCard.com by CardLab for $4 million in October 2012[8], AltaVista.com for $3.3 million in August 1998, Candy.com for $3.0 million in June 2009[9], Gambling.com for $2.5 million in 2011[10], Tom.com for $2.5 million in 1999[11]
Also, the slashdot summary is misleading. Xbox came out in 2001 (and I assume was probably registered as an official trademark worldwide). The domain name XboxOne.com was registered in 2011, and hasn't even been used as a real web site since then.
The only mistake Microsoft's lawyers made was in not going after this trademark infringement sooner, but I suppose they were probably hoping that this domain was just going to be developed as a fan site and was not going to be used just as some kind of speculative investment.
Had it been developed as a legitimate fan web site? Then yes, just for PR, it could be worth buying out the owner for a couple thousands of dollars (even if they were not required by law to do so), but in this case, I don't feel any sympathy for the registered owner. The registered owner should just have transferred the ownership of the domain name for free as soon he was contacted by Microsoft. That would have been the decent thing to do.
Except I'm fairly certain this guy is actually legitimately mentally ill, and some of his statements were quite worrisome -- my personal suspicion is that someone he knew spoke up to get him picked up so he could get helped.
This is the US, "legitimately mentally ill" people don't get detained against their will for more than 24 hours anymore (even if a loved one gets involved). Rightly, or wrongly, Reagan made sure of that. The big difference here is that he threatened Generals, which is actually not illegal either (threatening the President is a crime, threatening Generals is not).
His training doesn't matter either. If a mentally ill person and a former trained killer threatens his ex-wife or his classmates, at best, the person being targeted can get a restraining order, and the mentally ill person can be detained for 24 hours and his property searched, but that's it.
I realize that many laws have been flaunted or ignored ever since 9/11, but that doesn't change the fact that there is a political process for changing the law (assuming you believe it needs changing).
I also vote that we start using liters at the pump instead of gallons.
For consumers, it will make it look like the price of gas has decreased, plus for gas stations it means they won't have to upgrade their signage when the price reaches $10+ per gallon. It's a win-win all around. I'm just surprised that politicians haven't realized the wisdom of this proposal yet.
I know Slashdot is a US centric site but please remember that there are many non-native-US-English speakers reading it as well. I'm a native English speaker but I don't know what "scooped" means in the context of TFS.
The term scooped means "first one to get the credit for a discovery". It's usually used in the context of journalism, but the term still works in this case.
It's just like when French scientists first discovered the HIV virus (or so they claim). They mailed their blood samples to American scientists so the American scientists could confirm their findings and replicate their results, but the exact same American scientists who received those samples and the methodology the French scientists used, just used the same samples and ended up publishing the same results -- claiming the original discovery for themselves (at least, that's the story being told from the French side).
It's not just a question of ownership, although that's a part of it too, it's also a question of who gets the original credit (or shared credit) for the discovery (since that also determines who ends up getting mountains of public funding and/or royalties). And even public institutions are capable of stealing credit even if there are no patents/royalties involved, since reputation and public funding are just as important to them (as profits are to a private corporation).
I'm working in Hong Kong, and youtube has been bombarding me with ads for finding a foreign husband, which is pretty funny considering I'm a straight married guy.
Are you sure your wife hasn't been using your computer?
I have an idea around assigning attendees to quasi-random teams based on their skill sets, then giving them 48 hours to complete a serious coding / engineering challenge (probably in the not-for-profit space) — but maybe you've got some better ideas?
Whatever you do. Do not assign teams! Let team members select each other.
Let me decide who my partners are going to be. You certainly don't know me, you probably don't know which skillset I lack and which I have (even if you ask me in the most general terms), and you probably don't know how to screen potential partners like I do. Assigning team members would probably work in a classroom environment, where your students are a captive audience, and need your class to graduate, but assigning team members in a real technical hackathon will just ensure that the strongest developers/designers walk away from your hackathon before it even begins.
Also in the last non-profit code for good hackathon I went to, the organizer let people pitch project ideas (for projects that they were not even going to join). That was the worst hackathon I went to. If someone suggests an idea that they themselves are not willing to work on, then the idea is probably not that good anyway and the idea will lose its strongest motivated backer -- the person who originally had the idea and the person who knew the problem space the best.
And finally, do not run an Hackathon like a BarCamp. Personally, I love Hackathons and I love BarCamps, but each type of event are a very different type of animal. Also, I would suggest that you participate in a few more hackathons run by different people before you actually run your own. That way, you'll have a pretty good idea of what can go wrong if you have a wide cross section of examples to draw from, and believe me, there are many things that can go wrong in an Hackathon (not just the problems you've highlighted with the pitch-night you went to).
It won't help rescue the drowning victim because the actual people who could rescue aren't going to be any closer to the victim than currently and a 20 minute response time will REMAIN a 20 minute response time for that reason.
Sure, I used the wrong word. I should have said "soon-to-drown" victim, not "drowning" victim. Also in theory, the quadrocopter itself could carry a rescue buoy and/or it could also be paired up with a water rescue bot like Emily.
This presumes
a) that the drone is taken out there (if it's on a charging station), but if they knew that then they could also send humans out there at that time instead
A bot could be sitting in a launching station ready to deploy at a moment's notice 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year. I don't think you could say the same thing for a human being. In any case, I'm not saying that a bot would be ideal for all use cases. That's certainly not the case.
....you don't need autonomous charging stations for city-wide surveillance. You can just fly the drone back home.
Don't forget about quick deployment either.
A well placed charging station with a drone already inside ready to deploy at any time could shave off a number of minutes for getting first eyes on the scene. And sometimes, that very short initial lead time could be crucial in locating a drowning victim, or identifying a fleeing bank robber, or seeing what's going on just a few milliseconds after some gunshots are heard.
Personally, I'd rather have more healthy snacks like fresh fruits and nuts.
But either way, if upper management takes away free sodas (without the CEO having to make a similar sacrifice like giving up his corporate jet, or giving up his bonus), upper management and HR better brace themselves for an internal email shit storm that could take down its internal network for a couple of days, if not for a couple weeks, and that could potentially cost the company millions of dollars in loss of productivity and loss of sales (not to mention the eventual loss of key employees, the ones that are in demand enough -- not to be afraid to look for employment elsewhere).
And if those key employees are developers, good luck replacing them. Code bases and developers are not so easily interchangeable. Please read the book "Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks (if you haven't already).
The problem is that Ubuntu touch doesn't support the 1x1 screen resolution.
1x1 screen resolution is so last year!
If my kid wants higher resolution scrolling bars, or higher resolution ascii porn (bigger than 1 by 1 pixel at least), he'll just have to simulate that higher resolution by shaking/spinning/blinking the led fast enough.
did she have some new angle to the tech?
Yes, she did. She used a "led" as a demo device for her super battery.
Basically, a led is the equivalent a cell phone without a screen, without an antenna, without sensors, without memory (except for one bit), without a gps, without a speaker, without a microphone, without an amplifier, without a cpu, without a gpu, etc. Plus, it's a great device for simulating the power consumption of an actual cell phone.
A "led" is a also a great device to give your kids instead of a cell phone. It doesn't have a great range, may be just a couple of meters. And it needs to be in the constant line of sight of the person your kid is communicating with. But barring those two little constraints, it's a good tool for your kid to learn morse code (provided that "led" is the only piece of electronics/toy your kid has access to), it works great at night, it comes with uncapped/unlimited data, and it doesn't come with an expensive bill no matter how much your kids do texting with it.
The answer is to provide college up to PHD level for free like decent countries do.
Sure, but don't expect me to pay for your PHD in Art History, or Anthropology.
Please focus on the fields of study we actually need.
That's not what our intelligence tells us.
Our intelligence tells us that if we were to annex Canada, most Canadians would welcome us with open arms.
So you'd start school at 6am or something?
Clearly there are no down sides to that at all.
Clearly, I wasn't being sarcastic at all.
Cisco IronPort. We use it and rely on it heavily for secure emails regarding pii for our pension fund
Yeah, we did the same at my company.
Our IT Staff just threw their hands in the air, and now we just use a public bulletin board for our all our internal electronic communications (with private messaging disabled). And once in a while just to be thorough, we let a spammer come in to post viagra ads on it, just to remind all of our employees that our bulletin board is completely opened to the outside world and nothing posted on it will ever be private.
No, blame the schools because they let out the kids out at 4 PM.
If schools let them out at 1 PM instead of 4 PM, then cartoon time and prime time can be moved forward 3 hours, and then little school children everywhere could go to bed at 8 PM instead of 11 PM, and nobody would be having this problem of not enough sleep.