bediger

Why bother to threaten? Why not just expose them? The Jester believes he has hacked "known-bad" people. His list of "known-bad" may not coincide withe people guilty of crimes, and probably coincides even less with people chargeable with crimes.

His evidence probably isn't admissible in court, at least in the USA. I would guess that chain-of-posession is at least a lot suspect. So, The Jester can't really give this to any law enforcement that can use it.

Why not just release the data? What does The Jester believe he/she/it/them can gain from just a threat?

That's great, studies and evidence suggest that patents and copyrights result in decreased innovation. Are we going to do away with patents and copyrights? No? Why not?

Cap-and-trade may or may not have other effects that make the resulting possible decrease in innovation worth it to society as a whole.

And if everyone took a shower at the same time?

This is just scare mongering.

Also, the famous slogan was "The network is the computer", not "The internet is the computer". That was Sun Microsystem's tagline or slogan. Given that "The Internet" really isn't a single technology (except maybe with respect to TCP/IP, but even that's changing as IPv6 makes its way in) or even a single network, why are we fear mongering about this right now? Between Anonymous turning off The Internet, and China's Water Army disrupting USA in-flight refueling ops, one has to wonder if a coordinated PR campaign isn't taking place.

I have not read this book, but I did hear him on NPR's "Science Friday" last week.

I think Tyson misses something huge. The USA actually had a large number of career engineers to do the Space Program with. From 1945 to 1960, a lot of WW2 vets went to college, and a lot of those college-goers went into engineering. Civil, mining and mechanical engineering were traditional "first-in-family-to-college" majors. They were a way for a farmer's son or a miner's son to become a professional without having to exhibit all the social graces.

From 1945 to 1960, the US military-industrial complex went from piston-driven props to jet turbines, from high subsonic aerodynamics to the X-15. A lot of engineering went into airplanes and rockets and missiles during that time.

The USA, indeed, the world, does not have a stock of engineers to do the design, nor does it have the scientists to make the spec the design meets.

I don't think the USA, or the world, can duplicate the 1960s "Space Race", much less surpass it.

Given all the other noise about QU8K's rocket reaching 120,00 feet (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvDqoxMUroA) and other relatively sophisticated rockets based on off-the-shelf electronics and model rocket technology, when do we see a war between drones and the surveilled?

Great Snakes! This was almost exactly my experience with LFS, and I just installed Arch on my laptop, after running it on servers for a while.

Still live 19:34-0700. Is this for real, or just some DNS trickery? The HN post says "1 hour ago", wouldn't PandaSecurity respond faster than that?

The purest of propaganda gibberish. Available from "your Mercedes partner" on the 15th of June. "Partner". Really? Don't you mean "member of the price-fixing cartel"? Because that's what a car dealership is in the USA.

This article's title is sarcastic, apparently.

Sure, some mathematics is outside the purview of programming. Certainly some programming activities are only loosely mathematical. But to say that the clerical part of programming is all that matters (and that's really what he says here) is totally ridiculous.

You could bing for incidents like this.

Ah ha! A Dutch auction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction). This might be a good thing for people who can get away with less-powerful servers (and who can't these days?). I can't find the reference I want to find, but a little ways down in http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Auctions.html it says that a Dutch auction does not maximize revenue for the seller. So you have to wonder why the seller is using this auction style.

Dutch auctions are supposed to take place faster than other types, and risk aversion is supposed to make bidders choose a higher price than they would otherwise. Are people bidding on used servers particularly risk averse, or do sellers just want to unload them?

Interesting things to ask, to be sure. But why all the cuts? I mean, I'm sure they had to edit out the usual number of "ummm" and "ahhhh", and "wait, wait!" phrases. But the director had at least 3 cameras on him, from different angles, and kept cutting between a tight closeup, and three-quarters profiles from both left and right.

Why? Is this sort of thing done just to prove you're not filming it on your Droid, that you've got the resources to have 3 cameraa, 3 photographers, and you can edit it all together? Because I'm not too sure that the editing added much to this one.

Charles Petzold has elucidated a lot of the same ideas in: http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.htm...

Since that's got a 2005 date, can we agree that there's a trend here?

high-ceremony Java enterprise folk - is that a way of not including a "lightning rod" or layers of linkbait and trolling? Because I think of the work of "Java enterprise folk" in different terms. "Bloatware", "boilerplate", "marching morons" and a number of other more derogatory terms come to mind.

This article contains a good observation: he wraps his key idea in layers of link-bait and nerd-traps, shallow but emotionally charged ideas that side-track all but the strongest minds.

Hey, this idea is my Intellectual Property! I invented it to keep the morons at bay during Usenet's Eternal September, beginning with AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe's addition to Usenet in 1993. I always tried to put "lightning rod" prose into any Usenet article to divert the idiots into responding with idiocy. Only people with some knowledge can pass up a "lightning rod" and deal with the real issues.

The author takes the idea of "intellectual property" for granted. What about the problem of independent invention? The telegraph, telephone and lots of other major inventions had multiple pretenders to the throne of "inventor". I think that this fact make "IP" into something less than property.

The problems with this article extend further into its underpinnings than merely assuming a problem without explaining what the problem is.

Anybody who has used Linux at home, and Windows at work can tell you that. In fact, Windows has only recently caught up with Linux in OS reliability. X11 is still vastly more reliable than Win32.

Now, about the Windows performance issues...

This article illustrates what's wrong with "enterprise" type software: HiPPO rules in that context, and it costs too much to do testing to validate any design choices. In fact, most "enterprise" development managers believe that software is fractally buggy (any piece of the whole has an infinite number of bugs) and so if something is in production, they will not change it unless forced to do so at virtual gunpoint.

could very well be ahead of public research - does that mean you've had meetings with groups of 3 federal employees, one of whom does nothing but ensure the other 2 don't say too much? You know, like the feds that visited IBM to make DES more resistant to differential cryptanalysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27...)?

How about something like this for the "Card Services" scams?

These are the robo-calls with the female voice telling you that you can lower your credit card's interest rate, but it's only for a limited time, so press 1 to talk to a service rep.

I've gone pretty far down the road with a few of these "service reps". I'm convinced they want credit card number, expiration date and CVS/CVC for cards with a large available balance. They hang up on me if I just want the lower interest, or if I inquire too closely about who they work for, or why they need the CVS/CVC (3-digit code on the back of a card).

Very informative, in that it answers the question very precisely. It's like the old joke about a helicopter pilot lost in pea soup fog over Seattle, somewhere. A building abruptly looms out of the fog, and the pilot holds up a sign saying "WHERE AM I?" The person at the window scribbles on a piece of paper: "YOU'RE IN SEATTLE". The pilot whips the helicopter around, flies straight to a helipad and lands with 30 seconds of fuel left. The passengers want to know how he did that. "Well, the answer was perfectly correct, but absolutely useless. So, I knew that the building was in Redmond on the Microsoft campus."

Although I liked seeing and knowing what Wordpad means, this is the worst kind of apologetics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologetics). It's great that Wordpad allows this sort of control. But what the heck? Why does "text" mean three different things? Why does "text" differ from "binary"? That's just confusing.

What the hell is going on in the USA?

The USA Feds learned a lesson from the Chinese: "One eye open, one eye shut". See http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/051208-china-internet.... That kind of ambiguous policy conditions people to censor themselves.

Yes. I've come to the conclusion that chimps, gorillas and orangutangs (at least, maybe some monkeys, too) qualify as "human", or at least close enough. They need to be protected and allowed to prosper.

I have two thoughts:

1. Wow! I didn't know that the FBI had intercepted (as opposed to cultivating) that many "terrorists". They must have quite a database (like the serial killer database) of behavorial traits built up to be saying something this specific.

2. The FBI is just cultivating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. This is totally transparent.

In a larger sense, this is rubbish. It's a man-made rule that you can't take bottled drinks (or can't take X for any X) on a flight. Not allowing bottled drinks on flights is particularly stupid in light of exactly how the "two part explosive" is made, and in light of what the goobers in the terror plot using two part explosives wanted to blow up (the terminal).

This is like a headline saying that a dog has spent a frugalpopillion dollars to figure out how to bite a postman. It's a "so what". The real headlines ought to be about how the TSA and the USA feds are running roughshod over constitutional rights. Frikken lapdog news outlets...

I realize that traditional consulting companies hitch themselves to particular vendors or sets of vendors. I was surprised that consultants would act as Party Commissars, reporting developers or groups that depart from their preferred vendor(s). I thought reporting people for deviation from a party line went out in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

I'm not a .NET person. Heck, I'm not even a Windows person. I found this sentence interesting:

Things like the Microsoft "professional engineer" who advises you at your invitation, and then sends e-mails behind your back to executives to inform them of his concern about the "business risks" of non-Microsoft technology choices.

That's really weird. Who finances these commissars? I mean, I've seen this sort of thing take place, but only when a two-letter consultancy was gunning to take over some director's entire department. What's in it for the commissar?

If there's a legal (or standards-organization) mandate for DRM (and there have been legislative pushes for such in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_... , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Protection_for_Recordab... to note just two such efforts) then nothing I can do will move the market.

But beyond all that, the whole "Piracy!" excuse doesn't take into account whether the proposed problem actually merits a solution, whether the proposed solution actually cures the problem, and whether the proposed solution causes more problems than it cures. "But, but, Piracy!" is just a way to whip up a confusing semantic fog around an issue, demonize a set of viewpoints, and use that demonization to pursue some kind of agenda that hardly anyone would go along with without the associated confusing and witchhunts. You're doing it yourself, subtly, by implying that I habitually "pirate" stuff, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Although I'm not a church-goer any more, I'm a citizen, and a taxpayer. I don't cuss, I obey the Law of the Sea, Canon Law, and the Laws of Thermodynamics. I do not advocate the violent overthrow of the government, and I have no conflicts of interest.

"There will always be people with more time than money" - doesn't that mean "so-called pirates will always exist"?

If that's the case, why should the rest of us pay money for enforcement actions (in the form of taxes) and why should the rest of us allow a few Giant Immoral Corporations to distort our society and culture? Shouldn't our elected representatives patiently explain the economics to the crybaby corporations, and then politely tell them to go pound sand?

This is a control issue, plain and simple. The market for "content" is changing from a very cozy oligopoly to a one where no single firm or cartel has very much monopoly power. It's our sacred duty as Americans and Free Market Advocates to cause a transition to a market that can better serve the needs of consumers. Mercantilism in the form of "DRM" or "Intellectual Property" must not stand!

My family needs really great health insurance (USA, where job and health care go hand-in-hand).