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Plane ready to take Snowden to Iceland | 343 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Cable Guy Kicks Back at Google Fibre
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:25 AM EDT
Is cable holding back superfast broadband adoption on purpose?

cnet.com

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

We made Snowden do what he is doing now
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:45 AM EDT
Snowden himself is I think the most interesting part of this because he’s a so-called Millennial. His ethics and allegiances are not those of his father or grandfather and certainly not those of the politicians and intelligence leaders he’d love to bring down. So the old rules, old threats, and old reward structures don’t work with this guy, making him even more dangerous.
I, Cringely

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Newspick column width in google chrome
Authored by: Nick_UK on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 06:01 AM EDT
On a Linux Mint base system, if I use google chrome on the home page the
newspicks column width fills nearly half the screen, with the 'reports' column
squashed up to about a quarter of the screen. Firefox displays it OK.

Anybody else get this?

Nick

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Take a billion-pixel tour of Curiosity rover's surroundings on Mars
Authored by: Gringo_ on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 08:20 AM EDT

link

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Cheat sheet: What you need to know about 802.11ac
Authored by: JamesK on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 11:05 AM EDT
The newest wireless networking protocol is 802.11ac, due to be ratified sometime in 2013. Michael Kassner does the research and tells you what you need to know.

There is a link in the article to a Cicso paper on 802.11ac

---
The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oh My Tech!: Upgrade to Windows 8, other OS isn’t always an upgrade
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 11:43 AM EDT
I would like to see a column devoted to Windows 8 and why it is such a nightmare for many of us just to use. I deleted all those useless (to me) apps. Also, there are software compatibility issues, like with software from Brother. Brother has made only minimal attempts to solve this issue. It appears to me that there was no reason for Windows 8 except for Microsoft to make money.

Oh My Tech!: Upgrade to Windows 8, other OS isn’t always an upgrade

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

FBI - 'Obeying The Constitution Just Takes Too Much Time'
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 11:57 AM EDT
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller
addressed a proposal to require telephone companies to retain calling logs for
five years — the period the N.S.A. is keeping them — for investigators to
consult, rather than allowing the government to collect and store them all.

He cautioned that it would take time to subpoena the companies for numbers of
interest and get the answers back.

“The point being that it will take an awful long time,” Mr. Mueller said.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130619/17344023538/fbi-admits-that-obeying-c
onstitution-just-takes-too-much-time.shtml

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Former TigerDirect President Indicted in $230 Million Laundering Scheme
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:15 PM EDT
I think the title says it all.

Former TigerDirect President Indicted in $230 Million Laundering Scheme

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Nuke plants to rely on PDP-11 code UNTIL 2050!
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:19 PM EDT
The venerable PDP-11 minicomputer is still spry to this day, powering GE nuclear power-plant robots - and will do so for another 37 years.

That's right: PDP-11 assembler coders are hard to find, but the nuclear industry is planning on keeping the 16-bit machines ticking over until 2050 – long enough for a couple of generations of programmers to come and go.

GE's Chris Issel has resorted to seek assembly programmers for the 1970s tech.

Nuke plants to rely on PDP-11 code UNTIL 2050!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Krugman on IP - The much larger role of rents on intangible assets
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:39 PM EDT
There are a couple of obvious implications from this change in the nature of corporate success.

One is that profits are no longer anything remotely resembling a “natural” aspect of the economy; they’re very much an artifact of antitrust policy or the lack thereof, intellectual property policy, etc. Another is that a lot of what we consider output is “produced” at low or zero marginal cost.

So in some respects these times are different. How does this change things for economic policy?

I’m thinking, I’m thinking. First, more coffee.

Paul Krugman, NY Times

---

Dean Baker has more
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/krugman-discovers-intellectua l-property-the-1-percent-ar-the-takers

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

OT: legal humor, best ever cease & desist reply
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 02:32 PM EDT
Huffington Post has an article:

Stephen B. Kaplitt, Lawyer, Writes Possibly The Greatest Cease-And- Desist Response Of All Time
... an attorney for the township of West Orange, N.J., wrote a cease-and-desist letter to the owner of WestOrange.info, which is a bare-bones collection of links to local news sites and forums. The letter accused the unofficial site of attempting "to confuse and conflate the Township's official domain name and Web site with the Info Domain that you maintain."

Kaplitt fired back an entertaining response brimming with snark, calling the township's order an "impulsive, ham- fisted attempt to bully a local resident." It's an entertaining read, even if you're not into fine print. Best of all, it was pro-bono.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Corrupted credit ratings: Standard & Poor’s lawsuit and the evidence
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 06:56 PM EDT
In response to the civil lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice in February 2013, Standard & Poor's affirms that its ratings were "objective, independent and uninfluenced by conflicts of interest". This column presents empirical evidence opposing this claim. The data suggests a systematic rating bias in favour of the agencies' largest issuer clients.

[...]

In a sample of more than 6,500 structured debt ratings produced by Standard & Poor’s, Moody's and Fitch, we show that ratings are biased in favour of issuer clients that provide the agencies with more rating business. This result points to a powerful conflict of interest, which goes beyond the occasional disagreement among employees.

The beneficiaries of this rating bias are generally the large financial institutions that issue most structured debt; they in turn provide the rating agencies with most of their fee income. Better ratings on different components (so-called tranches) of the debt-issue amount to a lower average yield at issuance – a cost reduction pocketed by the issuer bank.

[...]

Using expected defaults frequencies of banks calculated from stock market data, we are able to calculate the rating error for more than 17,000 bank ratings of Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch.[1]

The bilateral business share in structured products between a rating agency and a bank explains the direction of the rating bias. This finding is robust to regression controls consisting of many different bank characteristics. Given that banks finance on average 20 to 30% of their balance sheet through unsecured credit, an inflated bank rating amounts to a significant benefit.

[...]

[1] The expected default frequency data was acquired from Moody’s and used as supplied. Moody’s therefore cannot claim that this rating benchmark is meaningless as it commercially sells this product.

Matthias Efing and Harald Hau, VoxEU, Centre for Economic Policy Research

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Paying to depose an expert.
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 10:51 PM EDT
I was watching the Frye hearing in the George Zimmerman case.
During oral arguments the defense attorney argued that they could not depose one
prosecution expert because of what he was charging and that they did not have
the cash.

This flabbergasted me. I thought that if an expert testified for one side, that
side had to pick up all expenses

What's next getting paid to be cross examined?
----------------------------
Mouse the Lucky Dog

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Plane ready to take Snowden to Iceland
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 08:24 AM EDT
Link (Reuters)

An Icelandic businessman linked to WikiLeaks said he has readied a private plane to take Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who exposed secret U.S. surveillance programs, to Iceland if the government grants him asylum

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Wormhole entanglement solves black hole paradox
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 08:41 AM EDT
Evidence of FSM?
Wormholes – tunnels through space-time that connect black holes – may be a consequence of the bizarre quantum property called entanglement.

[...]

Black holes emit photons via something called Hawking radiation, and these are "entangled" with the interior of the black hole and also with each other. This breaks a quantum rule that particles can't be entangled with two things at once.

To preserve quantum monogamy, Polchinski suggested last year that the black hole-photon entanglement breaks down. That causes a wall of energy at the black hole's event horizon that wrecks relativity because anyone falling in would burn up rather turn to spaghetti.

[...]

A new kind of wormhole that means the entanglement needn't be broken in the first place.

First, the pair showed that these space-time tunnels, usually described by the maths of general relativity, also emerge from quantum theory, if two black holes are entangled. It's as if the wormhole is the physical manifestation of entanglement.

The pair then extended this idea to a single black hole and its Hawking radiation, resulting in a new kind of wormhole (see diagram). Crucially, they suggest that this wormhole, which links a black hole and its Hawking radiation, may not be a problem for quantum monogamy in the way that normal entanglement is. As a result, the firewall needn't appear, preserving relativity ( arxiv.org/abs/1306.0533).

Jacob Aron, New Scientist

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Apple Wins Suit Against Samsung in Japan on Screen Effects
Authored by: ukjaybrat on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 08:50 AM EDT
Link

Wasn't the US version of this patent invalidated? Apparently Japan didn't get the memo. When will Apple stop giving us reasons to hate them?

---
IANAL

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 10:26 AM EDT
Arstechnica Link

When it comes to surveillance rules, some US people are more equal than others.

And all the rest of the world are just guinea pigs with no rights whatsoever

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Tennessee - Water complaints could be 'act of terrorism'
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 12:01 PM EDT
A Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation deputy director warned a group of Maury County residents that unfounded complaints about water quality could be considered an “act of terrorism.”
Brian Haas, The Tennessean

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Ultramercial v. Hulu (Federal Circuit opinion)
Authored by: macliam on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 06:56 PM EDT

Ultramercial v. Hulu decided again by the Federal Circuit, following GVR by the Supreme Court. Chief Judge Rader, and Judges Lourie and O'Malley still think that the serving up advertisements before, for example, allowing the viewing of a web page or video, represents patent-eligible subject matter.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • Yebbut - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 11:49 PM EDT
coupla gems on "Corporate Personality"
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 10:24 PM EDT
I just came across these on Common Dreams Another Brick in the Wall: Supreme Court Shields Corporations From the Law (As Usual) Lochnerized: Corporations have Constitutional Rights. Unions? Not So Much
It also demonstrates the very reason why just overturning Citizens United--as opposed to abolishing all corporate constitutional rights--is clearly not enough to reinvigorate democracy. Corporations should be subordinate and accountable to the people--not the other way around.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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