I thought before I read TFA that they'd embed a certain amount of pixel information into the file and then if it's re-compressed and a single pixel is changed from that sequence, you'd know it's altered. Apparently they're doing something stupider. They're embedding info which will only reveal the "message" after it's re-encoded once. Well, that won't work because of the varying levels of compression which would result in different pixels in different places. Even if it does work, I'd dump it into a PNG first then close and re-open it then save that as a JPEG. There goes their little trap message. The original idea I stated would work much better except it'd be re-inventing the wheel since you could technically just hash the entire file. Then you'd know if one single pixel was altered or not from the original.

Once again they've done something that's pretty basic but put a flashy name on it to get press. A robot can't "learn" until it can "think" and this one can't spontaneously communicate on its own in quite the way they're suggesting. This is basically data sharing between two devices. It's like saying my PC and printer just had a thought and magically my printer printed what my computer was thinking after I gave my PC the print command. Hell, it even woke up my printer! It was sleeping but it heard my PC calling to it and woke up, received instructions autonomously, and then acted upon them! Must be a new robot intelligence for sure.
I'm not saying robots need to have a full blown consciousness and personality but until it has the processing capabilities to be self aware and then spontaneously devises a method to teach another robot something on its own, I'm not going to be nearly as impressed even with clever wording.

Yes, Flickr is popular but it's not like they're just targetting Flickr and that's it. These people hit Facebook, Flickr, and even Google image search to find what they're looking for. Like if you take a picture and put text near enough to it with a matching file name of "cute puppy" then your cute little puppy is going to be on some Korean bag of dog food after they hit Google image search. Foreign photo thieves will get an image from anywhere that's free on the internet because any way that they don't have to pay for a stock photo looks good to their boss and brings the project in under budget. I can't see anyone who's doing this hit just Flickr and if they don't find just the right photo, they give up and don't look anywhere else.

Flickr just announced its list of ways to counteract foreign photo stealing for stock photo-like purposes:
1. be really ugly
2. have a cheap, crappy camera
3. just take really bad, crooked, blurry shots
4. Photoshop a cheesy top hat, moustache, and monacle onto all your photos

It looks like a lot of folks on Flickr have already implemented these security measures.

Why is it that hackers can't resist toying with people or leaving riddles or boasting about their deeds on forums? This ALWAYS happens! The ones who don't get caught are the ones who just do things to do them and don't care about respect from others for their "legendary" accomplishments. The whole "I'm so cool, look at me!" hackers attitude isn't real compatible with staying 100% anonymous. I don't think this was pure carelessness in their case either because they're probably smarter than that. I think it's the same old hacker ego stroking that got them caught.
The weird thing is, this isn't what I'd have expected. The Anonymous hackers seemed like the type to just do what they do with complete security and privacy and keep quiet about it because what they did was politically and ethically motivated, not motivated by just their egos. But I guess some of them apparently couldn't resist posting links to other hackers to their Facebook profiles or something equally stupid.

I agree totally. What "research" includes looking for an already searched term on Google and then looking at what results come up...then slapping them into your own live result list for the general public? Bing's cheap algorithm is some search and crawling technology from like 2007 mixed with marketing, marketing, MARKETING! Oh, and flashy features that don't really work. So it's not that shocking that they're ripping off other people's results because their product is pretty hollow to begin with.

If all internet was turned off and all forms of communication were supposedly disabled, how are the government and police communicating? Either they shot themselves in the foot or they themselves have something set up to use. Why isn't anyone talking about that? Anyone have any information on what the "other side" is doing for internet and other communication?

Apparently "regular" people have a response time of about 500 ms and last time mine was tested, it's between 50 and 100 ms. That means I just avoided hitting something someone else plowed right into because they don't have trained reaction capabilities from games. I've not hit about 3 deer here in Wisconsin due to stepping on the brake just in time and coming within feet of them. Also, gamers tend to stay cooler under pressure. One time a flatbed of 6" round duct piping came loose and there were ducts rolling around on the freeway about 5 cars up from me and I managed to not freak out and simply dodge two of them in a stylish back and forth manuever that barely squealed the tires. Some non-gamer would have probably said OHMAHGAWD!!! and ran them all over and crashed into the side barrier. So yeah, focus, staying calm, and reaction time are huge when it comes to driving safety. Now, if you drive like an idiot in a game and then do the same in real life, you're just stupid and careless and it has nothing to do with games.

Aerial lines can go what, 3 miles? Don't most shipping containers go thousands of miles? It wouldn't be worth the construction cost even in the long run considering the distance and variety of locations that something needs to travel.

Here's the summary I got from the hour long discovery channel special I saw on these islands a long time ago while they were being built: They built them out of sand....from the sea floor! I even told the person next to me while I was watching it that it wasn't going to work. Sand + water = bad.

What drives me crazy even worse than eye pain and unrealism is the fact that anything moving remotely fast looks like playing a 3D game on a 10 year old system. If I had to guess at what's going on, it's alternating frames during the 3D effects and only at like 30 FPS to begin with so the 3D effects are effectively at 15 FPS which looks AWFUL! Anything zipping across the screen in 3D looks like choppy crap and my gamer eyes can't take that.

You're right and I completely agree. Just because it's in the middle of $50 and $600 doesn't mean it's midrange. I just bought a GTS450 for $140-ish not too long ago and it can run Oblivion at near maximum settings at 1280x1024 so that's what I'd call midrange. And I don't think I've ever in my life seen a monitor that can run at 1920x1080 natively. Just for comparison, my 32" 720P TV runs at 1366 x 768. THAT is definitely not midrange! If it can run a modern game at a more normal resoltion maxed out, it's more of a top of the line card for sure.

You can really blame China for this, not Microsoft. If you sell no-OS computers in China, they're getting an illegal copy of Windows put on them 100% guaranteed. If you sell them preloaded, you force pre-assembled computer purchases in China to have legit copies.
Furthermore, how can someone prove they removed Windows 7 from a computer they bought? I don't think Microsoft quite has a remote killswitch or re-check of the license daily on the internet or something. They can't remote disable the copy of Windows that your computer came with if you claim you removed windows and put on Linux but you're lying and it's still running windows. I'm not sure if there's a license re-check for every windows update so they might be able to remotely kill that but other than that, they can't trust random customers who claim they removed it.

I have a different theory. Every time a calculation doesn't add up or observations don't match the numbers, astronomers blame dark matter. It's the new trend apparently. That's like me balancing my checkbook and when it doesn't add up, I make up some theory about dark money and then call it balanced and write a book about it and talk about it on the Discovery Channel. They should really get back to things we can actually test instead of things we can guess about. You would think with them being so close to the "most likely solution = alien UFO or manmade object" dilemma, they would stop giving any time and effort to whoever can make up the craziest sounding theories in astronomy. Dark matter is a miscalculation, that's my theory.

They would have to make a law that states "All executable code must be 100% flawlessly perfect and represented as such" and modify the EULA to say that first. Somehow I don't see that happening.