All of the times when cases like this have gone the other way, the precedent cited was one about business dealings, which being voluntary, void your sole oversight over the details of those dealings.

The problem with that argument as it pertains to cell phones, is that the government maintains a monopoly on the airwaves which it licenses out to cell providers. It would be like the government licensing out all roads to be toll roads and then getting to track your movements because they were part of a business dealing.

1) The assertion is that this malware infects as many bioses on the machine as it can. But a bios isn't big, so instead of containing code to directly infect the main OS, it contains code to setup a mesh network with it's peers to download the appropriate OS root kit.
2) The air gap was on a laptop (with a battery) in a room with potentially infected machines.
3) There never was a claim that a completely clean machine was infected over any method, just that a machine that had been the recipient of a lot of low level cleaning, and disabling managed to demonstrate a full re infection after spending enough timeout the proximity of other infected machines.

None of things asserted here are particularly novel. Infections at all levels bios, aren't novel. Mesh networking, isn't novel. Acoustic networking isn't novel. The arrangement of them to maximize the effectiveness of them is the novel part. But also in retrospect is also pretty obvious. Rather then try to code for all the bios and OS combinations, and all the OS and device combinations, you code for all the bios and device combinations, and then code for all the OS choices in a one off.

Maybe he got a tri-vection oven and a sufficiently upgraded stovetop that he doesn't need a seperate rice cooker, and get a much less generic result without out it.

The Subject "Illegal Downloading now a Crime", says it all, and what it says is that the corporations have won. If it was illegal downloading then it would have already been a crime, or it would not have been illegal downloading. "Illegal Downloading", has traditionally not been an actual thing but instead is a term used as a scare tactic. Similarly there is no such thing as an illegal copy. Traditionally, it has been the distribution or copying itself that is illegal, unlike stolen goods which remain tainted, Copies made without authorization have no lasting taint to them. So traditionally it has been the case that if someone serves you a song, they are the ones that are liable. If you serve it back out because you're on P2P, then and only they are you also liable. But the PR war was so effectively won, that this major change, is mis-reported.

I have to say the write up of the summary for this post did a really good job of not over stating what the study did and showed. Some that I have seen for this have been really bad.

So for me the question is that here the study was on name bias based on gender of names. So there are some obvious followup questions here, like were there gender ambiguous names in the study Like Terry, and if so how did they did do. For the participants what sort of pre-esxisitng person to name associations did they have with those names. (i.e. Rather then being a direct gender bias could this have been that people are more likely to have name biases for female names then male names [and by name bias I mean things like not trusting people named Jennifer].) Further going beyond the direct follow up I wonder if there are biases in styles of names. Does Jim go over better or worse the James, If there is a skew towards formal or informal names how do people who's names don't have a clear nickname (like Derek) end up in the whole situation. To me this just opens the doors to more questions, and since the study did not find that the bias was particular to either gender of reviewer, I think the obvious thing to ask is, so what's really going on here.

I think that this is a really important area, because science is best served by diversity, and am a little disappointed that they published their results at this stage because it potentially taints further study into this issue. I think that if we are going to tackle the problem we really need to understand it rather then trying fixes that are ignorant of the root causes.

Ever since RMS conceived his scheme to get open hardware by giving away free software, the difference between hardware and software, with regard to being open or free is just a mess.

An open source car, would have it's specs and software available for the public to look at, but not necessarily allow for the running of unapproved code variants, because the source is open no the hardware.

A Car that was open hardware, would let you run your own code and modify components, without necessarily letting you see all the details of the running code or factory parts.

Open source cars, could be safer because of external review.

I think that cars with open hardware might be a bad idea because cars a potentially a large public menace (and might be domestically the most lethal type of machine) and verifying the relative safety of any modifications would be very hard. Car makers have large budgets for that and they don't always get it right.

Well there is a project which is used to send neutrinos and has a decay tunnel. The tunnel just doesn't go all the way, as that's not needed.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Research/CNGS-en.html

I think the real story is that you're an alien from a planet on which several days can occur in the span of 24 earth hours. That teaser went up just a day ahead of the announcement.

Besides the Beatles are pretty much the best selling band of all time. In the 2000s only eminem sold more records then the Beatles. In a decade three full decades after the broke up, and with out a new medium to be released on they were the second best selling artist. They may not be a big deal to you but they are a pretty big deal.

.999... is the sum of 9 * 10^(-n) for each n in the set of natural numbers. If you multiply that by 10 and subtract the original sum you will get that the difference is 9, as long as in the set of natural numbers n, being a member implies that (n + 1) is also a member.

Apparently I value your time and expertise more then you do. Your time and expertise are part of the price. Also Build it yourself you tend to lose Aesthetics or Miniaturization if not both.

I was talking about The Market analysts that make recommendations on the basis that everyone is a day trader that punish stable profitable companies, just because they don't grow or their rate of growth isn't growing. A non-growing company that isn't stagnating and is profitable should be able to maintain a stock price such that dismantling the company and selling off it's assets is more isn't more profitable then selling the stock.

That's exactly what $400 dollar small form factor machines are supposed to do, suck, suck hard, and fail if you look at them wrong

That's the math of computers. Quality & Performance & Miniaturization & Aesthetic = Price. Enough people refuse to accept this and because there are vendors willing to take advantage of those people, many of them do so as not to lose market share and have their company killed by "Market Analysts" (Another group of people that seem incapable of doing the math of the real world)

Except that points, 2, 3, and 4, from the post you are replying too, explain why it does not. Here they are again for you.

Every viewer Analytics are a NEW thing. Webpages don't have them, billboards, don't have them, magazines don't have them, TV ads son't have them, radio ads don't have them. Direct mailings don't have them, ... And while they might have started to make their way into computer apps, for the most part they are limited to mobile phone apps. So surely if all those other ads can be sold with out every viewer analytics you can sell them for a phone without those same analytics, not that AdMob would even have to go that far, see points 3 & 4.

Beyond that, There is a good chance that gathering every viewer analytics from iOS apps is illegal. In many jurisdictions you are not allowed to monitor people without notifying them that you are doing it and/or getting their explicit consent. iOS apps generally don't make me agree to an Eula, and don't provide a terms of service, or if they do, don't do anything to make me aware of it. And since those are the tools that most software developers use to cover there legal obligations with regard to data they collect, there is a chance that those apps are crossing the line.

Did you say something? I think your comment might have gotten stuck in my firewall.

Yes, and anyone can be a spy. But we still give people security clearances.

Apple's competitors could conceivably use their Analytics groups for industrial espionage and if they do Apple doesn't even have a good way to find out about it. Independent Analytics groups may try to glean and sell trade secrets from the analytics that they gather, or they may even just announce them. But there is a good chance that Apple will at least know what was leaked. But if there is a continuing problem Apple will probably take steps.

No I don't that's why they left the ban in place for ALL their direct competitors.

This is about spyware, which is why Apple's first change was to allow NO ONE to collect analytics. Apple isn't banning people just now, they were banned. It's letting people back in.

Apple, really really doesn't like their development to get leaked. The Apple paranoia about their trade secrets is long standing and well documented.

My main intent was to remind people that Advertising is not Analytics. So this isn't an Advertiser restriction, it's an Analytics restriction. So it doesn't ban AdMob. So it's probably not an AdMob vs. iAd thing, since AdMob isn't even banned.

Every viewer analytics are actually a new thing.Moreover many of the current analytic gathering practices, especially on iOS where most Apps are sold without a TOS or EULA, are ethically and legally dubious. So really we should be having a discussion about Analytics rather then iAd.