"Here I am, brain the size of a planet..."

"Heavy Fog In Channel. Continent Cut Off"
    -- Headline in The Times, October 22, 1957

It also is, as Mr. T. said, an ancient practice that was well respected before modern science. Mind you, there have always been astrological crackpots, those who don't apply it scientifically, but just make stuff up. And, yes, the inference is "the sun's position in the sky has a direct and obvious effect on existence below the sphere of the moon; the moon's position in the sky also has an influence, although less strong (think: tides); therefore, the position of the other celestial spheres - mercury, venus, mars, jupiter, saturn and uranus - against the sphere of fixed stars, notably the constellations of the ecliptic, should have an influence.

Of course, it doesn't quite work that way. The inference is false, and the whole thing collapses.

I agree with you in principal, but they don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done faster so they can get more jobs done overall in as little time as possible. Reducing labor costs is the name of the game.

The problem with positional tracking is it doesn't tell you why X was in some location. Because he needed to be there to do some job or because he was trying to chat up some woman?

In true Slashdot fashion, I didn't RTFA but is he suggesting:

1) Hard encryption should be illegal -- ie, you can't actually sell software that does encryption that either the NSA can't break or that doesn't provide key escrow?

2) Third party vendors (eg, Apple) can't sell devices which self-encrypt in a way that Apple doesn't have access to? Ie, if you buy an iPhone it will self-encrypt but with a key that Apple has access to?

My guess is he's aiming at the latter, he wants most products that do encryption that are sold commercially to be done in a way that preserves the ability for vendors to decrypt on demand.

I guess part of what I was commenting on is that the trend seems to be away from all the trappings of "pro" porn -- perfect bodies, fake tits, and the fairly robotic sex routine of 3-4 positions ending with a facial.

It seems to me that there is a much greater interest (or at least availability) of porn with women that don't look like porn stars (varied bodies with imperfections), sex that seems a little less artificial and more real than the traditional all-pro porn. Sure, some of it is fake amateur but many of the women seem semi-pro at best if not actual non-porn-actresses doing it for a quick buck, not as a career, which seems to add to the verisimilitude of the amateur nature of it.

And actual amateur home-made porn is often bad from a technical perspective, you wouldn't know it from online reviews and view counts. I think the fact that it is real has an appeal that traditional pro porn can't match.

Which definitions are you referring to? Mine is Paul Tillich's "Ultimate Concern". By that definition, Buddhism is certainly a religion in the sense that it provides a path to meaning (i.e. enlightenment.)

Who's watching pro porn anymore?

The trend in adult content seems to be amateur, whether that means actual amateurs in purloined home-made photos and videos or "prosumer" amateurs where some money changed hands but nobody other than the male/cameraman/site owner (the same guy) is actually trying to make a living at it -- certainly the female talent doesn't seem to be a prototypical porn star.

And even when the content is for sale, the same companies selling it often have all you need to see for free on their own YouPorn channels, whether its pro all the way or the sort of semi-pro stuff.

One of my questions would be why are they even bother producing pro porn. There seems to be so many people willing to get naked and have their picture taken out there that actually paying people to do it seems to be a waste of time.

Why not both? AFAIK there is no double-jeopardy protection between civil and criminal cases.

Sure, the lawyers could get rich on a class action settlement but you never know, the class could get something useful out of this. I don't know what's involved in removing this spyware, but you could potentially argue for something like 4 hours of skilled time per system just to clean it as a rough median (maybe much less for brand new systems, maybe much more for systems that would need to be wiped, re-setup and have apps and data put back on). And that doesn't include any claims for damages resulting from the infection itself, just remediation. Even if Lenovo bargained that down to half, in theory they could be on the hook for $200 per machine.

You'd think Kremen would just have the guy kidnapped and torture the info out of him.

6 months probation for committing an armed robbery? That's nuts.

From the victim's perspective, he thought his life was in danger because it likely looked like a real gun. From the perpetrator's perspective it was a bluff, but the victim didn't know that. In most states the victim could have used deadly force to defend himself and easily gotten away with it. Even the best police department wouldn't have even blinked if an officer shot him with it. And it's not like it's impossible to seriously hurt someone with a BB gun.

Further, the perpetrator showed the willingness to use violence and the implied threat of death to accomplish a robbery. It's reasonable to assume this person is dangerous and a threat to society -- maybe next time he has a real gun, and the time after that he's willing to pull the trigger.

The fact that he stole pot doesn't matter. If this same guy had robbed your grandma's purse with a BB gun would it still seem like a 6 months of probation crime?

I am unable to explain how dis-appetizing this ending choice of phrasing was.

This may be the first textual diet suppressor.

We buy certs for corporate resources.

Purchased certs are too expensive to buy for every possible thing you might want to encrypt without a certificate error. There's all manner of internally facing services that don't need public certificate verification and a perfectly useful method of distributing trust for those certificates.

I would grant you, though, that there should be some kind of security setting that makes adding a root CA much more difficult for non-domain members. But don't make it impossible, that could set an ugly precedent for taking away the ability to require only third party trust.

Well, western voters haven't been sufficiently motivated to get behind the kind of violence the grandparent alluded to. If a significant population center was hit by a suitcase nuke, I have complete faith that the American populace would demand nothing short of total victory. It wouldn't be labeled genocide and even white middle aged professors who said otherwise would probably be risking a lynching.

The U.S. would just apply maximal, scorched earth total warfare which would probably be on Dresden scales of brutality. We've done it before and half of it targeted white people. Add in a difference in race and how sympathetic do you think the American public will be about a bunch of Arabs getting their village burned and shot in the street? And how hard do you think it will be to find legions of Appalachian crackers willing to do it?

The good news is that you wouldn't actually have to commit active genocide. Once you've destroyed a couple of cities and their populstions and bombarded the rest you really can break their will to fight and get the population to submit. This has been demonstrated since before the Classical period. This is EXACTLY how you defeat an enemy and conquer him.

It sounds reasonable, but I don't find it compelling. One of the biggest trends anymore is the "home grown" terrorist, the one who who commits act of violence in his home country.

I'm still puzzled why so many apparently soft targets haven't been hit, at least once.

It could just be that the "threat" is greatly overstated.