Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, "one month" is about the amount of time that nVidia's web forum - comically also the only route for reporting bugs, and found here - has been shut down due to a DDoS attack.

Probably not the best way to follow up their snippy response to Linus Torvald bashing their Linux support.

You're mis-assigning value here. What is scarce in the case of intellectual property - or in the case of copyright - is the physical copy. Since that's a tangible object, which previously required considerable investment to mass-produce, that's what got restricted to a licensed monopoly. But since making and distributing copies is now trivially easy, there's no reason to restrict them.

What has not been monetized, however, and is the only link in the chain that is not trivially easy to replace by digital means, is the original, physical act of performing the work. Artists have known this for some time: they make very little of their income from CD sales, and most of it from going on tour, and actually playing stuff live.

That event is the only thing that cannot be infinitely replicated, because it's a live event, so that's the only thing in the chain that has any real reason to have value. Everything else was artificial scarcity that has been imposed for the last several centuries until technology caught up. This guy's open letter to unrepentant filesharers makes a huge number of bad assumptions about spending and payment habits (really? Every time I download something free, it's a lost sale that directly impacts a struggling artist?), that just serves as further evidence that most people in the industry haven't realized yet that their entire business model is on borrowed time.

Wish I had mod points. It cannot be stressed enough: the way we've been taught to keep passwords is about the most ineffective method, for these very reasons. Pick four random dictionary words (or even toss in meaningless words), make a story out of them, and use that. My pw would take several thousand trillion years to crack, and it's impossible for me to forget. Yay for xkcd!

This timing of this report - how long ago was the BitCoin theft? a couple weeks? - seems a bit ill-planned.

No joke, I was at a supermarket about six years ago, and they ran a publicity campaign for about a month, with a big banner outside. It read:

FRESH IRRADIATED BEEF - try some today!

I never asked if their campaign was successful.

If you want to look at the country with the best school system on international tests, look at Finland's highly-regarded system. The short of it: no standardized tests, lots of social support at schools, and - what to me is the most interesting - teachers are members of a very highly-regarded professional class. Compare that to the US view ("if you can't do, teach," "the way to improve schools is to divert funding away from them and make them teach to the tests"), and the reasons for the difference become pretty clear.

If the [citation] request is an ironic reference to the fact that the information can be found in the first paragraph of the wiki page for cat food, then you get points for being meta. Otherwise, you're just indolent.

I'll assume you're just as insistent about condemning all the cat owners who 1) don't feed their pets freshly-prepared, nutritionally-balanced food, and 2) don't live somewhere where they can let their cats roam freely; and not, say, using your apparently poor grasp of domestic pet nutrition as a red herring to denigrate vegetarians and vegans.

except that there isn't enough naturally-occurring taurine in any processed cat food, so it's all supplemented with synthetically-derived taurine.

This is one of the most insufferable arguments against vegan pet food. Do some research before you spout off nonsense, ffs.

You're problem wasn't that your coworker was a vegan. Your problem was that your coworker was a sanctimonious asshole. One does not require the other.

I've been vegan for eleven years, and vegetarian for 10 before that. I know lots of vegans and vegetarians. I have never met one who acted like your coworker: to the contrary, they all, to a one, go to great pains not to impose on anybody, or to (to use a commonly-applied phrase) "shove it down [your/our/their] throat[s]." As the commenter blow notes, it's usually exactly reversed: my most common vegan introduction experience involves some variant of "oh, so it's going to piss you off if I eat meat in front of you, right?" And your comment marks you as little different.

What's wrong with you, huh? Why do you hate FREEDUMB?? Binney is obviously giving away National Security secrets to the terr'rists, and should be Gitmo'd right away. Didn't he read the name of the Act? It's the USA PATRIOT Act. If he hates the US America so much, maybe he should move back to Sharia Kenya, or wherever all these freedom-haters come from.

Poe's Law is a fickle mistress =/

Except that you are conflating "racial prejudice" with "racism," and they are not at all the same thing.

Or did I miss the part where there is a centuries-old system in place of deploying political oppression, police violence, cultural bias, distorted judicial and criminal codes, etc etc ad nauseum to secure and promote black privilege? Because that's what it would take for "reverse racism" to be anything but the rantings of bitter racists angry about being called out for their racist bullshit. Your boss explicitly discriminates against you in promotion and pay decisions because you're white? Fine, your boss is racially prejudiced. But don't be a moron and think that somehow makes you the victim of a vast structure of racism equivalent to the one - of which you are the beneficiary - that establishes and enforces white privilege. Doing so makes you complicit in racism, and thus a racist yourself.

Sorry, but "I went to a predominantly black school and totally got jumped all the time so my racist dad was definitely right about Teh Blax" is not sufficient cover for you to promote white privilege like it's some kind of clear-eyed meritocratic realism.

Wow, I really like the part where you throw out a whole bunch of ad hominem charges and coded racism to argue for Zimmerman walking. So, people who don't like the idea of armed racists chasing down and murdering defenseless teenagers are homeless freeloaders? That Martin somehow was culpable because he was dressed like a gangbanger? Did you read anything about this case at all? The kid was going to the store and back, you know: to his home, where he lived. And Zimmerman - a guy with a history of obsessing about "those people" and who appointed himself "Neighborhood Watch Captain" without anybody asking him to do so - stalks the kid, accosts him, and shoots him dead in the street. And all this is somehow justified because Real Americans are being oppressed by some Ayn Randian race-war fantasy?

Don't get me wrong: I'm pretty confident he's going to walk. But that's because the US is still a barely-held-together surface of bullshit social conventions that thinly covers a seething torrent of bitter racism and venal, belligerent warmongering, not because I think in any way that his actions are somehow justified. The idea, that Zimmerman should be set free, because black people lived near him (I like the thinly-veiled racism behind using "thugs" to denote "black people in hoodies") and that was scary, and that this is somehow what should determine the verdict, is repugnant to the idea of a just society, and destructive to a nation of laws.

Well, except that Zimmerman was not "responsible" for securing anything. He was a "self-appointed" Neighborhood Watch "captain," which translates to "a wannabe cop with a gun and some racist obsessions playing vigilante." And "observing" is not the same thing as "pursuing" (which is more like stalking).

So, I guess everything you said is wrong.

A federally-funded study found that a single large dose of psilocybin can result in that quality called "openness," which most psychologists agree is a foundation of general happiness. Naturally, magic mushrooms - which literally grow on shit, everywhere - are illegal as hell.

I remember reading a series of sci-fi books when I was young by one author, which really altered the way I thought about things. They're pretty simple, as they're geared towards 'tweens, but have some heavy stuff in them.

They are all by William Sleator:
House of Stairs:bunch of kids wake up in some immeasurable environment where they are treated like a lab experiment.
The Boy who Reversed Himself: some kid seems able to hop in and out of our normal space, but comes back with his body reversed (heart on his right side, hair parted backwards, etc), and gets into higher-dimensional stuff, and
Singularity: identical twins find an old shed that seems to distort time.

They're all quick reads, and all dealing with really interesting premises that are more the variety of rigorous-but-plausible sort of Sci-Fi that doesn't get into space-opera stuff.

He has a whole pile of other books, and they're all cheap, so I'd heartily recommend all of them.