The problem with the sequestration deal is that it was essentially a suicide pact: if Congress can't agree to a more-balanced budget, then savage austerity measures take effect, crippling government functioning across the board.

That's great as a motivator, except that one party is motivated by an ideology that actually wants that kind of austerity. In short: it's not a very good suicide pact if one side already has a death wish.

Also, don't worry about it being a mutual self-immolation: the Republicans will demand that only social spending (and not military) gets cut, and the Democrats will cave at the last minute in the name of compromise.

whoops. I got Dotcom mixed up with, uh, Julian Assange (who I believe is an AU citizen, yes?). I'll just go back to nursing this booze now.

That's where the FBI's case is going to go. Everything I've read tells me that the FBI, their Australian exponents, and the other parties involved broke too many regs to be able to bring a real case against Megaupload. This is just one more nail in the coffin.

... is dog-whistle for "I really wish I could get away with being open about my racism/sexism/homophobia/whatever." You should really avoid hiring those people, if that's what you really mean. If you just mean "Yo, we shouldn't knock qualified applicants off the list for a pot bust ten years ago," then maybe you're on to something.

Well, I'm not entirely sure of that. For example: I do audio work, and video work, and like gaming, and compile my own software. All of those things take a robust desktop architecture to do well. You're not really suggesting that I'd switch to a tablet running BOINC in the background 24/7 while I process high-def audio files, are you?

So let's discuss alternatives. Say AMD goes down. What are my options as a consumer in, say, five years if I want to avoid Intel, but want all the horsepower I can get my hands on for a desktop workstation? I really don't thing it's going to be Qualcomm, if they're targeting low-wattage mobile devices. Are there any other CPU manufacturers who are positioned to step into that market?

fo reals, though. Where I live (Germany) *nobody* is selling capped internet. Providers are in bidding wars to offer faster and cheaper internet than the other guy. I get a real rate of about 4.5MB down/150k up, with no monthly limits beyond that, for €20 a month. My cell phone plan is the cheapest I could get, and it doesn't cap, either (but throttles after 50MB a month), and it costs €10 a month.

This article needs to be re-summarized to "broadband service in the US is slowly but steadily regressing."

Not entirely. ContentID works by checking uploaded tracks against a database submitted by rightsholders. If the content matches, it gives the holders power to force an automatic takedown, or derive ad revenue from it. However, if the uploader disputes the claim, there was no real recourse if the claimant denied the dispute. Further, DCMA notices have to be manually filed for each uploaded file. Since Big Media is a bunch of whiny bitches, they didn't want to do that, and would much rather google does all the legwork for them.

Because responding manually according to the required procedure, for the (I'm estimating here) thousands of requests they receive would eat up a huge chunk of their administrative and support budget.

But that is definitely not the case in the Stanford experiment. The test-subjects in the role of the guards were not given any instructions for how to discipline the "prisoners." They were not given any explicit instructions regarding their conduct. Only the authority to carry it out. Read some of the results (quoting the Wiki):

etc etc

That's not normal people being coerced into doing bad things; that's "normal people" volunteering to act beyond the bounds of their instructions, and willingly acting in a manner that is outside the bounds of what is normally considered ethical or moral behavior.

And for the developer of the experiment himself:

That's the guy who designed an experiment ostensibly intended to provide some insight into whether (in the words of an above commenter) Nazi guards were personally accountable for the atrocities they committed, not having any moral qualms at all about creating conditions that lead to exactly the same sort of brutality, and only stopping because his girlfriend gave him an ultimatum. Again, what we find over and over in experiments like this, is that people will often willingly volunteer to escalate to acts of violence, if given official sanction to do so (and decidedly not, as you claim, and I wish, because they were manipulated or coerced).

And like I said from the beginning, read up on the experience of the dictatorial regimes of the last century if you need more evidence. You don't have to force people, or even prod them or train them, to come up with and commit acts of horrific cruelty. You just have to provide the venue for it, and the people will show up of their own accord.

But see, I take away a different conclusion entirely, from both studies. Morals aren't really morals if you drop them for an authority figure. To me, morals are what you as a person believe, and will not abandon just because someone in a lab coat tells you to. That's the disquieting truth of both experiments: the majority of what people regard as their own moral conduct is actually just socially-reinforced behavioral norms. That's the point of the pigeon example; or, to put it more sharply: if you could get away with committing an act of cruelty, with no negative consequences whatsoever, would you do it? Both studies suggest that most people would, and the experience of people living under Pinochet -- or any number of other horrible dictators -- verifies this.

The reason is very simple, if somewhat disheartening. Take a look at some of the literature on human behavior, particularly the studies on the "banality of evil" (texbook scenarios are the Milgram Experiment and the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment).

The sad truth pointed out by both of those studies is that approximately 60% of us -- all of us, even those of us who claim to be, and act like, normal ethical people in polite society -- will commit acts of cruelty upon another human being, even to the point of delivering potentially lethal electrical shocks to someone obviously in distress, if the social sanctions against it are removed.And those were both cases in which the victims had voices and (in the latter case) faces by which the perpetrators could witness the suffering they were causing.

In short, the majority of people will be cruel, spiteful bullies if they believe they can get away with it. For me, a good example is (oddly) watching how people treat pigeons (??): they're harmless, no more dirty than, say, hoboes, and live around us. But they are negatively viewed as carriers of disease ("rats of the skies" is such a cliché, and what's so bad about rats, anyway?), and most people wouldn't think twice about trying to scare them and threaten to cause them harm. It seems a bit melodramatic, but I often wonder why a person would want to be mean to some random harmless animal. I think, sadly, that it's because most people like being mean, and just need a venue to get away with it.

The Pinochet regime in Chile figured this out pretty quickly: you don't need to make people commit acts of cruelty against their will. All you have to do is provide a venue for cruelty without consequences, and the people will come out of the woodwork of their own accord. And Facebook/YouTube/your local news station's comments section are just such venues.

For the same reason we scorn the obese who are that way due to sloth and overindulgence, but not due to glandular or metabolic disorders: the hardware works fine, but the owner has elected to misuse it. Or rather, the possessor of a perfectly functioning brain has elected not to exercise it. It isn't true stupidity we scorn, but mental laziness.

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.