The internet is used for a lot more than downloading music, and is often used as a way of distributing information. For the common citizen (who doesn't own a TV station), short of speaking in a street/park with a megaphone, this is often the only way they have of communicating. The internet a medium of communication, facilitating speech even if in electronic form.

Well, if I want unbiased information about politics, the internet is probably where I would start. The internet is the only form of media where anyone regardless of how wealthy they are can put something, and if you take that away, making the only form of free speech privately owned and controlled, then it's not quite free anymore. Sure it's free for the people who own the media, but anyone else only gets to say something if it's in line with the message the owner wants expressed. Truly free speech means even the people you (or the elite class) does not like, and currently the internet is the only place where that (usually) happens.

People actually do use Twitter for this sort of thing, though I more often see Facebook used for that. Also, use of one's own online service, like hosting your own website for coordination of protests, collaborating over an IRC channel or other chat room, web streaming (or use of YouTube), or just plain e-mail communication, are all perfectly legitimate uses of the internet for assembly, and very prone to use for political motives by the masses. If the powers that be can argue there is copyright infringement (or linkage, like with thepiratebay.org) going on from protest-gathering-website.com, then they can justify blocking it just like any other website and thereby prevent assembly on it. The way the DMCA works now (and I don't think this law will be any better), any time an issue is time-sensitive or the defendants lack resources to defend themselves in court, you (the powers that be) don't even have to prove you own the copyrighted work. The DMCA wasn't even intended for censorship, while this particular bill is. Same goes for pretty much any other website.

Aside from religion (unless they decide Islamic websites are illegal or something), the ability of the government to censor parts of the internet does apply to the 1st amendment. Futhermore, copyright has already been (ab)used many times to censor free speech, so this is not just a hypothetical scenario. To claim copyright cannot, was not, or will not be used for online political censorship or that a law aimed at online censorship will not be abused is either naive or lying.

Nah, paper usually reaches terminal velocity pretty fast with its high surface area to mass ratio. It would have to go pretty fast against air friction to burn up. Now getting torn apart in the wind is another matter.

Not to say one way or another - it's really hard to prove causality in media/violence cases especially in video games - but I'd like to refer you to Albert Bandura's famous Bobo Doll study (video). The belief that an outlet for violence (particularly violent television) was good for satiating people's natural aggressive tendencies was widely believed up until this study was published in 1961. I am shocked nobody else here bothered to cite this study.

How much you wanna bet we're going to have to wait for Adobe's next 90-day update cycle, since this was released right on the day of another patch?

What's really sad is that the survey is probably at least close to accurate. There are so many people out there today who think they can get some "real justice" if they give up their rights to "fight terrorism" that I am having a hard time tearing apart the article.

What exactly do you consider an "intrusion attempt"? A failed SSH login? A suspicious script running on a website one of your users loaded? A phishing/trojan e-mail? An alert from the anti-virus (if you're running Windows)? How on earth do you browse through all those alerts, most of which can be ignored? Also, if you're working in IT, then you do care if they get into something. Obviously you would prefer it not be something like your main file server or something that stores sensitive financial/FERPA/HIPAA/whatever records, but you probably still care if one of your users' desktops is hosting malware/pr0n, pumping spam, logging keystrokes, or launching DoS attacks.

Aren't you desensitizing yourself to important alerts from the logs? There are certainly noteworthy things in the logs - coming from somebody who reads logs on his servers - but if you try to manually read and acknowledge every failed root login and every request with a bunch of - signs and quotation marks, you're going to be tempted to just ignore everything no matter how important.

Forget "latest edition" copies. Last year, I paid $120 for a textbook that was copyright 1993! The professor said there was no need for a newer edition since we were studying older computer architectures, but once the bookstores caught on, they either refused to carry the old edition, or jacked the price up to that of newer books. Of course, selling it back you'd get maybe $5 just because it's required next quarter, or a "newer" edition is coming out that year, but these companies charge whatever they can away with no matter how old or new the book is. Over 16 years, the price for students went through the roof while the price students can sell the book at went to almost nothing.

Yeah, the professors are usually naive/apathetic/complicit about it as long as they get their own colorful copy for free (some don't even bother teaching), but between the publishers and bookstores fixing prices for required textbooks, the students are pretty screwed no matter what position professors take. And it's not like the authors who actually write the books get any significant portion of this money. It's just the publishers playing gatekeeper on students' degrees in an economy where finding a job is nigh impossible without that degree.

Yes, at my school some professors request copies on closed reserve (one even got the publishers to send a free "sample" copy to the library), but many don't and it's really hard to do calculus problems in a big open space with lots of people talking/eating around you because you can't take it outside the library and it's due back in 1-2 hours.

Professors here at Ohio State have a variety of ways to deal with secondhand book sales. Some textbooks here are only available in looseleaf form so they cannot be sold back. Many are "OSU Edition" copies, to ensure they cannot be sold online; to book stores in other regions; or at all after 1--2 years once the publisher comes out with the next edition. Barns & Noble, the "official" OSU bookstore has a program called "textbook rental" to curb resale of used textbooks. Then, one of the worst models is in the Physics department; they have an agreement with the publishers and a company called WebAssign, where although you can buy a used copy of a textbook, only the new ones have a "product key" which you need to do your (required) online homework.

Under none of these circumstances do professors pay anything for students, and (for obvious) reasons professors get the materials for free and most don't have a clue what the books cost until a student tells them (which they ignore). I can't say I'm surprised by any of this. Publishers make enormous profits by revising textbooks and requiring newer versions, and because students (who have to buy the books) don't have a choice. All the while, these new techniques are being upheld as "cost saving" and "convenient" for students. Consumer choice and the free market at work I guess.

To the hell with online textbooks!

Facebook does submit your information over HTTPS; they just load the page over HTTP by default. Passive sniffing won't work on it. Here, take a look at the following code from http://www.facebook.com/:

<form method="POST" action="https://login.facebook.com/login.php?login_attempt=1" id="login_form">

The problem with this approach is, while it saves server resources, an attacker could trivially perform a man-in-the-middle attack on an average person connecting to http://www.facebook.com/ rewriting the above code to HTTP or running a squid proxy or something, and they would never notice because their browser says "http" like always.

That said, if you're worried about it you could always install HTTPS Everywhere and it will make Facebook always load using SSL.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I should have known Adobe wasn't really going to embed videos without requiring viewers to install proprietary plugins. After all, people wouldn't have any reason to use Flash anymore if they did.

That's not funny. This isn't a video game, and there are real, live, innocent people in those 100 cars that you'd be getting into an accident. To purposely add to a mess like this for "points" like it were a video game is disgusting, and whoever modded this up should be ashamed. Imagine the number of people who you'd be killing or sending to the hospital in your 100x chain reaction bonus.

Actually, I think that's just reporters screwing up the "technical jargon," as they often do. I highly doubt an engineer would actually have used "delta difference".