If the article about communicating with animals at a conversational level is published, the information will be translated into English.

Seriously, though, why do we still speak hundreds of languages? - I know... because culture! Culture is a lousy, empty, truly vapid reason. A large percentage of the human race's information is in English, a flawed, but serviceable (and malleable) trade language that served the British well for several centuries. As the study pointed out, English is, far and above all others, a global language.

It's a shame that it will likely be centuries before mankind figures out how to be more informationally efficient and come up with some sort of "basic" language. I'd even go along with Esperanto if the powers that be would just pick something and move the human race to it.

Come on, Apple, when are we going to see our 5" 8K displays? Imagine how clear that will be!!

For all budget discussions, any program, should always couch the monetary amounts in terms of how many F-35s it equates to.

This guy has been around for a while, I used to talk to him way back in the day, seemed pretty smart.

To clarify.... I know this is Sony Pictures, but if the hack was this invasive into Sony's IT infrastructure, it's very possible they penetrated the entire Sony network.

All we are seeing at the moment is from Sony Pictures, but we may see a lot more in the next few weeks.

How long before we see Sony's flagship console jailbroken like the PS3?

For that matter... we'll probably see the PS3's keys brought up to the current version, as well.

For a $500 computer, it would be a $40 UPS. That said what is your data worth? What is your time (involved in setting up the PC and installing apps)?

Also, a UPS isn't just about protecting against the damaging severe spikes and surges or outages - I used to live in an apartment and had all sorts of mysterious reboots and lockups until I attached through a cheap UPS. I took the same experience to heart with my job at the time, as an embedded systems engineer - we had a troublesome installation that had the panel rebooting constantly in the factory - all the while, the plant electrician insisted the power line to the panel was a conditioned line that was a rock solid waveform, but only after attaching the UPS to one of our panels, and having it perform perfectly for 3 days, was he convinced that all his fancy diagnostic tools might have been lying to him. After putting UPSes on all of our panels, all the problems disappeared. My next visit to that plant, and ALL of the control panels they had in the plant had UPSes inline.

The headline rephrased for truth:

AT&T confirms its future business plans depended on being able to double-dip subscribers AND content providers for payments.

or perhaps with the correct context:

AT&T confirms its future business plans depended on being able to shake down content providers for bandwidth subscribers already pay for.

High latency is right. Back around 1999 I got sick of waiting for Charter to flip the switch on broadband and got Echostar/Dish 2-way. My ping times were around 800ms for the trip to satellites 22,000 miles out. Luckily, I only had to deal with it for a year.

Cranking up a multiplayer game of Serious Sam with my son on our LAN was funny though... the games would appear on the internet, and people would try and join. Satellite wasn't conducive to multiplayer games, for sure.

There is no dark matter... it's a glitch in the machine.

That's not a bad thing; a glitch can be exploited.

You might be a bit out of your depth in understanding the issue.

The information is still a bit sketchy, but from what I gather, the chips in question are widely used to interface Arduino-type boards to your PC to program, debug, get data, etc...

The key thing here is that the counterfeit chips essentially have the same interface, so they can use the same drivers as devices built with the FTDI chips. Inside, however, they aren't using the same "firmware" as the FTDI chips, so the counterfeits have some extra functionality, like programmable PIDs; this is what FTDI exploited. It was NOT accidental, this simply isn't possible. They specifically coded their drivers to re-write the PIDs using functionality unique to the counterfeit chips.

The real problem is that they not only bricked the fake chips, but the entire device using it. This is a pretty bad thing, if your arduino was collecting data, for example, and you plugged it in to save it. The user has no idea his board is running FTDI-compatible chips (which is really what they are - they are no more "counterfeit" and an AMD CPU is somehow a counterfeit Intel CPU).

FTDI is upset because they paid legitimate fees to get the assigned PID for their device, but this is entirely the wrong way to do it. All you do is upset your customer base and break the law; destructive responses go back to the days when a CP/M spreadsheet program incorporated code to delete everything it could touch if it detected a pirated copy - and they paid dearly for that at the time. At least the victim back then WAS a pirate (mostly, unless the pirate was an unscrupulous vendor, which was often the case back in the 80s).

Ugh... when Microsoft throws out the old to make with the new, however stupid and ill-advised it really is, they justifiably get lambasted for it.

When Apple does it, they are "designing for tomorrow"

Um, ok, sure. Whatever. Ignoring good user interface design is still bad.

The year they finally get around to having 10% of the country wired for fiber.

Fund NASA to explore the advantages (and mitigate issues, such as waste heat) of using fusion in space vehicles. Let's get new designs in play now, so we can get the ball rolling fast when these compact generators are practical and real. Ion thrusters, magnetic fields, life support... having hundreds of megawatts of power makes the entire solar system within reach for manned space travel.

It's a purposeful misspelling of the word moron, a habit picked up on another site where it's a meme.

The original reference was from a picture of some idiot holding a sign that says "Get A BRAIN! MORANS" and another sign saying "GO USA" while wearing a Cardinals shirt and star-spangled bandana.

Thanks for "calling me out" though, especially as an AC. One more 'moran' with nothing worthwhile to contribute to the thread, it seems.