It's because the algorithms are the easiest parts to get right (because they are mostly just math and have been successfully ported and rewritten into many different programming languages many times). How you use the algorithms are the biggest part of the problem (e.g., actually getting random numbers to use as keys, or not having buffer overrun issues).

One of the issue with OSGP is that they used RC4 incorrectly (well, to be fair they probably weren't up on a weaknesses of RC4 discovered in 2001) in addition to the fact they were attempting to roll some of their own algorithms...

Corporation may not deserve punishment, but what about the people that made the decisions? If the people making decisions are attempting to stand behind the anonymous shield of the corporation, does that negate that punishment can be attempted?

If you think carefully of why you make any purchase from a corporation (be it single serve coffee, acetaminophen, or hamburgers), it's often related to brand and your personal view of their corporate history. Should a restaurant be punished for food poisoning you by you never visiting there again? How about if a restaurant bribes kids with happy meal toys? Or if the CEO directs the WinShape Foundation which contributes to causes you don't like? Why not boycott if the company doesn't happen to make you happy and their are other viable alternatives. Why should we forgive a faceless entity? It's not like it's a human.

Even with humans we have institutionalized "revenge". Why even punish humans who commit crimes at all? It doesn't generally net out for society (e.g., look at the cost of the death penalty or even simple incarceration). Most animals don't seek revenge. Often businesses don't even do revenge (business is business as they say). Institutionalized revenge really is all about maintain civil society by bleeding away our desire for revenge. The issue you should be addressing isn't the target of the punishment (e.g., a company or a human), it's how/why to satisfying our desire to punish something or someone for insulting our sensibilities...

FWIW, the organizers of our society have recognized there are different type of corporate organizations (e.g, non-profit, Benefit, or B-corporations, etc). But the "standard" type of corporation is really just a limited liability construct for the benefit of the owners (e.g., stock holders), nothing more, or less. You might even say a standard corp is more akin to a totally amoral superorganism (to use your terminology) than the other type of corps. You might imagine how you might relate to (or be afraid of) a human you knew to be amoral...

Basically KOLD is a SodaStream like product. The reason they think it's revolutionary is that they got CocaCola to sign on to it.

AFAIK, unlike SodaStream, KOLD will creates CO2 from a chemical reaction and pressurizes it with a pump (not feeding it from a proprietary pre-filled canister). Not sure how much DRM they were planning for this part, but I'm guessing not much now ;^)

Well some of still believe huge multinational businesses aren't human beings therefore do not need or deserve forgiveness.

If a business dies, another one will take over (or do you still buy your drygoods from FW woolworths and not Amazon). Sure it might be a shame that some people lose their jobs, but it's not like we a shunning another human being from society where they starve and die. I'm not advocating holding petty grudges, but I'm saying we need not anthropomorphize corporations. Corporations are simply limited liability constructs created to facilitate the concentration of capital for investment purposes, not living entities that can have their feelings hurt.

Although of course certainly employees of such an entity are human, they can (and usually do) associate with different companies over a lifetime. For most individual humans, your identity is constant for your lifetime, you cannot easily make a fresh start (w/o moving to a new place and with the internet maybe not even moving will help) and concepts like forgiving a mistake makes more sense (although I'm sure there will be many that debate this for some individuals).

So maybe a corporation is more like a family? Corporations dump their leaders on occasion (often do with bad news). Why not have this leader (Mr Kelley) dive off with a golden parachute for approving this mistake (maybe he could get one of his old jobs back at Coca-cola or North American Van Lines, GE, Ford or Procter and Gamble) to attempt to regain trust? If a family was known for doing that would you even forgive them? Maybe this is better at illustrating how corporations don't deserved any sympathies granted to humans, right?

If you put a fork() in HURD it won't be heard...
(AFAIK, fork() is an emulated syscall in hurd.glibc because it must manually dup all the open file descriptors on the underlying mach port objects)

Maybe legendary news on this site?

The indigestion will be with you all week...

Most policies have a convenient *out* in that they allow themselves to give out this data so that they can stay on the good side of the government. CPNI deals with sharing data with other private parties, not government.

FWIW, Here's what a MetroPCS's subscriber agrees to let the company do with private information when signing up for their service (basically anytime anywhere they feel it's worth it for them)...

Apparently the common practice of injecting waste water (which predominantly originated from waste water used to help reactivate conventional oil wells, and only sloppy hydro-fracking waste water processing to a lesser extent because it is more recent) deep underground into other depleted oil wells which were targeted for storage can explain the uptick in earthquakes in Oklahoma and around the Midwest.

The theory goes that when this injection practice started years ago the storage wells were empty, but as these storage wells filled up, more pressure had to be used to inject the water and this triggered the more recent seismic activity. Apparently this theory was corroborated by researchers correlating existing known faults and the locations of storage wells.

Sadly, this "sloppy" practice of injecting waste water into depleted wells continues unabated...

AFAIK, the main theories bandied about for how a reaction-less drive might work come down to basically harnesses some sort of Mach's principle effect (e.g, Woodward effect) which would be analogous to using "friction" from fields (usually EM) setup by the rest of the universe and/or somehow exploit the creation of quantum vacuum virtual particles to supply some local reaction mass and using a form of magnetohydrodynamics for propulsion.

The physics loophole that they seem to exploit is that in our description of physics, not all vacuums are created equal (e.g., a vacuum in one frame inertial of reference is generally not actually a vacuum in another frame of reference when a vacuum is thought of as a volume of space where distant fields cancel each other out). This indirectly questions the nature of the frame of reference in the asymptotic limit of space from which we might define an "absolute" vacuum. You might also think of it as asserting that maybe there is actually an aether of some sort?

To provide a car analogy, people are suggesting that wiggling in an asymmetric way and effectively using vanishingly small amount of friction supplied by the rest of the universe can get you moving in one direction kind of like getting your car moving when it's stuck in snow with (almost) no traction. It doesn't take much traction to get you going in the right direction as long as you are wiggling the right way...

Unless it relates specifically to the job (e.g., if you need to be 21 not 18 to get a professional car license, or if you are near a mandatory age of retirement such as being 60 when a pilot must retire at 65).

However in this specific case, I suspect Comcast may be under a government consent decree to collect this information to verify compliance with prior age discrimination investigations by the EEOC (e.g., DeJoy vs Comcast)...

The APA has been collaborating with the military for a long time.

I suspect the first large scale collaboration between the APA and the military started with Robert Yerkes back in World War I. Back then the controversy was eugenics (more specifically to justify the popular idea of the mental inferiority of and second wave European immigrants and African Americans).

Apparently, this time it was to attempt to assess enhanced torture methods in use for "safety, efficacy, and health impacts".

Somehow, it never seems to go well when these two organizations start cooperating...

Although the original Armadillo Aerospace as funded by Mr. Carmack is effectively no more, in true trickle down form it has been resurrected as a kickstarter campaign...

Given that their goal is only $125K and Carmack spent $8M, they would be attempting to do something with even *fewer* resources...

Although there is nothing that stops you from going to a company and offering them some money for a share of the company, there is probably something that prevents them from taking you up on that offer: the SEC.

You can of course always give your money to the company (e.g., kickstarter), but your money is not legally protected the same an investor (e.g, share of the profit, no liquidity, etc). Basically the SEC rules say you can only invest in a non-public company if you are qualified investor (basically have enough money so that you can lose your shirt on this investment and/or you know the principals of the company well enough like friends/family, random people on the internet don't qualify).

Even if you are a qualified investor, a company can only take on so many investors before it is required by the SEC to file financial reports. In practice this means companies can only really accept a few big investors unless they want to be a semi-public company subject to reporting requirements (and the financial costs and scrutiny they bring). Most companies when they reach the stage of a semi-public company, they just do an IPO to gain better access to capital markets.

However, there is a loophole in the law so that small investors could put their money in an specialized "investment" company and that investment company can perform the investment in a startup as a single qualified investor on behalf of the small investors (because the investment company itself is subject to reporting requirements). The problem is that to date, no companies emerged as "investment" companies for crowd-source investors to invest in startup companies. I guess that is probably because of the risk and the overhead of being a middleman company is not compelling given the potential return of starting such a company.

Patent trolls are simply motivated by money, and they hardly care about being anonymous (or shamed). I suspect that all this will enable is patent sellers to create a virtually unstoppable army of mini-patent tr0lls that brings the industry to it's knees.

Mini-patent tr0lls will exactly how real-estate tr0lls currently work. Real-estate tr0lls buy up irregular lots (often thin-strips of property that border streets and various rights-of-way) that appear to have no commercial value, but they use them hold them hostage when a developer want to develop the adjacent land and shake them down for lots of money. Of course you really have to know the terrain and the local real-estate market (not to mention schmooze with local planning officials and city council members) to execute this strategy, but if often doesn't take much money. And why yes I have direct (painful) experience dealing with real-life real-estate tr0lls when my parents were trying to develop a subdivision.

Tragically, the MLS (multi-list service for property) made this real-estate tr0ll strategy available to less sophisticated investors in a similar way the MLS enabled small-time chinese investors to invest in the real-estate market in the US. Even though all real-estate transactions (principals and the sale price) are public record, there are so many of them, it creates a form of anonymity.

This new breed of patent-tr0ll instead of having lots of money, will instead use their domain knowledge to looks for specific low-cost patents that they can use to hold the industry hostage. Using this type of patent clearing house will make it easier and lower risk and multiply the number of people trying to do this. Maybe I should think seriously starting a new career as a mini-patent tr0ll... Or maybe I can just patent the idea ;^)

I don't think a patent clearing house like this is even *remotely* a perfect solution and will likely just trade a few well funded pariah patent-tr0ll companies (e.g., intellectual ventures), for a virtual army of anonymous mini-patent-tr0lls...

(f.y.i, used "tr0ll" to avoid the lameness filter)