I guess that's cool until the moment some crazy terrorist engineers some crazy strain of the spanish flu and kills half the population.
Or Yellow Stone erupts and the world is thrown into climatic chaos
Or an asteroid hits, etc...

Why don't we do both? Make Earth a paradise and build the technologies to go to mars and make it a paradise too.

Let me preface this with the fact that I'm an intellectual property specialist. I bill $450/hour, and still have lots of time to work on my startup without having to take venture capital.

I thought about some educational answers for your questions, but the insult at the start of your comment rubs me wrong and I decided I don't owe you anything. So, I'll save them.

By definition, if it's in the form of a 1000 CHF note then it's not in a Swiss bank. Nice try at painting an entire country as a bunch of criminals though.

The first symptom of a new but incomplete understanding of patents is gold fever. That is when you have an idea that what you are holding is extremely valuable and that you must protect it from others at all costs. People tend to get irrational about it.

So here is some reality: The fact that you have even published your video (which is "use in commerce" under patent law) invalidates future patents that you might file on that same art. Then there is the prior art (including art you are not aware of), and the recent court finding in Alice v. CLS Bank that invalidates most process and method patents which describe software. These all work against the potential that your thesis is going to make you rich through patent licensing.

You can get a patent awarded, perhaps, that you can use to hoodwink an investor, but forcing an automotive company to pay you? Much less likely and it will cost $10 Million in attorney fees to get there.

Probably your school wants 51% of the revenue and your grant funding sources (and those of your college department) may have their own policies on patents.

Yes, this is definitely a "WTF?" moment in the history of Slashdot. I suggest that you all just move on to the next story and refuse to feed the troll by asking him questions.

Slashdot, obviously, has to innovate in order to stay current. Thus, they are now taking the next step after "Anonymous Cowards". The new "Identified Troll" feature will include interviews of people who have prostituted their personal credibility to some company's calculated disinformation campaign.

Firstly, There needs to be better education about what happens when you take a picture with your phone and where it ends up. I've had conversations where the person doesn't get that once the picture is on facebook if they delete it from their phone it's still on facebook. We don't have to go into the gory details, but there needs to be better understanding about the causality of posting a picture, even as a text.

Secondly, the person should clearly understand that if they post a nude picture to something like apples cloud what the permanent ramifications of that are.

Thirdly, (I know this is already happening) device manufacturers need to start implementing two factor authentication and key management systems.

Thus if [insert random person] wants to send a nude photograph to someone... a) the file is encrypted on the server use the persons private key and the recipient is using a separate revocable key to look at it. Thus in the future if things don't work out, the first person take that recipient off their allowed list and presto the pictures aren't viewable.

This doesn't prevent the recipient at the time from making copies or forwarding the pictures, but it would mitigate some of the danger of the persons phone getting hacked.

Nothing is perfect other than not taking pictures, but in the social age we're in, that behavior isn't going to suddenly change so technology should keep up to protect people as best as possible.

If you read the TfL page about this that's exactly what they say their plan is - more track barriers, and allowing "current drivers to work for the rest of their careers". Of course I doubt the RMT will be willing to see itself slowly fade into the sunset via natural ageing, but they don't want to push it too far. London Underground engineering is incredibly efficient, they pack a lot of maintenances into the 3-4 hour engineering hours they get each night (the Tube never really shuts down per se). A lot of the upgrades require rehearsals in mockups of the stations, timing is so tight. If there was a sustained strike then a crapton of automation upgrades could be completed quite quickly.

Nice :-) I stated it as a question, so if someone knows who this "Whose" person is, we should ask if they're still writing programs in PL/1...

IMHO that's an excellent way of looking at it. If the chimp can persuade reasonable people that he can be trusted to not do that, he has a pretty good chance of being treated as though he does have rights. And anyone (chimp or otherwise) who persuades people otherwise, might find themselves being treated as though they don't have rights. (Shame about all the communications problems and other errors that happen in that second scenario, but it .. mostly works. Mostly.)

> Restore the prohibitions against spying and require real warrants to engage. No more dragnets.

And while we're at it I'd like a pony and a flying car.
Aint going to happen.
It's like asking a Lion to just stop eating Wildebeast. Pass all the laws you want. Make all the restrictions and checks and balances you want. The three letter organizations have huge budgets for "black ops" where nobody can know what they are doing. Not even Congress. Probably not even the people in the next office in the same three letter organization.

Whose writing programs in PL/1 these days?
What about Delphi? Whose writing Delphi apps these days?
How about Cold Fusion?
What about ActionScript. After standing up the Air platform they've basically abandoned it as a language.

One computer, the fileserver, goes at the "awful location." This is the one that runs all the bandwidth-intense stuff (deluged, sabnzbdplus, etc) so you get to slurp up data at high speeds.

The others, you connect to that as well as you can. They're mostly just going to be running video players or web browsers anyway. It wifi or powerline networking is the best you can do, fine.

More generally, 2-step authentication disables the risk analysis based login security. If you set up 2SV then you can use your account via Tor.

However, note that - as observed in a comment below - you cannot create a Gmail account via Tor without passing phone verification. Thus if you're logging in to a Gmail account via Tor successfully that probably means it was created outside of Tor and so has some non-Tor IPs associated with it at some point.

The key point is that email and Tor don't mix, for obvious spam reasons. It's not a Google specific thing. People may wish to look into Pond, a secure messaging service designed to be used via Tor from beginning to end.

I haven't used desktop Linux for about a year now, but before that I used it for about a decade and in the early 2000's even did development for it, so I read this post with interest.

I feel the money quote is this one:

People on the email thread have claimed we had an agenda. That's actually certainly true, everybody has one. Ours is to create a good, somewhat unified, integrated operating system. And that's pretty much all that is to our agenda. What is not on our agenda though is "destroying UNIX", "land grabbing", or "lock-in". Note that logind, kdbus or the cgroup stuff is new technology, we didn't break anything by simply writing it. Hence we are not regressing, we are just adding new components that we believe are highly interesting to people (and they apparently are, because people are making use of it now). For us having a simple design and a simple code base is a lot more important than trying to accommodate for distros that want to combine everything with everything else. I understand that that is what matters to many Debian people, but it's admittedly not a priority for us.

For what it's worth, this paragraph makes a ton of sense to me. The biggest problem with Linux, both on the desktop and to a lesser extent on the server, was the fact that you got a basically half-baked set of components that were hardly integrated at all. Basic stuff like being able to set the timezone graphically ended up being distro specific apps / hacks because there was no API to do it, and everything was held together by giant piles of shell scripts and Python which might or might not be something you could actually contribute to or work with, but was certainly never usefully documented.

Basically, the experience of using or developing on Linux gave you the impression of a man in a slightly dishevelled, ill fitting suit. All the parts of a smart suit were there, but none of them quite fitted or lined up, and there were lots of small tears everywhere. And waaaaaay too many people liked this state of affairs because they had made "I am a UNIX user" a part of their identity and had managed to convince themselves that an OS architecture that dated from the 1970's was actually totally elite, and any attempt to reform it was "ignoring the UNIX philosophy" or some shit like that.

Result: MacOS X absolutely ate Linux's lunch on the desktop, despite the fact that Linux was free and Macs .... decidedly not free. Heck Linux didn't even make much headway against Windows, even though under Ballmer the Windows team basically sat on their ass for a decade rewriting the start menu.

From a (now) outsider looking in, this whole systemd fiasco looks a lot like Linux finally being dragged into the 21st century through the sheer willpower of one man, who has an apparently infinite ability to withstand faeces-throwing by the UNIX peanut gallery. Don't like systemd? OK, stick with Debian Stable or FreeBSD and don't get the new features. Stick it to the man and keep your "I Love *Nix" t-shirt on. Me? Between reading about GNOME 3 and systemd I'm starting to wonder if it's time to revisit Linux and give it another shot. If that community can conquer its UNIX fetish and build a modern OS, it has a lot of potential.