What about the other 150?

I have a difficult time understanding how Zeus is *still* around; it started in mid 2007! According to WP, it has more than 3.6 Million infected PCs.

There is no reasonable stance that defends the existence or the activities of botnets either legally or morally. How is it that we know there are 150 other command nodes, presumably that we can also discover their IP addresses, but law enforcement has been unable to bring them down?

While I understand there are differences in laws, and with what is legal and what is accepted in different jurisdictions, but this seems patently absurd. If an ISP provides service to a verified botnet control node, and refuses to quickly turn them off, I would expect immediate upstream action like this. Why hasn't this happened even more?

I'm bullish on these techniques, and feel strongly that they will usher a new wave of medical breakthroughs, redefinitions of disease states, and significant increases in longevity.

However, there are real concerns about neoplastic growth from stem cells - that older cell used to create "autologous" transplants (cell lines that start from the given subject and are re-injected back into that subject) may have damage that leads to uncontrolled growth. Real safety testing is very, very difficult to do in a controlled way.

What ads?

> head -5 /etc/hosts
##
# Host Database
#
# This MVPS HOSTS file is a free download from:
# http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/

More ridiculous terrorism scare tactics used for attention.

"If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer..." No, I don't. Most likely you'll find a bunch of harmless pot growers and housewives trying to grow pretty flowers. People smart enough to really harm a well run society aren't posting details on the Internet. For the rest of us, these people will just take all the money you can from selling other people's (previously) private data.

No matter how hard we try, we will not stop determined individuals from attacking any society unless we effectively remove all freedoms from the citizens. I choose freedom over safety every time. The solutions to terrorism are NOT more or better surveillance, better technology, or more war. Real solutions include primarily the creation of a society that people don't WANT to attack. The reasons people have for suicide bombing and terrorism are usually pretty damn clear: they have nothing left to lose, and someone took advantage of them to direct their hate toward the easiest, most hated target.

Well, you want to fix terrorism, then address the real reasons for hating your society; it's pretty simple, and the only thing that really works.

Stories like this, about "scary" technology advances, remind me that as technology moves forward, the essential nature of the rights and freedoms that the US used to stand for and defend are more important now than ever before.

Here's what I'd like to find: A non-tax-cheat who is also a congress member. Oh, oh, how about a politician that still has a moral compass at all? A single honest politician? Even one? Let's find non-doctors charging Medicare. Corrupt cops. Meth distributors. Human traffickers. Murderers. People who built technology just to make money using other people's personal data, and try and frame it using terrorism scare tactics. Oh wait...

As I understand it, all modern audio encoders encode in the frequency domain. The graph and description
don't mention this, but imply amplitude quantification/digitization, then damage, and reconstruction only
in audio amplitude. Not an expert though...

"During encoding, 576 time-domain samples are taken and are transformed to 576 frequency-domain samples."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Encoding_audio

"The signal is converted from time-domain to frequency-domain using forward modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT). This is done by using filter banks that take an appropriate number of time samples and convert them to frequency samples."
THEN... "The frequency domain signal is quantized based..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding#How_AAC_works

does anyone else find it comic and rather ironic that almost exclusively
because the countries involved have tried to keep this a secret, that ACTA
negotiations now get far more attention than they would otherwise?

I feel this needs even more attention, and more clearly explained and broadly
disseminated explanation of what is at stake both for individuals and for
emerging cultures as they join the ranks of "western" strong-copyright regimes.

7 years of constant, daily use and abuse. Still runs awesome.

Image: http://208.69.42.194/scpfiles/6310i.jpg

I've been actively looking at replacement phones for over 2 years now and
cannot find a phone with the quality and battery life that come even close.

DMCA takedowns follow a very clear an explicit process on what providers have
to do and how... as I understand it, "locking out" the domain at the registrar
level is far beyond both the spirit and the letter of the law.

This is what counts for science nowadays?

http://www.americanscientist.org/include/popup_fullImage.aspx?key=vo50G9YwnF6SwlOk2usL5R9EyqRLsNX+YiPzweX/0ZsH0IeSOOXIBip7qwN2/ZRY

Look carefully at the 'digital encoding' of the "simple tone" sine wave. ??? Really? What encoder is that?
cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_Transform

we are generating data far, far faster than we can save. We have for some time, and while trends for storage are catching up, we will always be able to generate more than we store, as a function of how computing and communications work.

So what to save? The Director of the NLM had a unique insight on this exact question: [paraphrasing] "What is used, is saved." Basically, its the utility of information, that information that people find useful and actually use is the best proxy for long term value. The good thing is that all people are motivated to store and maintain the data they find useful, or their constituents or customers desire. As long as people keep wanting data, it will be stored and available.

This is a very different situation to real-world archeology. In the digital, connected world we can access data today once it's publicly available, evaluate it and use it if we want. There is no dust that covers old data, it does not get buried...

I'm surprised it was approved by Apple.

I think that for the long term survival of the species, it would be safer to keep companies working on AGI completely separate from the ones who generate or maintain energy sources.

It appears Google is only a consumer of energy at this time, and there is lots of talk about better procurement and trading... +the pdf makes explicit: they have no generation nor transmission capability at this time.

I sincerely hope there are real teeth and that people take notice of clause 20: "Google Energy must timely report to the Commission any change in status that would reflect a departure from the circumstances the Commission relied upon in granting..." because to me, there are difficult issues to consider if Google wants to start producing their own energy in the foreseeable future.

Helene Hegemann's first book has been moving up the best-seller list in
Germany and is a finalist for a major book prize. While originally this
was notable because Hegemann is only 17 and this is her first book, and
so earned praise as a prodigy, what's interesting now about this story
is that she has been caught plagiarizing many passages in the book.
Amazingly, she has not denied it, but instead claims there is nothing
wrong with it. She claims that she is part of a new generation that has
grown up with mixing and sampling in all media, including music and art,
and this is legitimate in modern culture. Have we entered a new era where
plagiarism is not just tolerated, but seen as normal? Is this the
ultimate in cynicism, or is it simply a brash attempt to get away with
something now that she's been caught? Is her claim to legitimacy
compromised by the fact that she only admitted it after it was
discovered by someone else? And finally, if 'sampling' is not acceptable
in literature, is this reason to rethink the legitimacy of musical
sampling?

This argument, while never voiced due to its absurdity seems the most common rationale for removing privacy protections.

The comment not a joke at all. It was satire of the recent Google CEO comment: If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, said Schmidt. You know, kind of like calling a failed politician, "Fucking Retarded" (you're brilliant, Stephen). See? Satire.

If you don't want anyone to know where you are, you shouldn't go there.

[[/TROLL]]