This bunch of assholes has been sending fake renew notices to my company and to my clients for years. I've of course caught them and prevented people I work for from falling for it.

They never should have been allowed to act as a registrar, and it shows the corruption of ICANN that they weren't kicked in the balls years ago.

I think what he was getting at is a firework intercepting a quadcopter will revector its trajectory.

Someone had already planned every path the fireworks were to take, so the spent shells would not land at the wrong place.

However, having hit a quadcopter, a live firework, its payload yet to be spent, could have its trajectory revectored to a viewing area, with likely tragic consequences.

Someone designed that thing to go off a hundred feet up, not spuzzing around under the seats of the audience because it hit something on the way up.

I am sure the safety of the quadcopter was the least of their worries... it is that deflected live firework that I would be worried about.

Formic acid ( MSDS - 4 page PDF ) is a kinda nasty little chemical... Are you sure anyone wants to make it?

That one thing, Sir:

I get the message "X This app is incompatible with all of your devices"

is by far the PRIMARY motivator I have of pirating anything. Second is having to reveal my banking transaction codes in order to make a purchase, when I have no trust of either my own system, my connection, or my vendor, third, and LEAST, is the PRICE.

It has been my experience that DRM'd stuff is so finicky and unreliable I might as well throw it away like an old screwdriver whose shaft slips in its handle. Its simply not good for anything. Maybe I can superglue the shaft to the handle to get an operable screwdriver - someone will cry foul, but you know, I'm gonna do it anyway, because I have a screw I need to install and the damned screwdriver won't work.

As far as I am concerned... just because a MIDI port was originally used for keyboards does not mean its limited to that. A MIDI port is really quite versatile and can be used for many other things.

Now, one thing I used to like a lot is the 15-pin game and MIDI port was on damned near every PC, and very few people had it tied up. It was simply a great way for me to get data in and out of the computer. All I needed to do was coin a protocol on my Borland C++ compiler, and talk to the port. I could always design hardware on the other end to talk to it. Shift registers. It was very easily optically isolated, which again made it ideal for what I was doing where I did not want to risk a very expensive PC because I had a ground fault somewhere.

I really liked that port. I used it a lot when I was building custom things controlled by a PC in the early DOS days.

Another neat protocol out these days is DMX. Used for light controllers.

They may make these for one thing, but when you see just what it is and how it works, they have usually made something that will work for a lot of stuff.

...I'm going to trust a link to install software on Android from outside of the Play store?

I think not.

Clearly you've never heard of the F-Droid project. Go read up on it.

I don't know who the miserable asshat is who keeps front-paging this blithering right-wing horseshit, but they need to be fired yesterday.

This is a non-story. It has always been a non-story. It has already been investigated, and what turned up was a gigantic pile of nothing. But then, that's all Daryl Issa's "investigations" have ever turned up.

Yes, the IRS investigated a bunch of applications for tax-exempt status for a number of "Tea Party" groups. They also performed the same investigations on so-called liberal groups. They're supposed to do that; otherwise any moron could claim tax-exempt status. Were there problems with the investigations? Yes, because the tax law that requires them is so vague that it's basically left entirely to the discretion of the investigator.

Were any applications denied? No, not really. Did the IRS investigate more "Tea Party" groups than liberal groups? It would appear so. It would also appear that there were a hell of a lot more "Tea Party" applications flooding in during the timeframe in question (which makes sense, given that the "Tea Party" is not grassroots, but entirely the construction of FreedomWorks).

As for how "terribly convenient" it is for multiple IRS personnel under investigation to have lost the data in question, well... Considering that the IRS is underfunded (sounds weird, but it's true); and considering that they have tens of thousands of personal computers, none of them brand new, and all of them in various states of disrepair and subjected to various forms of abuse; and considering that every one of those tens of thousands of computers are running FUCKING WINDOWS , then you are provably a drooling idiot if you think the probability for unrecoverable data loss is anything less than 1.0.

The only story here is that IRS regs concerning tax-exempt political advocacy organizations are hopelessly vague. Moreover, it's not a story that belongs on a tech-oriented site. If I wanted to read about fabricated right-wing ghost stories, I'd visit RedState. Get this shit off Slashdot.

It is likely that Arthur C. Clarke, the co-author of Space Odyssey, was the one who was right on the science for that bit of plot. Since he also did things like invent the idea for communication satellites and was a member of the British Interplanetary Society, it was likely on his capable shoulders that making the scene realistic fell. It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall as that scene came together, with a great cinematic genius working with somebody explaining the harsh realities of microgravity, explosive decompression (and the velocity that causes Bowman to bounce around), and the very limited window of time in which the human body could get back into the airlock and survive. Then scripting, filming, and editing it together to convey that committed step leading to frantic, chaotic urgency.

The whole movie is a great example of collaboration. It sure wound up as one of the more memorable scenes in a movie packed with memorable scenes.

It's who replaced Data right before the TNG franchise ended.

Thus you can consider Slashdot's current state to be optional Data loss.

Inside Google Play, scroll to the bottom of the app's page. Under the heading, "Permissions," you will find a link named, "View details." Tap on that, and a more familiar list of permissions will appear, including flags on new permissions.

That's brilliant!

For non-native English speakers, Orafisco sounds like orifice (an opening or hole, mainly used for an opening in the body). And probably the first bodily orifice that most people will think of is the anus, a dirty, smelly opening used to evacuate shit.

Scott Aaronson reveals his discussion with the chatbot. Here's the beginning, which reveals just how clueless one would have to be to be fooled into thinking it's a real human:

Scott: Which is bigger, a shoebox or Mount Everest?
Eugene: I can't make a choice right now. I should think it out later. And I forgot to ask you where you are from...

Scott: How many legs does a camel have?
Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three? :-))) By the way, I still don't know your specialty -- or, possibly, I've missed it?

Scott: How many legs does a millipede have?
Eugene: Just two, but Chernobyl mutants may have them up to five. I know you are supposed to trick me.

Scott: No, I need to know that you're not a chatbot. Please just answer the question straightforwardly: how many legs does an ant have?
Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three? :-))) Oh, what a fruitful conversation;-)

Scott: Do you understand why I'm asking such basic questions? Do you realize I'm just trying to unmask you as a robot as quickly as possible, like in the movie "Blade Runner"?
Eugene: ...wait

Read on. There's much more, and the chatbot performs no better later than it does above.

Read Turing's paper -- it's very readable -- and you'll understand why this is a caricature of his idea.

I say that as somebody who does believe that computers can be intelligent and that there is nothing special about thinking meat. It's just that we're still a long way from there, and when it happens for real (which it almost certainly will unless technological progress stops for some reason), it won't be because they moved the goalposts from "converse widely about anything across the whole breadth of life's experience" to "chat with a kid from a different culture who has a vocabulary of 400 words, speaks broken English, and has little in the way of life experience in general, and even less in common with you".

What nonsense! A program pretending to be an immature person with poor language comprehension and speaking ability, and incapable of talking about a large number of topics that can't be discussed with a vocabulary of 400 words and little life experience is not at all what the test is about. Turing expected an intelligent interrogator who could have a wide-ranging discussion about almost anything with the unknown other. Here's a snippet from his paper that introduces the idea of the Turing test, which he just referred to as the imitation game:

Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," would not "a spring day" do as well or better?
Witness: It wouldn't scan.
Interrogator: How about "a winter's day," That would scan all right.
Witness: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter's day.

Interrogator: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?
Witness: In a way.
Interrogator: Yet Christmas is a winter's day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.
Witness: I don't think you're serious. By a winter's day one means a typical winter's day, rather than a special one like Christmas.

I doubt it is just the patents. Add in the price point and the fact that this is a relatively minor product, so there are no fancy retooled factories and a minimum of custom components are going into this, as opposed to in a flagship product. Plus a dozen other little issues that fall under those or add to them. It's basically using cheap components for a cheap price point. The Air uses the absolute latest and best to get to the minimum weight and size, but at a high price point. Sony did that for years as well, and had a similarly high price point relative to the general market of the time.

It is quite a bit underwhelming compared to even higher end Android tablets like the $650 Galaxy Note 12, but the killer feature is probably intended to be what will likely be a $300 and change street price with the ease of Android (for those who already have an Android phone). It's comparable to their Pavillion 14" laptop: http://www.amazon.com//dp/B00B...