Good people give from the goodness of their hearts, give from their excess. It's great he's doing some of these charities, but it's pretty obvious which category he falls into...

It was this year. Def-Con 18. Annnnd...oops! Guess it was Mike Metzger that gave the talk. Showed up as another name on my phone. Look for the talk for "Letting the Air Out of Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems". Dunno how helpful this will be though since your AC *groans*

Or ya know...just treat your IT staff with some dignity & respect and it'll go so far to not leaving bad blood. Plus, giving them two weeks notice so they can get things in order for your company with a 3-6 month severance is always a way to make sure you don't run into problems. Oh, and don't ransack their office going happy go lucky trying to figure out what is & isn't their property unless they have been stealing from the company. Experienced plenty of good ways, and bad ways to be let go. Always a sign as to if your former managers will be able to handle it. Whats really funny though is when they end up having to bring back the person they just laid off at 5x their original hourly rate when things go south because they think they can bring someone else in at half the original cost who doesn't have a clue. It certainly is sweet sweet karmic justice when those events occur, and they almost always do with regularity. /rant

Actually it's fairly hard to get onto XBLA and PSN. Even big publishers play hell getting things onto the PS3. It's why as of late, if something shows up on the 360, and PS3, almost every time theres something exclusive to the PS3 version, and rarely the other way around with the 360. Look at Batman Arkham Asylum for a good example (Joker exclusive levels). Now if big dev's have to go through that BS JUST so they can release on either system, imagine what the small indie devs have to do. Heck, I've even got a prime example for you: Machinarium. Turned down purely from XBLA because it wasn't "exclusive" to XBLA. Which is hilarious because it's not like it was a shovleware game so many big devs have taken to. It was proven on the PC that it's a good game, and people dig it.

I'm kina sure they can. If the company wants to do business in the United States, they end up being bound by US law. If the US government says you can't sell something to a specific country, or group, you end up having to play by their rules. Look at China & Google for a good example. Just in that case China had so many political, and backroom reasons to make life hell for Google.

Actually this is all old hat at this point. This guy is just stealing from a Def Con talk which needs attribution to Mike Hertzfeld. I was at the talk that first brought this about. It was a little jaw dropping. He came up with ways to track people around cities using the information from the systems. That in itself isn't so bad since almost everyone has Bluetooth and/or active wireless scanning enabled on their phones, but I digress (the police use this method already since it requires no court order). The really meat & potatoes was where if he flooded the system with garbage data over the wireless something interesting happened, the car shut off. Thats the real crazy part to me, that the system is that vulnerable.

I thought this was called disable cookies, and delete all browsing data upon exit? This isn't even an issue. Do that, and they can track you about as well as what phone prompts you chose when you call support.

All of successful China is corrupt. Not saying the US isn't too, but there it's more blatant. This is the country you have to pay around $30,000 to graduate your university on top of what you just payed for 4 years of school payable to some random person who will "make it happen". Not to mention you end up paying someone for the privilege of working for them (certainly keeps turnover down!). Not a single bit of what goes on over there is shocking or surprising. It's just par the course. Corruption is built into their culture. This sadly coming from someone who actually likes China, and thinks it's a nice place to go, and would live there if not for the insane amount of corruption.

Oh, and one more thing, patents like that one are shakey that they are even being infringed on since it's so drastically different from how coolers are built today. Either way though, payout is still almost always more favorable. I so got into the wrong field.

Actually Laches doesn't stop the suit from coming forward. It costs something like a minimum of $20,000 a month to fight a small patent dispute. The real issue with these trolls is they usually hit up the smaller guys first to build their warchest. They know better than to pursue the big players at least until they have a big warchest (and thats even if they ever bother with those with deep pockets). Their goal is a quick settlement. My work got hit by some asshat claiming BS about EVERY modern cooler that uses heatpipes (which is awesome since the research for heatpipes came from NASA). Options are fight the joker until bankruptcy, or pay them some minuscule percentage that will likely never equal one month's fight. Either way the patent troll won't lose any money, his lawyer is almost always running on contingency. Not to mention, anyone who fights the lawsuit will likely just get dropped midway through since that puts their patent in peril, and move onto the next guy. I'm a little disgusted /. doesn't post anything about these shenanigans until it hits the big players.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/04/09/us_based_companies_sued_for_heat_pipe_cpu_coolers

Aaaaactually...With Windows Vista you can disable driver signatures permanently. With 7 you have to disable the requirement EVERY booth with F8, or the device gets put into a stopped state. It's REALLY nice for this kind of issue (which could have saved the rootkits of XP), but sucks balls for drivers that just fell short of getting updated. I'm looking at you Intel 910/915 graphics drivers! They work awesome until you reboot. *grumble grumble*

Gaw damnit I miss living in sensible countries ;_;

Plus really there hasn't been enough precedent yet. It'll be interesting to see what happens when someone just owns up to pirating around 24 songs instead of trying to lie about it in court. So far I think the extreme damages have come allot from people flat out lieing in court, or other shenanigans.

I'm honestly with the GP. I had all the same info for the police here (LogMeIn FTW!), and the cops never did dick. Having my MBP I just got 2 weeks back paid for however sure softens the blow to personal security about someone entering my home when I wasn't here (security film & cameras help too now!).

Actually it's not so much about local v federal. That's mostly to do with corruption, and not wanting to give up proffi...err control. They honestly could give two flips about autonomy unless you live in HK. The real issue that seems brewing to me is Western China military v Eastern China Government. What most know is the somewhat safe Eastern China where we get most of our shiny crap from. The Western China however seems to have more in common still with fudle lords of days long gone by. Just no one really talks about it much. The quality of life in that area is markedly lower (what middle class?), technology of course hasn't made much impact there, and if your foreign, your pretty insane to even think of going near the Western areas.

I'm still wondering how that is going to play out especially with the coming water shortages China is getting itself into.