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Privacy

Did We Lose the Privacy War? 521

Posted by Soulskill from the no-now-finish-your-cheerios-and-straighten-your-shirt dept.
eihab writes "I've been a fanatic about my online privacy for the last few years. I've been using NoScript and blocking Google Analytics, disabling third-party cookies, encrypting IM and doing everything in my power to keep data-miners at bay. Recently, I've been feeling like I'm just doing too much and still losing! No matter what I do, I know that there's a weak link somewhere, be it my ISP, Flash cookies, etc. I've recently gotten AT&T U-Verse, who, according to their privacy statement, will be monitoring my TV watching habits for advertisement purposes. I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it. I just can't take this anymore. I have nothing to hide, but I do not want to be profiled and become member #5534289 in a database somewhere that records everything I do. I know I'm not that interesting to anyone, but the idea of someone being able to pull up everything about me with a simple SQL SELECT statement and a couple of JOINS makes me cringe. One of the reasons I hate data mining is that data security is not understood and almost non-existent at a lot of places. Case in point: I changed my life insurance two years ago, and the medical firm that conducted my health screening was broken into and computers with non-encrypted hard drives and patients' data were stolen. That medical firm didn't really need my SSN, but then again neither did AT&T when I signed up for U-Verse. Am I just too paranoid? Is privacy dead? Should I just give up and accept the fact that privacy is not the norm anymore (like Facebook's founder recently said) or should I keep fighting the good fight for my privacy?"
Education

How Easy Is It To Cheat In CS? 684

Posted by timothy from the no-no-you-want-game-theory-down-the-hall dept.
Pinky3 writes "The New York Times has an article on cheating in CS at Stanford. Here is a classic quote from one student: 'I wasn't even thinking of how it [sic] easy it would for me to be caught,' he said. One interesting strategy discussed is for the professor to make the final count for more of the final grade each time cheating is discovered. Share your experiences as a student and/or as an instructor."
Image

"Tube Map" Created For the Milky Way Screenshot-sm 142

Posted by samzenpus from the non-stop-service-to-the-Perseus-Arm dept.
astroengine writes "Assuming you had an interstellar spaceship, how would you navigate around the galaxy? For starters, you'd probably need a map. But there's billions of stars out there — how complex would that map need to be? Actually, Samuel Arbesman, a research fellow from Harvard, has come up with a fun solution. He created the 'Milky Way Transit Authority (MWTA),' a simple transit system in the style of the iconic London Underground 'Tube Map.' (Travel Tip: Don't spend too much time loitering around the station at Carina, there's some demolition work underway.)"

Comment Re:Stealing? (Score 0, Troll) 390

by omgarthas (#30864606) Attached to: Judge Lowers Jammie Thomas' Damages to $54,000
You are (wrongly) assuming that every CD given away is a lost sale

Imagine that some company sells a CD with just one track, which is a bell ringing for 3 seconds, and they sell it at 3,000,000 $.. If I gave one away, would it be a 3,000,000 $ sale lost? No, because it wasn't going to be sold anyway...
Intel

Cliff Click's Crash Course In Modern Hardware 249

Posted by timothy from the first-there-were-the-dinosaurs dept.
Lord Straxus writes "In this presentation (video) from the JVM Languages Summit 2009, Cliff Click talks about why it's almost impossible to tell what an x86 chip is really doing to your code due to all of the crazy kung-fu and ninjitsu it does to your code while it's running. This talk is an excellent drill-down into the internals of the x86 chip, and it's a great way to get an understanding of what really goes on down at the hardware and why certain types of applications run so much faster than other types of applications. Dr. Cliff really knows his stuff!"

Comment Re:meh. (Score 1) 419

by omgarthas (#30701094) Attached to: Hot Or Not — 3D TV
You should check this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry:_Love_for_Sail!

The game also shipped with a "CyberSniff 2000", a sheet of numbered scratch-and-sniff paper, corresponding to a number displayed on the screen at a certain location, so that the player could get a scent of what the area the player was in smelled like.

I loved the beans smell

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