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Submission + - Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Gets Life in Prison (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: The mastermind behind criminal website Silk Road, which sold $200 million worth of drugs to customers worldwide, was sentenced to life in prison by a federal judge in New York Friday.

Judge Katherine Forrest imposed two life sentences against Ross Ulbricht, 31, for narcotics distribution and criminal enterprise.

Forrest told Ulbricht that he will never be eligible for parole. "What you did in Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social fabric," said the judge, calling him a criminal whose graduate school education made his actions less explicable than a common drug dealer.

Submission + - Jason Scott of textfiles.com Wants Your AOL & Shovelware CDs (textfiles.com) 1

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: You've probably got a spindle in your close tor a drawer full of CD-ROM media mailed to you or delivered with some hardware that you put away "just in case" and now (ten years later) the case for actually using them is laughable. Well, a certain mentally ill individual named Jason Scott has a fever and the only cure is more AOL CDs. But his sickness doesn't stop there, "I also want all the CD-ROMs made by Walnut Creek CD-ROM. I want every shovelware disc that came out in the entire breadth of the CD-ROM era. I want every shareware floppy, while we’re talking. I want it all. The CD-ROM era is basically finite at this point. It’s over. The time when we’re going to use physical media as the primary transport for most data is done done done. Sure, there’s going to be distributions and use of CD-ROMs for some time to come, but the time when it all came that way and when it was in most cases the only method of distribution in the history books, now. And there were a specific amount of CD-ROMs made. There are directories and listings of many that were manufactured. I want to find those. I want to image them, and I want to put them up. I’m looking for stacks of CD-ROMs now. Stacks and stacks. AOL CDs and driver CDs and Shareware CDs and even hand-burned CDs of stuff you downloaded way back when. This is the time to strike." Who knows? His madness may end up being appreciated by younger generations!

Comment Re:Won't save most of the 4000 lives (Score 1) 615

by pitchpipe (#49707449) Attached to: The Economic Consequences of Self-Driving Trucks

Let's say a truck is driving at 60 MPH (88 feet per second) when somebody jumps in front of it, 88 feet away.

If the speed limit on this road is 60 MPH, it most likely means that it is clear of stores, schools, etc., IOW this is not a standard city street. Braking is not the only option here, especially with a self driving truck. The truck could be programmed to safely sacrifice itself (running off the road into a field, river, etc.) to protect the humans around it.

It remains to be seen if this type of behavior from the automation will be mandated.

Submission + - ISIL Leader Abu Sayyaf Killed in Raid (suitsandspooks.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: The White House on Saturday said that an ISIL senior leader known as Abu Sayyaf was killed in an operation in eastern Syria conducted by U.S. forces. Sayyaf, who was ordered to be captured, along with his wife Umm Sayyaf, was killed when he engaged U.S. forces, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said in a statement.

According to the White House, Abu Sayyaf was a senior ISIL leader who, among other things, had a senior role in overseeing ISIL’s illicit oil and gas operations – a key source of revenue that enables the terrorist organization to carry out their brutal tactics and oppress thousands of innocent civilians. He was also involved with the group’s military operations.

Comment No bias here. (Score 1) 103

by pitchpipe (#49704167) Attached to: House Science Committee Approves Changes To Space Law

In a series of party line votes, the House Science Committee has approved a number of changes to the laws that govern the private commercial space industry. Almost all of the changes were advocated by the [government], so in general they move to [improve] the regulatory and liability [common sense] that has been [enabling] the industry since the 2004 revisions to space law. While it is very unlikely commercial space can ever get [more] of [awesome] federal regulation, these changes indicate that they can eventually get some of the [most awesomest] regulations [strengthened].

I also, can write a really [unbiased] summary.

Fucking dot slash.

Comment Re:So when will this actually happen? (Score 3, Insightful) 372

by pitchpipe (#49635315) Attached to: Global Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach New Monthly Record

Nothing resolved itself. People took action, and you fucking idiot don't even bother to figure out that someone else saved your sorry ass.

Just like Y2K, It's the same shit over and over again: society expends resources to head off disaster, because of said expenditures disaster is averted, fucking morons baffled because disaster that everyone was talking about didn't happen.

Fucking morons believe disaster scenario was made up to expend resources.

REALITY FUCKING BAFFLING TO MORONS! FILM AT 11

Comment Re:Defense of the Article (Score 1) 425

by eldavojohn (#49620497) Attached to: The Programming Talent Myth

So there could be two groups, those who look to improve their skill, who quickly distance themselves from the group that doesn't. Of course, there will still be wide variance in skill between the members of each group. I'm sure you can think of other ways it could happen.

No, I can't. I started out and I sucked. I got better eventually through experience. In order for it to be truly bimodal, people have to start in either camp A or camp B and end in the same camp they started in. Because if you transition from one to another over time, any point in time will capture a group of people in between the modes. Now, you can argue that people don't spend much time in between those modes but you haven't presented any evidence for that. What's more likely is you have geocities coders on one tail and John Carmack/Linus Torvolds on the other tail. And in between are people like the presenter and I. And since I'm not instantaneously going from bad to good, the reality of the situation is most likely some degree of a normal curve filled with people trying to get better at programming or even just getting better though spending lots of time doing it and learning a little along the way.

For all your attacks on the presenter, your argument of a bi-modal distribution sounds more flawed to me. I would love to see your study and hear your argument.

Comment Defense of the Article (Score 1) 425

by eldavojohn (#49619837) Attached to: The Programming Talent Myth

This guy doesn't know how to measure programming ability, but somehow manages to spend 3000 words writing about it.

To be fair, you can spend a great deal of time talking about something and make progress on the issue without solving it.

For example the current metrics are abysmal so it's worth explaining why they're abysmal. I just was able to delete several thousand lines of JavaScript from one of my projects after a data model change (through code reuse and generalization) -- yet I increased functionality. My manager was confused and thought it was a bad thing to get rid of code like that ... it was absolute dopamine bliss to me while he felt like our production was being put in reverse. KLOC is a terrible metric. But yet we still need to waste a lot of breath explaining why it's a terrible metric.

Another reason to waste a lot of time talking about a problem without reaching an answer is to elaborate on what the known unknowns are and speculate about the unknown unknowns. Indeed, the point of this article seemed to be to advertise the existence of unknown unknowns to "recruiters, venture capitalists, and others who are actually determining who gets brought into the community."

So he doesn't know......programmer ability might actually be a bi-modal distribution.

Perhaps ... but that would imply that one does not transition over time from one hump to the next or if they do, it's like flipping a light switch. When I read this I assumed that he was talking only about people who know how to program and not "the average person mixed in with programmers."

If he had collected data to support his hypothesis, then that would have been an interesting article.

But you just said there's no way to measure this ... how could he have collected data? What data set could have satiated us? The answer is quite obvious and such collection would have been a larger fool's errand than the original article's content.

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