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Comment Re:Update to Godwin's law? (Score 2) 575

The mere existence of such a backdoor or master key would result in it's eventual leak, more likely sooner than later. The government isn't the best keeper of secrets by a longshot. Their main advantage is sheer size and bureaucracy. However, if you know exactly what you want, a competent group with a bit of cracking or more likely some social engineering, will obtain what they are after.
Additionally, the sheer number of people that would have to be involved to do this on an industry wide scale makes the number of potential access points for leaks increase dramatically.
I'd give them less than 6 months after it had been implemented.

Comment Re:Good. IndieGoGo should do it too (Score 1) 203

As many kickstarters use those same funds to, I don't know, actually FUND the project, that would be a really self defeating idea.

Phred & Jorj discuss funding...
"Hey Jorj, we need money to do this project, so I'm going to get money, but lock it away so we can't use until after we've finished."
"Phred, and just how are you going to do it without money in the first place?"

Comment Re:Bullshit (Score 4, Insightful) 221

"If the intruder were carrying chemical, biological or radiological weapons and President Obama and his family had been in, we would have had a dead president as well as a dead first family."
And if he'd have been an Extraterrestrial Assassin, or a Time Travelling Killbot, or plenty of other really F-N unlikely things...

By the way, the chemical weapons that could be used to take out someone in the building without being in the same room, and possibly closer than that, is going to need something that would have to be concealed in a backpack or the like anyway. This isn't a hollywood movie with their james bond size lighters that gas entire military bases, or their john wayne evershoot guns that apparently carry hundreds if not thousands of rounds of ammo.
All the tiny stuff you can hide in a pocket is going to require you to be really close.

Now that chances of the intruder actually being a threat is actually really small. The odds of him having anything realistically dangerous without a sufficiently sized container to hide it in, like the previously mentioned backpack, is also really small.
Over the decades, there have been lots of people that have broken into the white house grounds. I've never heard even a single one of those reports in the last century being of hostile intent. (Weird and or confused, but not hostile.)

So, with odds like that, you want them to do something horribly over-reactive to make them look really bad and get called fascist nazis by the press, just to make you feel a little better? Not going to happen so long as they maintain even the slightest iota of common sense.

Comment Re:Only 4 displays, sticking to AMD. (Score 1) 125

Sure, if you can afford that card, you can probably afford a couple of monitors, but honestly, other than a few oddballs, who's really going to have more than 2 or 3 monitors at once. If nothing else, the space used by them really adds up in most home environments. So maybe these cards aren't made for the rich guy with specialty needs, which brings up the question of, "yeah, so what?".

Comment Nothing new. (Score 1) 358

To me, album artwork was always the box art.
And, "Single songs and single articles killed their respective larger containers. ... " is silly since it means they've been killing the albums since at least the 60s, definitely before I was born. Albums always were, just an economy sized packaging, without an economy discount.

Comment Re:Not much different than the fire starting laser (Score 2) 180

Believe it or not, those military conventions restricting certain weapons are also done because of an often ignored military logistic. Rather simply put, a bad public perception of your activities will have a strong negative impact on your military capabilities in the long run, and sometimes in the short run.
People get killed in wars, that's been pretty much understood and accepted by the populace. However, there is that little phrase "worse than death". Exactly what it means may vary by culture and time period, but it's very important. In general, if the public finds out you are doing things they consider too abhorrent, they will withdraw their support. That means less recruits, less funding, less access to other resources, and politicians trying to deal with the masses calling for your resignation and/or prosecution for war crimes.
Every military leader through out history that has ignored those very factors has ended their career in disgrace if they were ever in a position to act upon it, unless they got killed first. It's been going on since at least the Roman times. Just look at some of the politics their generals had to put up with. Although admittedly, there wasn't a lot you could do back then that would piss off your people without going out of your way to do it, but still, it did occur at times.

Comment Re:Double-edged sword (Score 1) 118

And here I thought having to pay for patent lawyers to research if an intended project might infringe upon a pre-existing patent, and then ending up 2-12 years later getting blindsided by patent trolls with a half dozen other patents that weren't found in the previous search being used to leach millions from the company would sure as heck seem to be a bigger disincentive than not being able to patent software.

Comment Re:tldr; why is blood the perpetrator's? (Score 2) 135

Yes, and as we all know, there were no other missing persons in that region of the country during the time of Jack the Ripper was active and that the only male that could have gotten blood on a shawl obviously had to be Jack.
I guess Jack sent sent that womans shawl to police after autographing it in his own blood with the words "This is Bloody Jacks, don't touch it gov".
</sarcasm>

The provenance of the shawl is very questionable. If it is the shawl found near the body of a ripper victim, it may very well not have been hers. Even if you make the assumptions that it is the one found at the crime scene, and it's hers, you then have to make the huge unsubstantiated conclusion that the blood on it is Jacks.

Now, you aren't done yet. The DNA analysis is rather unlikely to be able to pin down someone exactly when dealing with someone from many generations ago that you don't have any samples of. About all you can do is follow lineage and say the blood is related to known ancestors of that suspect. Of course, there are bound to be a lot of other relatives that held that mitochondrial dna alive at that time, especially when dealing with close knit communities that intermarry far more than breed outside their group. Something very common, including with Jews in Europe at that time.
Still worse, the sample wasn't preserved in a fashion to reduce contamination and decay. At an age over a century, it's value for making such wild accusations against another unknown dna is absurd.
To top that all off, someone else has previously claimed to have done a dna identification, and they fingered an entirely different suspect.

This whole thing is a farce. It was probably done to sell books or something, because from a scientific evidential standpoint, it's composed more of fiction than Moby DIck.

Comment Re:Both a perfect match (Score 3, Insightful) 135

Only if you accept that the results are accurate despite the decay and age of the sample that hadn't been stored in an appropriate manner to preserve the integrity of the dna as well as avoid contamination by other source which include bacteria that like to eat it, and that the blood was actually from Jack The Ripper and not from someone else, possible another victim.

Run on sentence of the year award? Nope, still too short. :P

Comment Re:Mitochondrial DNA? (Score 1) 135

One of them is both fictional, and causes more groans and horror faces than 2 girls 1 cup, not too mention completely superfluous and unwanted.
The other is the little chemical energy generators in your cells that you can't live without. (Really lousy description on my part, just go read a wiki or something.)

Comment Easy viewpoint (Score 1) 206

Once something is part of your body, as opposed to something you can drop or take off without surgery, it is no longer a separate object and is immediately part of you, only being subject to the same laws that someone that has no cybernetics is subject to.

So no, the police could not download the data from your cybernetic memory anymore than they could from your biological memory.

There, see, easy solution just by recognizing one simple idea, your body is your own, no matter where it came from. That also applies to someone with transplanted organs or other parts from someone else, as they are nut subject to any benefits or penalties that the previous owner of that tissue once had. So you can't inherit from your heart donors rich aunt, you can't be thrown in jail for the robbery and murder committed by your face donor (yes, they've done a couple of those now), or the like.

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