Wow, I didn't realize Jonathan Swift posted on slashdot.

Good enough. Is the key.
If you go too crazy with security. People will find shortcuts around the team in charge of security.
Too lax you are open to problems. Biometric in generally is the sweet spot.
Good enough to to keep people secure without becoming overly burdensome.
For your phone or your pc, being that you are not a direct target to get your account. You prevent people from getting into your system. If you are some person who has access to hard to get to data. Then yes you may need to go more secure.

Maxwell and Newton were one-in-a-million. (if not more) Do we really want to only harness that small a portion of the human race's mind-power? Yes there will always be some who will have found their motivation in the natural world, and don't need any artifice. But is there really a problem with providing inspiring artifice? Does that make contributions those people make worthless? They may well be second-rate compared to Maxwell or Newton, but that also takes in the vast majority of mankind. To do better seems good.

Which highlights what I'd really like to see added to the ISS - a farm module. Test a farm module on the ISS, getting the concept ready for a Mars mission. Do we really plan to send something on the order of 2 years of consumables on a Mars mission, recycling only the water? We need much more complete recycling, and we'll need it for any permanent presence anywhere beyond Earth. For that matter the only reason we don't need it on Earth is because we've got this giant biosphere that has handled the details pretty well for us, up until the past several decades.

I rather like the idea of such a farm module even on Earth. No doubt it would be designed for compactness, efficiency, and minimal hand-holding. Sounds good to me - put one of those in the back yard and cut the grocery bills. (I realize that the initial outlay is likely prohibitive, but the idea is neat.) There are also likely places on Earth where such a thing would be worthwhile, say Antarctica or other inhospitable locations.

(Note that I didn't say that a farm module would use sunlight - that might not work for Mars, and probably not beyond.)

dont forget the 390,000 illegal downloads. you need to count those as well.

A kid sharing a song to 10,000 people is nothing. a Company selling it to make a profit off of it is very different. Not one person says that someone making and selling copies is innocent. Not even the most rabid of file sharing proponents.

Not if they slapped the press all over with it. The best way to combat sony is to humiliate it in every media possible. get it out there that they STOLE her music and are making millions off of her hard work.

Under the DMCA Sony needs to pay her $22.7 Trillion dollars for her losses. Use SONY's own bullshit made up numbers, bankrupt the whole fucking company over it like they do to people that can't defend themselves.

Depending on your locale, the purchase might be covered by distance selling regulations. In the UK, you have a few days in which you can cancel the order for any reason. Cancel the order citing their poor security practices as the reason, keep a copy of any correspondence, and forward it to your credit card company if they try to charge you anything.

Today, there's no reason to not drive drunk. The expected cost of driving drunk is less than the cost of a cab. So it's rational to drive drunk.

It's only rational if you (a) value the price of a cab more than the risk of injury and death and (b) are a colossal arsehole.

In the US and UK, the requirement for a contract to be enforceable in court is that the side wishing to enforce it must demonstrate that a meeting of minds has occurred. It's far from a binary decision. Some things, such as witnessed signatures at the bottom with each page initialed, have large amounts of case law backing them up, so you need a very strong argument if you want to discount them. For click-through licenses, there's a lot less case law and everything on the opposing side helps. If you can demonstrate that you have actively opted out of tracking and then been presented with a click-through license that, buried somewhere in legalese, there is a permission to track, it's easier to argue that the contract is invalid.

The various European data protection offices would be a good bet.

Making it impossible to track means making clients indistinguishable, which is very hard. Making tracking without consent illegal is much easier, because the companies that you really worry about doing the tracking are the ones with large and expensive data centres where they can process the data, and these are nice big targets.

It's not the Cold War anymore. You don't have to pretend that any country that you don't like is communist. The hereditary dictatorship in North Korea is about as far as you can get from communism and stopped pretending to be communist some time ago. It still claims to be democratic though, so if you're going to object to political philosophies based on the buzzwords that dictators use, you should probably be complaining about democracy, not communism...

It's worth doing some reading, to understand the differences between the switch types. Here's a good description of three of the switches. You likely don't want the really loud ones - I recently bought a keyboard using Cherry Brown, which are tactile, but a bit quieter - it's still loud enough that my officemates had to get used to it, but at least they didn't kill me.

No. The nVidia drivers share around 90% of their code between all platforms (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris) and the open source ones all use the Gallium framework, which is designed for portability from the ground up.

Modern GPU drivers require a set of services from the kernel, mostly related to memory management. They need to be able to get access to the device's I/O range in the physical address map and they need the kernel to grant access to texture memory in both main memory and the device. That's about all that they need from the kernel.

At the top, they need a state tracker that manages 3D API state (which is fairly minimal on modern APIs, as they aim to be stateless for performance reasons) and that translates the shader programs into some intermediate representation.

The majority of the device-specific driver code lives between these two layers, which are usually handled by abstraction layers so that they can be plugged into different APIs. You use the same Gallium driver with an OpenGL 2, OpenGL 3, OpenVG or Direct3D state tracker.

You mean the person who clicked through the ToS that grant Facebook a perpetual, commercial, sublicenceable, license to use the photos however they wish? Including (as they've done in the last) licensing them to third parties to use in adverts?