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Comment Re:Because it was british (Score 4, Interesting) 214

I mean, take a look at Apple's "If it's black and rectangular, it's ours" patent.

The ipad injunction involved a European "Community Design", an appallingly stupid concept which is actually considerably worse than patents. There's no obviousness or prior art test AT ALL, they're simply granted automatically upon payment of the filing fee. It's absolutely guaranteed to be abused like this, in fact as the link shows Apple have a program that spam-registers designs which they have no intention of even using, just to make life difficult for their competitors. It's hard to escape the conclusion that it's simply a cynical device to collect those filing fees, with the negative effects on business and consumers being somebody else's problem.

Oh, and the extremely generic community design they used for the ipad thing was filed in 2004, 6 years before the first ipad announcement.

Comment Re:Somewhere in the engineering process (Score 1) 647

It's almost certain that this drone DOES have an inertial navigation system - the problem is, how do you know when to use it?

When your control channel is being jammed. As others have pointed out though, it really should be using military encrypted GPS - in fact this seems to be a requirement since September 2006 - in which case it seems that they shouldn't have been able to spoof it ...

Comment Re:-1 for the BSA (Score 1) 140

The Sisyphean task of fighting anonymous botnet herders and spammers must quickly become frustrating. You have to follow the law and proper procedures, they do whatever the hell they want and typically operate sophisticated distributed systems with no central C+C that can be impossible to take down. I don't agree with him, but it's easy to see why he's come to think this way.

Comment Re:First (I think) (Score 1) 215

Import duties. Yes they're "unfair", but truly free trade is only a good idea so long as your sole goal is maximising profits for the elite. Globalisation and liberalised immigration have overall been harmful to indigenous western workers, exactly as was predicted, leaving us with an unbalanced economy that mostly manufactures intangible Intellectual Property and fraudulent financial instruments, rather than physical goods.

Comment Re:Javascript required? (Score 3, Informative) 161

Nope. NoScript protects against the relatively common attack vector of malicious 3rd-party scripts being injected into a site you already trust, via exploits or ad networks. In this scenario the site will try to load malware from http://lolhax.biz/ or whatever, which it doesn't normally do and you haven't permitted, so it fails. It saved me once when a PHP forum I visited often got hacked.

Submission + - March RSA Hack Hits Lockheed, Remote Systems Breac (pcmag.com)

CPE1704TKS writes: I guess we know what the first target of the RSA hackers were now: military secrets. Unfortunately, RSA's complete silence on the matter will only remove any shred of confidence people have in their product.

From the article:

"So how did the hackers do it? It's been speculated that hackers obtained master key files during the March RSA attacks—as implied, a hacker then would be able to penetrate a SecurID-protected network by replicating an individual's exact keys generated by the particular device."

Moon

Submission + - Discovery of Water In Moon May Alter Origin Theory (yahoo.com)

MarkWhittington writes: "Scientists, working on a NASA grant, have made another startling discovery concerning water on the Moon. It seems that the interior of the Moon has far more water in it than previously thought — as much as the Earth does, apparently.

Researchers made this discovery by examining samples of volcanic glass brought back to Earth by the Apollo 17 astronauts. These tiny beads of glass have about 750 parts per million of water in them: about the same amount as similar volcanic glass on Earth. It is postulated that more water than previously imagined exists deep below the lunar surface and was brought up and trapped in these crystalline beads by volcanic action billions of years ago."

Comment Re:Anysufficiently advanced technology (Score 1) 240

Remember when they claimed Steam was coming to Linux absolutely, positively, for sure, 100% confirmed with an official announcement coming out imminently? Then it ... umm, didn't.

It's a worthwhile site, but they're unreformed Linux fanboys and inevitably that does bias their reporting sometimes. They don't rig tests, but they do find a way to interpret the results in a pro-Linux way if possible.

Comment Re:Trolltalk Poll (Score 0) 62851

Well now. A more informed choice could be made with the context you withheld.
(tl;dr = she's very aware of her fatness but has recently come to believe society should just accept this etcetera. Also holy fuck, 263 lbs?)

She's quite pretty, partly as a result of pro fashion / makeup usage, and wears her Reza-esque weight surprisingly well, partly as a result of weird body shape, but the tragedy is she could probably be really hot if she wasn't causing gravitational lensing. Also, whilst her piece is well-written and makes a valid point it implies i)this situation will not be rectified and ii)she's a feminist.

Trolltalk is now a women's weekly magazine.

Can't decide on a score, but under the right circumstances and if she was fun etc yeah I'd fuck her.

Comment Re:One amusing aspect. (Score 3, Informative) 254

Well, sort of. 95% of the break was done by fail0verflow, who I think it's safe to say don't hold Hotz or his motives in particularly high regard. They quite deliberately stopped at the point where they could run homebrew unrestricted, since going further had no use other than piracy. Predictably, Hotz did that extra part and released it as a pirate-friendly "jailbreak.zip".

Whilst the DMCA is total bullshit, it's hard to feel too much sympathy for him. He did something that had no purpose other than enabling piracy / cheating, he surely knew that was a DMCA violation, and he attached his name to it loud and proud. His defence will probably try to argue that the jailbreaking exemption applied to cellphones should be extended to consoles, but it seems far more likely he did this for purely egotistical reasons than as high-minded civil disobedience.

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