And we all wonder why there is a GamerGate scandal ....

Because some people still don't know what Naughty By Nature's lyrics meant, 23 years later?

Sorry, bud, not making the connection...

Power-save -> 0, Performance -> 1

Laptop-safe -> 0, crotch-burn -> 1. :)

But yeah, I see your point, that it wouldn't have any side effects in the output-integrity sense.

I notice TFA has almost no detail beyond what TFS says. Yeah, so they found this bit that apparently has no side effects to anything else but magically boosts performance by 20%? I'll admit I haven't written a graphics card driver since back in the VESA2 days, but I can't even conceive of what function such a bit could have, without having some down side... Something like (and I don't mean this literally) disabling vsync but accepting tearing.

Okay, I take some pride in usually understanding at least the basics behind cool science tricks like this, but I have to admit, this one just blows me away - I still don't "get", it even after reading TFAs.

So can someone explain what really happens here? Does the light keep reflecting between the two surfaces, as though caught between two "perfect" mirrors? Or do the photons (and does this depend on wave behavior, or could we do it for particles as well) just basically stop mid-air, something like an event horizon as seen from the inside? Or something else entirely?

/ Bonus points for a car analogy. XD
// Serious question, though... Thanks!

Sure, but on the other hand nobody but a novelist or a lonely weather station operator would bother uttering the phrase "fine, dry snow blowing in the wind". They'd just say "it's snowing."

Know how I can tell you don't live somewhere that requires you to remove that fine dry blowing drifting pooling pain-in-the-ass snow from your driveway before work the next morning?

/ Though I'll take that over wet, sticky, clumping snow with a crust of ice any day! I might need to clear it three times, but it goes easy each time.

Nevermind the consequences if they limit the meaning -- it will be legal to destroy most kinds of evidence in a criminal investigation. It's all A-OK if it didn't contain financial records right?

This story seems to mix up the traditional concept of destruction-of-evidence with a very specific subset of that crime applicable under SOX.

The prosecutors simply went too far in pushing for that specific crime, and therein lies the abuse - No different than how they try to make every case of plain ol' traditional fraud into a federal "wire fraud" offense when it involves the use of a computer (ie, basically all of it in the modern world), or how any crime involving more than a single person qualifies under RICO, or to pick a golden oldie, nailing Al Capone for tax fraud. Might what the crew did technically count under SOX? Maybe, maybe not - But SOX doesn't exist to serve as a bigger stick in all situations; it exists specifically to prosecute otherwise difficult to prove "white collar" crimes where most non-accountants can't even comprehend who did what to whom.

Prosecutors need to stick with the crime that actually happened here, punish the crew appropriately, and lose the "get creative with charges and see what sticks" bullshit that has become far, far too common in today's legal system. When the law becomes nothing more than a set of technicalities to use to punish dissidence as their whim, do we really wonder why no one actually respects the law anymore?

Ok, that's better. But have you read that law

Have you, other than to find a misleading snippet from a subsection that, as you point out, doesn't apply? You might want to reconsider subsection (d) before going too far out of your way to flog that (a)(1) strawman.


There is no such law. I asked for a citation — please, be exact.

Not here to do your homework for you, dude; but given that I've had a boring morning... Try 18 USC 1028. "No such law"? Well, not until late 1998, perhaps...

Yes, but their "solution" seems to be lobby Congress to preserve their sixty year old business model, not actually innovate.

Not really much congress can do about this one (short of requiring everyone to pay for cable TV or incur a tax penalty).

People will simply no longer put up with ever-increasing prices for enormous bundles of services they don't want. How often do we hear people bemoan the fact that they watch three channels but pay for three hundred? Well, at some point, people realize that they effectively pay $40 a month per channel they watch; for lighter TV viewers, that can easily come out to $40 a month per series they watch. And hey, even ignoring options like Netflix and Hulu, I can outright buy entire boxed sets of most TV series for half that per season (never mind per month), ad-free, and 100% on-demand.

If congress really wants to try to save the cable TV industry, they need to do something that will cause some pain on the short term - Force the cable industry to offer 100% a la carte programming - Which would in turn require forcing upstream content providers to do the same, rather than subsidizing pro sports by forcing anyone who wants Animal Planet to also pay for ESPN (and vice-versa, forcing sports fans to pay for Nickelodeon if they just want ESPN). That might save the cable industry, as long as they don't get stupid with the price per channel (at $5/channel/month, I might even sign back up. At $20/channel/month, I need to ask myself if I religiously watch more than 12 programs per channel, because I could just buy them on DVD instead).

Nope, much of the outrage is coming from the Seattle Times who had their website spoofed.

As the owners of the Seattle Times' tarnished trademark (and depending on the quality of the spoof, quite likely the copyright holders to a significant number of infringements on that front as well to "decorate" the spoofed site), they have more right to outrage here than anyone.

Beyond, of course, the righteous outrage of a population which has granted its government certain limited powers in the interest of maintaining a functional civil society, only to have that government routinely flaunt its willfully overstepping those powers. But then, that whole constitution thing went out of fashion long before we invaded a sovereign Iraq because a group of Saudi nationals blew up one of our buildings.

Please, cite the violated law. Thank you.

Identity theft. "Corporations are people too", remember? Thus spake Mittens, and whether we like it or not, the courts have largely agreed.

Or more practically, try trademark dilution by tarnishment: "Typically, the only relief available for trademark dilution is injunctive relief. However, if the defendant 'willfully' intended to trade on the owner's reputation or to cause dilution of the famous mark, the owner of the mark may also be entitled to other remedies, including the defendant's profits, damages, attorneys' fees, and destruction of the infringing goods."

Wow... I don't personally care for the Walled iGarden, but you don't just get to make up numbers and then damn them for your imagination.

Brown?

Brown???

Sorry, I knew too many Brownies back in my uni days. More likely, they just forgot about "bigger bottom, better borrow" and broke the wave function the old fashioned way. ;)

/ I could also have gone with "paid daddy to break it for them", but took the high ground... this time!

I am willing to bet some joe-blow intern infected the network with someone doing some amazingly easy social engineering to him/her.

Who needs social engineering? Just drop an infected flash drive somewhere near the front door, and sooner or later (usually sooner) someone will pick it up and plug it in.

"Nuh-uh", you say? "They certainly have stupid things like autoruns turned off on the Whitehouse network!"

"Hmm, what do we have on here... Random spreadsheet crap, OSHA regulations Powerpoint crap, launch code crap, more random crap, okay some mostly-geezer music I'll check out later, RNC 2016 strategy crap, even more random crap... Hmm, Fappening.Jennifer.Lawrence.Complete.zip.exe? Oooh, awesome, I never did get that on last leaked pic of her!" *click*

Powerpoint has been a weapon against clear thinking, preparing for a meeting, and keeping people interested in what you're saying for a long time.

No one has ever cared about what the presenter had to say at meetings.

It just took more effort before Powerpoint - Both by the presenter, who had to actually prepare instead of cutting and pasting Wikipedia into a slideshow; and by the audience, who had to actually look at the presenter (thereby risking eye-contact) rather than glazing over while staring blankly at a projector screen.

Really, we should thank Microsoft for Powerpoint. Instead of meetings dragging on and on and on as the presenter rambles and people ask stupid questions in a futile effort to remain awake, now the meeting only lasts as long as the slideshow, no one asks any stupid questions, and everyone can go back to doing actual work that much sooner.

And I care about one more crappy corporate-controlled portal site why? Other than the "will they set up a GeoCities page next"-esque shock-value that any company in 2014 still believes their customers give the least damn about their ISP's home page, of course.

If Verizon doesn't want news about the ways the intelligence community and Verizon conspire to rape us all, hey, their portal. And if I want actual news, hey, not their portal. It all balances out.