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Comment Re:The founding documents present a path... (Score 1, Troll) 161

So are you thinking constitutional amendment, constitutional convention, a vigorous letter writing / lobbying campaign, or ... cough *armed insurrection* cough?

Is the straw that broke the camel's back for you Citizens United, Obamacare, gay marriage, NSA collecting phone records, or warm beer?

Comment Re:FISA court (Score 0, Troll) 161

Who are these judges appointed to the FISA court? Is a prerequisite a hatred for America, or is this something they develop once on the bench?

They are ordinary judges that serve on a rotating basis on that court. They are selected by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

The judges who preside over America's secret court

Hatred for America? How do you think that plays out between findings for gay marriage versus findings that allow continued surveillance against terrorism?

Submission + - Business Insider: Iran's nuclear program has been an astronomical waste (businessinsider.com)

Lasrick writes: Business Insider's Armin Rosen uses a fuel-cost calculator from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to show that Iran's nuclear program 'has been astronomically costly for the Islamic Republic.' Rosen uses calculations from this tool to hypothesize that what Iran 'interprets as the country's "rights" under the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty is a diplomatic victory that justifies the outrageous expense of the nuclear program.' Great data crunching.

Submission + - Medium.com ditches passwords to increase security (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: Remembering all of the passwords required to gain access to all of your online accounts is a pain. You could opt to use a password manager, or you might decide to use the same password for everything. But Blogging platform Medium.com has another option — just don't use one!

The site has been anti-password for some time; users log into their accounts using an existing Twitter or Facebook account. For people who are not social network users, however, there's a new option. Working in a similar way to the 'I've forgotten my password' system used by many sites, Medium allows users to log in using nothing but their email address — and says the system is more secure than regular passwords.

Ditching passwords as well as Twitter and Facebook-based logs might seem as though it would open up accounts to unauthorized access, but Medium says that this is far from being the case. Passwords can be very easily compromised, but by emailing time-limited login links to users, Medium thinks it has come up with a solution.

Comment Re:No GPL (Score 1) 171

No one owes him anything. It may not matter to the GPL'd code's author whether this guy wants to use it in his own code or not. There are lots of reasons for writing code.

It's absolutely not a stupid line. The guy who GPL'd the code wrote it so he can do what he wants with it. That is his right. Surely this other developer can write his own code too? Of course GPL'd people don't use that line with end users. After all they are free to use the software however they see fit. That's what the GPL says.

As for toybox, llvm, etc. Good for them. Competition is a good thing. LLVM rejuvenated the stagnant GCC project. As for busybox vs toybox, toybox certainly is the better choice if the company doesn't know how to comply with the GPL or is too lazy to do so. For too long companies thought open source, particularly "free software" mean public domain. It does not, regardless of license. There are obligations under copyright law for all source code licenses, even proprietary ones like MS's royalty-free runtime redistribution licenses.

Submission + - Apple Loses Ebook Price Fixing Appeal, Must Pay $450 Million (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A federal appeals court ruled 2-1 today that Apple indeed conspired to with publishers to increase ebook prices. The ruling puts Apple on the hook for the $450 million settlement reached in 2014 with lawyers and attorneys general from 33 states. The Justice Dept. contended that the price-fixing conspiracy raised the price of some e-books from the $10 standard set by Amazon to $13-$15. The one dissenting judge argued that Apple's efforts weren't anti-competitive because Amazon held 90% of the market at the time. Apple is unhappy with the ruling, but they haven't announced plans to take the case further. They said, "While we want to put this behind us, the case is about principles and values. We know we did nothing wrong back in 2010 and are assessing next steps."

Comment Re:Drone It (Score 1) 843

I can't believe you would say these things and advocate killing more innocents, even if you're just playing devils advocate! And you got modded up too. But even worse you pass judgements on individuals you know nothing about.

I guess you haven't read up on the drone pilot news lately then. Burn-out is super high because drone pilots do have consciences. One guy talked[1] about being ordered to fire on some bad guys, shooting a missile at them, and then watching as one of them bled to death in the sand. On IR camera he could see the guy slowly get cold. That was more traumatic than you and I know. The effects of this and other incidences on this pilot have led to debilitating emotional difficulties. And that's not an uncommon experience.

Now this same pilot, had he been over in Afghanistan, in the thick of things, and under real danger and fire could have killed without remorse. The justification would be as much self defense as anything. But far removed from the action, the trauma of killing was much much more intense. And then going home afterward to a "normal" life with the wife an kids just amplifies the trauma for many personnel.

If you want to target the inhuman American war machine, go ahead. War crimes are war crimes, no doubt about it. But to claim drone pilots have no conscience is just wrong.

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

Submission + - Celebrating Workarounds, Kludges, and Hacks (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: We all have some favorite workarounds that right a perceived wrong (like getting around the Wall Street Journal paywall) or make something work the way we think it ought to. From turning off annoying features in your Prius to getting around sanctions in Crimea and convincing your Android phone you're somewhere you're not, workarounds are a point of pride, showing off our ingenuity and resourcefulness. And sometimes artful workarounds can even keep businesses operating in times of crisis. Take, for example, the Sony employees, who, in the wake of the Great Hack of 2014 when the company's servers went down, dug out old company BlackBerrys that, while they had been abandoned, had never had their plans deactivated. Because BlackBerrys used RIM's email servers instead of Sony's, they could still communicate with one another, and employees with BlackBerrys became the company's lifeline as it slowly put itself back together.

Submission + - 16 facts about our slowly mutating energy consumption (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: Electricity consumption has slowed while the use of natural gas, wind, and solar have become larger portions-- with coal and nuclear becoming less — of the nation's electricity generation between 2001-2013. That was one observation of an interesting report issued by the Government Accountability Office this week that looked at the changing ways in which the US generates and uses electricity.

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