Shame on them? The NSA is one of the principal funders of pure mathematical research. It was their dollars that created almost all of the encryption algorithms. Most of this research has no goal or direction from the NSA, it's block grants given based on the idea. The program isn't much different than what DARPA used to do with their pure research dollars where they had a group that threw money and anything regardless of application by the military then had a second group that put their money at only targeted research that would yield weapons or defense.

The fact is the NSA funds a LOT of pure theoretical research in mathematics, just because any of it could one day be used to create or break encryption or fit some other NSA need doesn't mean the research isn't valuable to society as a whole.

If the devil payed you to successfully research a method to eliminate poverty would you do take his money?

Free markets don't remain free without regulation.

Monopoly is the usual result of business in which there are high capital costs to enter the market. Local residential service of any sort that requires stringing wires or pipes to individual homes is so ridiculously capital intensive that it is a natural monopoly. Without regulation that market will become a Monopoly naturally and that monopoly will then begin to abuse it's position to displace and harm other business.

As others have noted, internet is the new phone service. It's almost impossible these days to function without internet, that includes finding and maintaining a job, educating your children etc. But there is big money that opposes the regulations this will inspire because there is big money to be made abusing those monopolies, particularly now that regulations that prevented these companies from controlling media systems are now gone. These monopolies can now use their position to prevent the rise of competitors to content offerings which would provide competition to their business. In time they will use the position to leverage themselves into other markets.

There is nothing wrong with TOR other than not enough people are providing capacity. The biggest reason the government can attack TOR is that the number of relays and nodes is so pathetically small as to make it trivial to attack it for a large well funded organization. And your suggestion is to reduce the effectiveness of TOR even more AND put your trust in a system in which the developers themselves can't guarantee it's secure because it's never been audited, unlike TOR, and operates on the exact same principles and methods.

You sir are a fool.

Of I2P, freenet, Tor and all the others TOR is the only one with good financial backing and an audited codebase that more than 3 people have looked at. I2P on the other hand is built on Java with literally one developer and is even smaller of a network, and likely suffers the exact same weaknesses as TOR, the most important of which is that the smaller the number of machines connected the easier it is to crack and track the network encryption and routing.

How the information was disseminated and to who is a red herring.

Technical information was published publicly. No matter how esoteric and incomprehensible it was or how small of an audience it received it was out there and the ONLY way you could argue this is a genuine mistake (in that it remained uncorrected until now) is if the people who inside nvidia who knew the actual capabilities never saw this published public information. I find the idea that their team, who knew it was false, didn't see this published information to be nearly impossible.

And once you draw the conclusion that there is no way this information wasn't seen by people with the knowledge to know it was false the only conclusion that you can draw is that the decision was made to deliberately ignore that it's false.

As you say, it's so esoteric of information that for the most part it's irrelevant until you realize they lied about it and did so deliberately (at least by not correcting it). I have difficulty reconciling the idea that this information was so irrelevant when they had to know it was wrong (at the very least after publication someone in nvidia would have saw it) and then still didn't bother to correct it. If the information had been as irrelevant as you claim then such a correction to issued to the sites that published the wrong information would have been a non-event that no one would have cared about. So why not issue the correction?

My problem isn't with the information, this is a legitimate compromise in the design of a cheaper part. My problem is with the deception. I believe with certainty that someone with knowledge at nvidia saw the wrong information and communicated to those in charge that it was wrong, yet nothing was done and that information has been live until someone validated it as false with benchmarks.

Unlikely to be deliberate? For this to NOT be deliberate you have to assume that everyone involved in the design never ever looked at the marketing material, which is absurd. Not only that but even after the card was released the incorrect information was what the company said was the facts until there was objective proof that it was a lie.

Of course none of this would be a big deal at all had they not lied about it. I'm a long time nvidia user (I don't consider myself a fanboi), but the only way you can say this was an honest mistake is to assume that the marketing people are the only people that get to see the published specs. This was a decision made by high up in the company and it was to deliberately lie.

This should not be brushed off a "mistake", it was deliberate.

If they thought it would sell chips I'm sure they'd find a way.

If your rooster is laying eggs you've got far bigger problems than them being boiled. ;)

Yes they should have said chicken egg, not hen's egg.

And the UK has likely done the same (though less publicized) AND extradited people to the US for things that aren't even crimes in the UK.

Apparently you missed the part about the stick. The carrot and the stick work together to get the donkey to do what is against it's own interests.

It's kinda like Republicans, where the vast majority of their voting block is old white people, a good majority of whom are on social security and medicare, while at the same time of having a defined party policy of getting rid of both either directly or through "privatization". They do this with the carrot of reduced taxes and the stick of fear of Obama and "socialism". It's the reason their party is trying to destroy social security but if a democrat votes for one of the GOP bills to destroy social security they run commercials against that democrat saying the democrat is trying to destroy social security.

For example, the republicans just gutted social security disability funding. In May when all the disabled end up with social security cut 20+% and all the stories on the news pop up talking about the poor white veteran in the wheelchair from kentucky who's now homeless as a result the republicans will go on TV and will blame the democrats. And there will be a substantial number of republicans who will believe it because fox news told them it was obama's fault.

IMO he had a good case and could have won but I understand him taking the plea.

He didn't know the information was there in the link that led to this whole thing and the "threats" were hyperbole at the best. He probably couldn't afford a good attorney and he was looking at decades in prison. Typical FBI strategy is charge them with everything in the book so they plea to lessor charge you actually want.

It's a travesty what they did to him.

Those minimum requirements are a joke. I've got a 580 and I can run everything at full detail for the monitor resolution I have. None of them even stress the games. The fact is most games are designed, spec wise, around consoles and won't even stress 5 year old graphics cards.

Tom's a whore, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the ranking or quality of the product in his reviews is impacted by the amount of money he was paid. Some of the recommended products he's had over the years to me indicate that the site's "approval" is for sale. I haven't been there is years so it might have changed but once someone sells out you shouldn't trust them again.

Some of the newer laptops are too thin for a RJ-45 jack. The bottom part of the jack folds down a few MM (my wife's laptop has this "feature") so you can get the RJ-45 into the slot. I haven't noticed too much of an issue with it, I believe it's going to be common now that laptops are thinner than the RJ-45 jack because otherwise you can't have a RJ-45 without a bulge in the case.

Have you looked at the photos? They didn't make any such determination from those photo's. They know all the systems deployed properly because they can see them as they should have landed, they have no idea why the petals didn't unfold and in fact that's their only explanation for why it didn't contact as they don't actually have an image of it with enough detail to know it wasn't damaged.

But if you think they can determine that from the 3 or so pixels that make up the lander you obviously believe they have image technology like in the blade runner movie where they can see details in a photo that aren't there. What they know is that the parachute and airbags deployed and apparently worked but there is no way to determine if there was damage to the lander during the bounce process. They can only guess that the petals didn't deploy properly, not why.

And I remember watching an interview with the first woman firefighter in new york and how she was instrumental in getting the "tests" changed (she sued the department) from something you would see on the world strongest man competition to something firefighters actually do. She explained that when she tried to join the department they had all these silly tests that were created as a macho strongman contest to deliberately exclude women that had nothing at all to do with firefighting and her lawsuit forced them to change the test into moving hoses around, holding pressured hoses, using a fireman's carry to get incapacitated people out of a building and cutting down doors with axes and saws.

Which is pretty much the exact opposite of what you just said.

You can find out about the film here and here the story in their own words: http://takingtheheat.com/

You might not know this but they changed the physical test when they were ordered to open the ranks to women applicants. They deliberately changed it into a stupid strength contest with things like carrying a 120lb dummy on one shoulder and walking UP and then down a bunch of flights of stairs (because as we all know fighters must carry completely unconscious people up further into the burning building before bringing them back to the same floor and can do it only by carrying them on a single shoulder). Or being able to scale a 8' tall brick wall or running a 6 minute mile. I see firefighters scaling 8' brick walls by hand all the time, not to mention the ones I see carrying people further into burning buildings. That's why so many died on 9/11 they were carrying people further into the building because that's what they were trained to do. The changes that this caused to the test actually made the test more realistic.

What's stupid about this is to this day NYFD has like 1% women in their ranks where departments around the country have far higher numbers. Their leaders and rank and file union members still try to exclude women.