Most DDoS attacks are launched from zombie botnets, so there's a lot of collateral damage when someone does a "retaliatory" or "self-defensive" attack. It usually misses the true perpetrator's computer.

Anyway I'm not saying that DDoS is "not really that bad". My point was more that bad analogies lead to bad conclusions. It looks to me like a disgruntled employee hacked into SPE and hurt the feelings of a few celebrities who made some shitty movie, and somehow this has resulted in two nation-states getting involved. All because our leaders, the media and society don't really understand what's happening, so they've shoehorned this into a flawed mental model that they do understand: war.

Does anyone else feel that using the term "cyberwar" to describe this is an insult to anyone who has ever been through a real war? Insofar as there is a conflict between two or more parties, it is like a war. But that's the furthest that the analogy can be taken without it falling apart. Let's get some things straight: computers aren't people, DDoS attacks cause orders of magnitude less suffering than real war, and using a hyperbolic analogy leads to massive escalations of a conflict (e.g. Obama getting involved and taking an entire country offline).

I propose we replace this with a car analogy :). A bunch of people, possibly North Korean, possibly not, have gone and stolen a lot of cars and parked them in JP Morgan's car park. Now all the bankers, and their customers, can't find parking and can't get into the office. Banking and financial services have been denied. Then some guy at JP Morgan realizes that those cars all have New Jersey plates - that's where the attacks are coming from! So they go steal a bunch of other cars, drive them across the Hudson River, and use them to gridlock all the streets in Jersey City. Problem solved - there's now ample parking for Jamie Dimon's Maserati!

Except that because cars were stolen and transported interstate, the FBI now has to get involved.

It was printed with ABS plastic: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa...

Not sure why people here are so hung up on plastic though. It's better than nothing at all, and doesn't stop you from getting a metal one in the future.

If they're comparing her to Steve Jobs and expecting her to create Yahoo's iPod, then it may be worth pointing out that Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 and the iPod wasn't released until 2001. Two years is a long time but sometimes great products take even longer than that.

Mandarin and Cantonese differ a lot when spoken, but have similar written forms (especially for more formal writing). Since the study looks at written languages (books and websites) it makes sense to lump the many written forms of Chinese together.

There seems to be this idea that rather than regulate something, you just need to inform consumers of the risks, and then the free market will sort everything out. It sounds great in theory but doesn't seem to work well in practice. How many times have you seen a sign saying that something "contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm"? Most Californians ignore it and most people would probably ignore this list of "unsafe" buildings too.

The only time this matters is during peak times - who cares how much space a vehicle takes up when you've got plenty of extra road capacity?

I suspect they do some, but either way you're still "the product". Or is it more about privacy (which is a totally different thing from being exploited)?

I bet it has something to do with the $5 billion they pull in every year in revenue.

An honest question: if you don't want to be "the product" then what are you doing here? How do you think Slashdot makes its money?

Yep, sellers charge Australians more literally "just because they can". They sometimes make up excuses like shipping or localization, and sometimes buyers even believe them! But the reality is that Australians are willing to pay more than Americans for the same thing, so sellers take advantage of this.

A similar situation of price discrimination exists for university textbooks. US edition textbooks can cost about double the price of the "international edition" of the exact same book. This is because Americans are willng to pay more than the rest of the world for the same book.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It's interesting that Ballmer would say this, given that Microsoft made a big effort to carbon copy AWS during his leadership.

I feel like smartphones have replaced TVs as the consumer electronics device to be smug about not owning. With apologies to the Onion:

1. UI innovations are still innovative, even if the underlying technology has been around for a while.

2. There are no existing email clients that bundle semantically similar emails and extract relevant highlights. Even if you're not impressed with the ui there is still a lot of interesting machine learning behind this.

I don't think this is like Windows 8. It's a safe bet that once technology improves and prices are low enough, everyone will have a hi-dpi screen, so it's easy to argue that retina displays are the future. Whereas this idea of desktop-tablet convergence thing that Windows 8 tried to push was controversial at best, and is an example of Microsoft designing for a future that probably won't happen.

The right font choice depends on the screen that the font is being displayed on. And during the period where we're transitioning away from low resolution screens to "retina" screens, there is no perfect choice for everyone - Lucida Grande is going to be better for low-resolution screens but Helvetica will look better on retina displays. They're not "ignoring good user interface design", they're just making a design tradeoff that favors new hardware over old, and optimizes for their highest-paying customers.