I don't understand the confidence in bitlocker. If you assume TC got NSL'd, how would MS react in the same situation? Do you honestly believe that MS hasn't already been handed several NSL's over the years? And it's not open source, anything could be in there, including a back door. If you're paranoid about security, a closed-source product run by a big company based in the USA is the last place you'd be looking for a security product.

I don't think an NSL can (legally) require you to actively DO anything besides turn over property or information. (in addition to the obligitory gag) If MS put a back door in bitlocker, the NSL could demand the keys. I don't think they'd be legally able to either demand such a back door be put in, or be left in though. But then again, this is MS and they'd have good reason to think twice about trying to drag an NSL through the legal mud. An NSL with "it would be nice if you woud..." followed by vague suggestions of consequences could be enough to get more out of them than is legally required.

This isn't just to bash MS. Mac OS X is no different. Most of it is closed-source, and there's no chance of them releasing the source to their security API. There are already know back doors. if you have a fat wallet and a badge you can buy software to read the entire contents of an unlocked keychain on a mac, without knowing the user's password. Same for getting around a password-locked or disabled iphone. This is just the stuff we know about. You have to assume there's more with any company that has to comply with the insane national security laws of late.

What it ALL boils down to is that you simply cannot trust any company (or group, or individual) that operates in the jurristiction of a government that has "secret laws". If I could add one ammendment to our constitution, that'd be it. Three words. No Secret Laws.

It is a fallacy of thought that you have to have an extensive operating system with virtual memory and other elaborate support systems to accomplish a simple task.

My work with the Arduino can produce surprisingly complex operations in under 32kb. (for the program, the runtime, AND the variable ram)

That makes LESS sense than giving away money to people that would otherise go out and rob someone. At least money isn't chemically addictive.

But this guy wasn't likely a user, he was more likely a dealer or a supplier. Users are from your average slice of society, which typically don't rob or point a gun at a cop. This one was in it for the money.

If we just gave away drugs to the addicts, this guy would have to find another way to get money, he'd be out robbing some other local store instead. Giving away drugs just enables addicts and costs ME money in the process. nothankyou. It's like sending food to starving children. So more of them survive. And breed. And now you have a BIGGER hunger problem. You have to address the cause. Help them build farms or something. If they're already in a hole, don't hand them a bigger shovel !

For probably the best perspective on drug addition, do a google search for "chief enabler". That's who you want the government to be. Notice how this person is not part of the solution, they are an important part of perpectuating the problem.

I fancy myself a "knows a LOT of languages and knows how to adapt". So I can sit down in front of a machine running a completely in-house language, and be proficient in it in less than a day, very skilled in under a week. I think this is more important than already being proficient with any given language. Having a very broad background of languages is very useful, because there comes a point where a new language won't really have any surprises you're not used to managing.

Things change so fast with computers, how fast you can adapt is usually more useful than how much you already know. Experience goes stale so quickly, only adaptation remains valuable any distance out into the future.

So this makes it a little tricky to judge "programming competence". If you simply sit them down and see how well they can code in what you use right now, you're not necessarily getting a good measurement on how "competent" they'll be at it in a week. I'd say "throw something at them you know they have ZERO experience with, and see how they react". A competent programmer should be able to have 80%+ comprehension on any code you set in front of them. They should also be capable of very simple edits, and maybe even a little debugging. Have an experienced dev sit down beside them and then give them a simple challenge, with the dev as their assistant. The questions they ask the dev will tell you a lot about their level of competence. Get the dev's input on this later too.

that link was an interesting read. it's got some bias problems in the other directon though, and should be read with the same critical thinking as any article with opposing views.

The most obvious "sweeping generalization" I ran into there was:

"all prices on a free market are competitive."[35] Only government intervention can generate monopolistic prices.

Whoever came up with that needs to read up on Anti-trust Laws.

Anything important should be changed more frequently. And anything less important... why do we have a special day for it? Waste of time. *shrug*

They do not, however, have carte blanche to ignore laws and safety regulations.

I believe the "regulation" aspect right now is simply about the numbers. When you have a handful of amateurs flying quads around their local park or around their back yard or neighborhood, the risks of collision are minimal and the scope of the damage limited. Once it becomes profitable, you can get a sudden, substantial increase in risks to the public.

Right now there are already quite a few people using quadrocopters etc for commercial purposes. Probably the biggest group at this time are the realtors, that hire professional photographers to get pictures of properties for sale. Many of these photographers use quads to get good aereal shots of the house and surrounding property. I think these are being overlooked by the FAA because they don't tend to concentrate and raise the risk of a collision. The photographers are also flying expensive cameras, and don't want to crater their $2,500 camera let alon their $350 quad. Also they're used casually, with no time pressure, so they can concentrate on their flying. Odds are also very good that anyone below hears them and is stopping to watch, and would be much better prepared to take cover should there be a loss of control.

On the other hand, there's a very plausible risk of collisions and damage/injury when you have a papparazzi-ish fervered group of reporters trying to get coverage on a public event. I could see a dozen or more quads zipping around trying to get fleeting unique video, while flying above crowds of people that are NOT paying any attention to any potential danger above. High concentration of aircraft, operators with priorities over safety, concentrated public, and public not paying attention to them. I suspect that is the sort of thing the FAA wants to keep a close eye on, not the "random quad flying solo through the city with a camera onboard." The current regulations simply don't make the necessary distinctin between the different types of commercial use at this point, so they're "selectively enforcing", as is to be expected. If anything, I think the press should have specific additional regulation in certain circumstances, where it's not a case of "protecting the fredom of the press" but is more a case of "protecting the public from reckless reporters".

at $3 per ID when they're having a sale, (which is quite surprising, I wasn't aware it could be so cheap!) the cheapers are quite profitable. If they were quick to ban, say within a few hours reliably, it wouldn't be worth it for most of the cheaters, and they'd quit doing it.

As it is now, you load up your hacks, buy a few accounts, and "rent" some haxor time on the servers for a few weeks, and then they go ahead and ban you, more-or-less right on schedule. That's all it is, they're just working a different business model.

As a game dev, you have your bean counters run the numbers. The number of cheaters "C" subtracts from your legit sales, but adds to your cheat-burn-account sales. There's a point where C maximizes your profit. And I'd be quite amazed if they were off from their proper C by any amount. There's someone in the building who has the job of keeping an eye on non-cheat and cheat sales, making sure that the VAC ban rate is keeping their C at the most profitable point.

The devs and the hack-writers are doing it for the money, the cheaters have various reasons. A few can't shoot straight and legitimately need the help, most just want to pwn the noobs, and a few are just plain dicks.

they've been looking for an entire jetliner for weeks (and positively spamming every newsfeed in the world the entire time), how do they expect to find a lost drone?

29, 49, so close, does it even matter?

Tina Amini, deputy editor at gaming website Kotaku, said the game tanked because "it was practically broken." A recurring flaw, she said, was that the character of the game, the beloved extraterrestrial, would fall into traps that were almost impossible to escape and would appear constantly and unpredictably.

THAT

My parents never bought me a game console, but a few of my friends had them, and I had two friends with 2600's that had that cart. I recall trying to play it, and yes, immense frustration. You'd walk around on a 2d map with a grid of rooms, and random rooms would be trapped. I could spend 10 minutes trying to levitate out of a trap. My friends usually had better luck, because they'd been playing it so much more, but even they would average several attempts to get out of a single trap. I can see why peope would return the game. Ten minutes of that and the cart came out and something else went in.

iirc, the trick was to let go of the levitate button AND hit the only correct exit direction, at precisely the moment you emerged from the hole. Otherwise, you'd fall right back in. (I never did really get the timing down, I only got out on rare occasion, I think due to luck) After a few attempts, you'd be out of energy. I think elliot would magically stop by with a handful of reeces pieces or whatever, at a cost of your score, but all that did was extend the frustration. It was impossible to beat the game without both a good memory and escaping several traps. If you had difficulty with the (random) map, you could easily have to deal with dozens of trapped rooms.

Imagine climging up a ladder and just as you peek your head over the roof edge someone is swinging a shovel at you. You have a split second to dodge the shovel and pull them off the roof or you're falling. Now repeat that 15-20 times. That was 90% of the game.

I wasn't aware that there was a Politically-Correct (PC) term for "Advertising"... but that must be it?