Comment Re:Core competency (Score 1) 142
In 2050 Firefox will be a wood-pulp mill in Finland.
Kingston and PNY Caught Bait-and-Switching Cheaper Components After Good Reviews 289
An anonymous reader writes Over the past few months, we've seen a disturbing trend from first Kingston, and now PNY. Manufacturers are launching SSDs with one hardware specification, and then quietly changing the hardware configuration after reviews have gone out. The impacts have been somewhat different, but in both cases, unhappy customers are loudly complaining that they've been cheated, tricked into paying for a drive they otherwise wouldn't have purchased.
Comment Re:More Uses for Aluminium foil (Score 2) 125
>Hopefully we'll wise up someday and stop caring about the pointless minutiae of each others' lives
We've been scrutinising the minutiae of others lives for millennia; ever since we evolved into social grouping, with all its hierarchical dynamics. It's not going to stop any time soon.
California Regulators Tell Ride-Shares No Airport Runs 314
An anonymous reader writes in with news about ride-share crackdowns in California. California regulators are threatening to revoke permits for on-demand ride companies UberX, Lyft, Sidecar, Summon and Wingz unless they stop giving rides to and from airports within two weeks. The move could lead to the state shutting down the companies' operations. Flouting the airport rules also flouts regulations that the CPUC set up for the new generation of ride companies to operate in California. In a clear rebuttal to an argument often made by the ride companies, Peevey wrote: "These safety requirements should not hinder your creativity nor should they impede your innovation."
US Pushing Local Police To Keep Quiet On Cell-Phone Surveillance Technology 253
schwit1 (797399) writes with this story from the Associated Press, as carried by Yahoo News: The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned. Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment. Federal involvement in local open records proceedings is unusual. It comes at a time when President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a debate on government surveillance and called for more transparency about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified federal surveillance programs.
Comment Re:Apple Actually Cares About Privacy (Score 0) 323
Wat is this utopia of user-slelected privacy controls?
signed,
A reamed-every-which-way-including-Sunday Android user.
Comment Re:Not profitable (Score 1) 110
I sense a meme...
GoDaddy is to domain registrars what RyanAir is to the low-cost airline industry.
Fuel Cells From Nanomaterials Made From Human Urine 83
New submitter turning in circles (2882659) writes 'Carbon based fuel cells require carbon doped with other elements, normally platinum, for oxygen reduction reactions. Urine contains carbon with an exciting splash of nitrogen, sulfur, potassium, silicon, and so on, and you don't have to manufacture it: the stuff just comes out by itself. In an article published this week in an open journal, researchers from Korea reported a new nanomaterial for fuel cells, which they dub "Urine Carbon." Upon drying, and then heating at 1000C, and rinsing of salts, the resulting Urine Carbon porous nanostructures outperformed Carbon/platinum in electrodes.'
Comment Re:US Government is Corrupt by Inspection (Score 1) 253
He was joking. He meant it amounts to being illegal - because they persue and persecute anyone who exposes their wrongdoing - and they use the DoJ et al, to do the persecution.
Study: Male Facial Development Evolved To Take Punches 190
First time accepted submitter Joe_NoOne (48818) writes "A new theory suggests that our male ancestors evolved beefy facial features as a defense against fist fights. The bones most commonly broken in human punch-ups also gained the most strength in early hominin evolution. They are also the bones that show most divergence between males and females. From the article: 'Fossil records show that the australopiths, immediate predecessors of the human genus Homo, had strikingly robust facial structures. For many years, this extra strength was seen as an adaptation to a tough diet including nuts, seeds and grasses. But more recent findings, examining the wear pattern and carbon isotopes in australopith teeth, have cast some doubt on this "feeding hypothesis". "In fact, [the australopith] boisei, the 'nutcracker man', was probably eating fruit," said Prof David Carrier, the new theory's lead author and an evolutionary biologist at the University of Utah. Instead of diet, Prof Carrier and his co-author, physician Dr Michael Morgan, propose that violent competition demanded the development of these facial fortifications: what they call the "protective buttressing hypothesis".'"
Did Russia Trick Snowden Into Going To Moscow? 346
An anonymous reader writes "Ex-KGB Major Boris Karpichko says that spies from Russia's SVR intelligence service, posing as diplomats in Hong Kong, convinced Snowden to fly to Moscow last June. 'It was a trick and he fell for it,' Karpichko, who reached the rank of Major as a member of the KGB's prestigious Second Directorate while specializing in counter-intelligence, told Nelson. 'Now the Russians are extracting all the intelligence he possesses.'"
Comment Re:This is why no Briton.... (Score 1) 216
This is why no Briton is in a position to criticism [sic] the US.
Britons are not party to the nefarious shenannigans of the British state (by and large). Britons who oppose such things should be free to criticise them wherever they happen. As should everyone.
Comment Re:Another case of 'same, but with a computer' (Score 1) 216
Inddeed. "Threat to the national security" was recently used to quash an investigation into corruption and bribery involved in a deal with Saudi Arabia. Important to have the Saudi royal family on your side, apparently. More important than the law or justice; so the "National Security" card was played and everything got dropped.
This move is about stopping people like Edward Snowden. It what we've come to expect from the Britsh State.
Meanwhile, the government gets up to whatever the hell it likes under the utterly, utterly false boilerplate defence that “all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.”
We live in a country that's little changed from the 18th century in terms of democracy and accountability.
Comment Re:Life Sentences! (Score 1) 216
>How about for corruption, embezzlement and all the other ways criminals and terrorists outright destroy the lives of citizens daily?
Yeah, but the politicians themselves are often in on those sort of things, so
Comment Re:How are people affected in their day to day liv (Score 2) 217
you're more than likely NOT using OpenSSL on the client side (except say, if you use Firefox on Windows)
That's quite the parabolic sentence there. I hope you didn't give yourself whiplash.
