How quickly will teachers become completely automated? That's a bit of a scary concept. You can't just have "teachers" who do nothing but press "Play" on a video machine.

I don't think auto-graders are a good idea. Where is the information exchange between student and teachers? Teachers need to read student essays not just to assign the grade, but to exchange knowledge with their students Opinions and comments should be two-sided exchanges, if students are writing things that aren't going to be read, how does that work?

Yep, this is not the first time we've discussed this one... but it's nice to see a tradition like this still going on.

Black Boxes are typically things that scare Slashdot. We don't know how they work, as compared to a documented "white box" solution.

This definition of a "Black Box" is different. It's an event data recorder, meant to be like the orange devices found at airplane crash sites designed to let everybody know the status of the vehicle before it crashed. No big privacy change because most cars already have one, it's just a law change that requires there be standards,. rules, and such for these things in the future.

The more communication the US has with China

Who said this was communication? This was barely a "wargame" and not something worth our time.

This isn't a ""Windows Problem" it's a "PC Problem" because it's about both Mac too, which is both a type of PC. What happens to the user who's traveling or doesn't have their PC available or one at all? They should still be able to sync their music collection with iCloud and such. This "PC-Free" initiative should be the answer to that.

What we have here is a pen-and-paper exercise between two groups of bigwigs where there were asked a few questions about what they would do, and we have no idea if they answered truly or not. What is this story doing here? We must not have anything to talk about today.

This is as old as Napster and other file sharing technologies. The copyright holders would rather use the laws for "theft" than "copyright infringement" but that's just not going to work. Good lawyer work on the defense side I think.

Yep, and G4's AOTS did a similar thing when the show first started.

There's only one thing left to do when this happens, teach our kids how to play Crossballs. (Anybody remember that show?)

They can't without permission, but continuing to use the service can represent permission.

A court ruling out of line with three other rulings is certainly a sign that the court wants a higher court to look at this... 3-1 scores don't matter, just that the case got there.

There's two key strategies to avoid being DDoSed... first, have more processor, network speed, and disk I/O resources than you need for normal load so that the attacker can't fill one of your computers pipes. Then, host your server or servers at multi-connected datacenters which can cut off large users of your server before it reaches your NIC card. Firewalls at the server can't get back the bandwidth lost to needless connections, but firewalls at the datacenter entry points can. Basically, make sure none of your time-sensitive loads reach 100% and you're fine.

Yep, and it wouldn't surprise me to see someone from Microsoft go home and write the critical exploit for the flaw that'll never be fixed. If your OS no longer has patches available, you're running too old an OS.

What's your source on that?