Comment Stop! (Score -1, Redundant) 205
You had me LOL at "The test, funded by Microsoft..."
First-Sale Doctrine Lost Overseas 775
Max Hyre writes "In a 4-4 decision, the US Supreme court let
stand the Ninth Circuit's decision that
the First-Sale Doctrine (which says once you buy something, the maker
gets no say in what you do with it) only applies to goods
made in the US. That Omega watch you bought in Switzerland last
year? It's yours now—forever. You can't sell
it without Omega's permission."
Comment Re:Security is an embarassment (Score 1) 606
Great point, and who's to say that most intelligence agencies don't already have all this information? I think the people Wikileaks will be upsetting by this isn't the USA, but the nations that thought they were going to be able to use the information as a bargaining chip but now can not, because it's out in the open.
On the other hand, perhaps nations that already had this information couldn't act on it, because that would expose they had spies in certain places, but now they are free to publicly act out in defiance.
On the other hand, perhaps nations that already had this information couldn't act on it, because that would expose they had spies in certain places, but now they are free to publicly act out in defiance.
Comment The system clearly isn't working. (Score 5, Insightful) 764
Look at those dollar amounts. First trial: $220,000 Second: $1.92 million Third: $54,000 Fourth: $1.5 million
Something about the shear inconsistency of the outcomes tells me how broken this system of courts truly is. It's not based on anything real. It's based on appearances, fuzzy opinions, manipulated interpretations, etc. This woman shared some music over the internet, and they want to financially crucify her. $54,000 thousand would take a lot of people a long time to pay off, let alone $1.5 million. That amount would effectively end her financial life.
Something about the shear inconsistency of the outcomes tells me how broken this system of courts truly is. It's not based on anything real. It's based on appearances, fuzzy opinions, manipulated interpretations, etc. This woman shared some music over the internet, and they want to financially crucify her. $54,000 thousand would take a lot of people a long time to pay off, let alone $1.5 million. That amount would effectively end her financial life.
Comment Re:Burma? (Score 1) 149
Yeah, it just wouldn't sound the same if it ended with "Myanmar Shave".
Massive DDoS Cuts Myanmar Off From Net 149
Trailrunner7 writes "The nation of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, found its access to the Internet severed by a massive denial of service attack, according to a report by Arbor Networks. The source or motivation of the attack isn't known, but it is believed that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have targeted the country's Ministry of Post and Telecommunication (or PTT), the main conduit for Internet traffic in and out of the authoritarian nation."
Comment Well, it's important to be clear about this... (Score 1) 79
We wouldn't want someone to confuse Star Wars (the classic sci-fi movie) with Star Wars (the contemporary adult-midget porno flick). Of course, the famous quote from the latter is "Penetrate me O-B-its-Long Ushorty, you are my only poke." How the two could be confused I have no idea.
Comment The British are now like the Terrorists... (Score 0, Troll) 629
...they hate us for our freedom.
Comment Re:Outer Space Treaty (Score 1) 301
There's an easy solution. Take an unflagged pirate ship (no national flag, of course it will have a jolly roger) into international waters, and launch the satellite on a rocket from said ship. Or....launch the rocket from Antarctica. That way, the rocket/satellite wasn't launched from "Country X".
Batteries Smaller Than a Grain of Salt 68
An anonymous reader writes "Lithium-ion batteries have become ubiquitous in today's consumer electronics — powering our laptops, phones, and iPods. Research funded by DARPA is pushing the limits of this technology and trying to create some of the tiniest batteries on Earth, the largest of which would be no bigger than a grain of sand. These tiny energy storage devices could one day be used to power the electronics and mechanical components of tiny micro- to nano-scale devices."
Comment Things will get interesting when... (Score 1) 465
...when the robots begin discussing what rights they should take away from us.
Martian Meteorite Gets NASA Mars Rover's Attention 94
coondoggie writes "NASA's Mars rover Opportunity will take a small detour on its current journey to check out what could be a toaster-sized iron-based meteorite that crashed into the Red Planet. NASA scientists called the rock 'Oileán Ruaidh,' which is the Gaelic name for an island off the coast of northwestern Ireland. The rock is about 45 centimeters (18 inches) wide from the angle at which it was first seen on September 16."
Comment This doesn't make sense at all. (Score 3, Insightful) 154
When the Government asks Google for information about a user, how is that "censorship"? It may be a violation of privacy, but it's not censorship unless Google admits that the government then used that information about the user to censor their online activities.
Of course, I did not RTFA. I prefer to censor myself ;P
Google Publishes Censorship Map 154
Entropy98 writes "Google has released a censorship map showing how often countries around the world request user information and censor services such as Youtube. The US government asked Google for user information 4,287 times during the first six months of 2010. Information on China is conspicuously absent."
The Big Promise of 'Big Data' 78
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Frank Ohlhorst discusses how virtualization, commodity hardware, and 'Big Data' tools like Hadoop are enabling IT organizations to mine vast volumes of corporate and external data — a trend fueled increasingly by companies' desire to finally unlock critical insights from thus far largely untapped data stores. 'As costs fall and companies think of new ways to correlate data, Big Data analytics will become more commonplace, perhaps providing the growth mechanism for a small company to become a large one. Consider that Google, Yahoo, and Facebook were all once small companies that leveraged their data and understanding of the relationships in that data to grow significantly. It's no accident that many of the underpinnings of Big Data came from the methods these very businesses developed. But today, these methods are widely available through Hadoop and other tools for enterprises such as yours.'"
