Worse, it was fucking boring. The Hobbit would have made a fine two hour movie, maybe two 1.5 hour movies. But there is not enough plot for seven and a half hours.

And by the time the last film is released, will be about 4.5 hours too long.

And what would you define something that didn't ingest, metabolize, excrete, reproduce and have some sort of system of heredity? Other chemical processes; like fire and crystallization, might hit some of these marks, but we don't call them living systems. So while the precise chemical processes, heck maybe even many of the chemical elements involved may be different (silicon-based life on Titan or something like that), I think at the end of the day if it going to be called life, it has to have the same basic features as terrestrial life.

If it's life, it's going to have a metabolism, it's going to reproduce and it's going to excrete. It may not, at first blush, look like life, but there will be chemical processes that in some way replicate processes found in terrestrial life.

If I had written the bill, I would have named it "USA #1 Freedom Bald Eagle Star Spangled Flag Waving Democracy Rah Rah Rah Act"

Is it MARVELous this SHIELD?

No matter how stupid Apple was to fall for this, and how much they disregarded good practice, this is still definitely fraud.

Why wouldn't they call the police?

No kidding, any system which comes down to "I have a number, trust me" is pretty flawed.

Obviously, Apple was doing something wrong since they're on the hook for it, but you'd really think there would have to be some validation inherent to this.

This sounds like it boiled down to "declined, declined, declined, OK, go ahead". That's crazy.

But that's the problem with this system: as long as the number of digits is correct, the override code itself doesn't matter.

Who the hell came up with that idea?

That's no security in any meaningful sense of the word.

I'm betting some lobbyist made it so that the banks didn't really need to do anything concrete, just look like they were.

If that's all that's required, the banks deserve to be getting ripped off.

Do the DHS seriously believe they have any credibility in this area?

At this point, I assume if they find any exploits they'll keep them secret and use them themselves.

Sorry guys, but once you became the enforcement arm for copyright, you lost all credibility.

The Internet is not powered by experiments on humans. Not even in the DARPA days.

No, websites do NOT experiment on users. Users may experiment on websites, if there's customization, but the rules for good design have not changed either in the past 30 years or the past 3,000. And, to judge from how humans organized carvings and paintings, not the past 30,000 either.

To say that websites experiment on people is tripe. Mouldy tripe. Websites may offer experimental views, surveys on what works, log analysis, etc, but these are statistical experiments on depersonalized aggregate data. Not people.

Experiments on people, especially without consent, is vulgar and wrong. It also doesn't help the website, because knowing what happens doesn't tell you why. Early experiments in AI are littered with extraordinarily bad results for this reason. Assuming you know why, assuming you can casually sketch in the cause merely by knowing one specific effect, is insanity.

Look, I will spell it out to these guys. Stop playing Sherlock Holmes, you only end up looking like Lestrade. Sir Conan Doyle's fictional hero used recursive subdivision, a technique Real Geeks use all the time for everything from decision trees to searching lists. Isolating single factors isn't subdivision because there isn't a single ordered space to subdivide. Scientists mask, yes, but only when dealing with single ordered spaces, and only AFTER producing a hypothesis. And if it involves research on humans, also after filling out a bloody great load of paperwork.

I flat-out refuse to use any website tainted with such puerile nonsense, insofar as I know it to have occurred. No matter how valuable that site may have been, it cannot remain valuable if it is driven by pseudoscience. There's also the matter of respect. If you don't respect me, why should I store any data with you? I can probably do better than most sites out there over a coffee break, so what's in it for me? What's so valuable that I should tolerate being second-class? It had better be damn good.

I'll take a temporary hit on what I can do, if it safeguards my absolute, unconditional control over my virtual persona. And temporary is all it would ever be. There's very little that's truly exclusive and even less that's exclusive and interesting.

The same is true of all users. We don't need any specific website, websites need us. We dictate our own limits, we dictate what safeguards are minimal, we dictate how far a site owner can go. Websites serve their users. They exist only to serve. And unlike with a certain elite class in the Dune series, that's actually true and enforceable.

No, this is EA, assume malice, because EA are assholes who don't give a rats ass about their customers or what they do to them.

You know, after the Sony rootkit issue, I do kind of expect vendors to be up front about this.

Because, "hey, here's our software, oh, it might wreck your computer" is kind of a big deal.

These companies feel entitled to install all sorts of crap on your machine. But, this being EA, it's already crap.

They really should be required to tell you the extra crap they're installing, because it has the potential to really fsck up your computer.