that my tax money is used to launch secret surveillance technology. And of course it is "in my best interest".

90mph (=144kph) is not actually very fast.
On a semi-empty highway 160kph (=100mph) is a good cruising speed. And when in a hurry you'd go much faster... sometimes 220 kph or faster (~140 mph)

This reminds of car chasing scenes in American movies I watched as a kid, where folks would force their car to its limits... and a closeup of the speedometer would show the needle laboring somewhere between 90 and 100 mph. We always had a good laugh from that.

You make a bad movie and then you blame somebody else (file sharers in this case) for it. Pathetic.

Personally I hate multiplayer online games. I have enough competition in my real world life and really do not need to add more of that during my spare time. I play very occasionally I do not want to invest time to acquire skill to be a worthy contender in whatever game I want to play.

If a game is multiplayer only, I usually avoid it.

Furthermore sometimes it seems companies just want to avoid the cost and effort to develop a good AI and then sell this as a feature.

then who can you trust?

I know there are always black sheep, but a basic trust relationship between management and the employees is very important and better for the morale.

If security is an issue, some security awareness training may be money better spent.

This is nonsense. Warm air carries more moisture than cold air. When taking a cold device into a warm room, the air will enter the device, cool down and water will start to condensate inside the device. Water from condensation is just as bad as water from a spill.

The liquid sensor is right to go off, as it should since many electronic gadgets/laptops were destroyed this way.

is to require reciprocity. That goes for access to financial data as well as travelling/airline data.

It seems to me the US is quick to access other countries' data, but it far less willing to provide equal access to internal data as well.
Hence this would either level the playing ground or put a stop to US demands.

I like this from the article:

> You can tell ZFS to do full byte comparisons rather than relying on the hash if you want full security against hash duplicates:

I once did similar a project with web content caching that replaced some data with a hash of said data with a way to get to the actual data. All sorts of people were worried about hash conflicts, etc. People are always worried about collisions.

It took a lot of convincing that that risk is lower than a nuclear strike on the data center(s).

What finally did convince my team mates was that 2^256 (~10^77) is by some estimates is close to the number of elementary particles in the visible universe (without a few orders of magnitudes at least).
So assuming the hash function is good (there's no evidence to prove otherwise), we'd have to try almost as many inputs as there are particles in the universe. The chances of hitting duplicates are so astronomically small that doing byte comparisons is most certainly useless, and just check mark feature for those types who worry about these things. AFAIK there are no known SHA256 duplicates.

Flamebait?! I was merely clarifying terms, and pointing out the clever naming scheme chosen by the industry. Oh well...

"Piracy" is a clever term coined by the music and file industry to associate file copying directly with stealing.

Existing information is replicated or copied nothing more and nothing less.
That may not be legal by current law, and there might be an "opportunity loss" for the content owner, but that is not "piracy" nor is it "stealing".

"Illegal content replication" just doesn't sound as snazzy and dirty as "piracy".

Of course the excuse mentioned in the article had to be the good and tried child porn excuse.
While I find sexual acts on children despicable and inexcusable, I am sick and tired of seeing my civil liberties eroded away by the same excuse over and over again.

It does not even help! One can put any questionable content on a memory stick and mail it across countries. If the content is encrypted one doesn't even have to worry about it being intercepted. If it is intercepted, just send another one.
In fact that is probably what I am going to do with private photographs/movies from now on (my parents and I live in different countries). The border agents then can nose around on my laptop all the want, without invading my private life. The point is that I should not have to do that.

Any terrorist actually caught during a border search is likely too stupid to carry out said terrorist act anyway.

Don't take out a database lock (also referred to as pessimistic lock sometimes). Web transactions tend to be long lived and there's typically no easy way to know when the user just abandoned the edit (and hence you would not really know when it save to release the lock, unless it is by timeout or explicit release by the user).

Instead do optimistic locking... Assume there are no conflicting edits (or that they are at least rare). Then version each row (with a monotonically increasing number for example). At the beginning of the transaction also retrieve the version, and upon save verify that the version did not change - if it has changed there was a conflicting edit in the meanwhile and the current save should be prevented (you could then get fancy and retrieve the current version of the row from the database and show it to the user, etc).

One can actually show that if the rate of collisions is low optimistic locking even performs better, whereas in scenarios where the contention is high (a significant fraction of transaction result in a conflict) pessimistic database locks performs better.

I recently got a Kindle 2. The hardware is great, the free wireless is cool.

But I will never ever purchase a $9 (or so) DRM controlled e-book. That is ridiculous. For $0.20 I might. Anything more is theft and I'd rather get the paper version.

However, there is a lot of free stuff to be found sites gutenberg.org, scientific articles, philosphical texts, etc. Basically all the stuff that glues you the computer screen to read it. Now I just read all whenever/whereever I want on the Kindle.

The Kindle will read .mobi files directly, and you can convert PDF and HTML to a format that works on the Kindle for free (but you need an Amazon account to do the conversion, and I do not know whether the result of the conversion is DRM crippled or not).

I recently recycled a bunch old computers. I considered wiping the harddrive electronically, but then I didn't feel like the hassle. I just removed the drives and smashed them with hammer. It was fun and the recycling center took them anyway.