Not exactly since movies and TV shows wouldn't exist in their current form without the content companies. The pirates are only providing someone else's product in a different format, albeit a superior one.

you need serious lightning, for serious money.

The first part may be true, the second part does not follow (if serious == a lot). There is no law that states that more money equals better quality. It is human perception that makes you assume that. If the most talented director sells his services for 10$/hour, does that make his work worse? Or if some crook charges 500$/hour, does that make him more talented?
The amount of effort/knowledge you have to put into lighting with digital is a lot less, because you can get direct feedback from what is being recorded. And with more sensitive recording equipment, you need less light in an absolute sense, so you need less expensive lights too.
But in the end it is not the equipment that makes the film interesting, that is only a diversion for us geeks with less then stellar soft skills. The acting and the script contribute a lot more then the equipment.

That's one of bigger problems GIGO. When jobs are being produced and the code needs to determine how to take the packages and fill a known weight and dimension limit - the thing that always causes problems is the humans doing the data input.

the conversations are always humorous.... "Dude - you have to fix the piece dimensions - you can't fit a 16oz piece through the machine - Did you mean 1.6 oz ?"

Wut ?

If we garantee their income then what's their incentive to produce good product?

If their profit is guaranteed by law then they're going to make the minimum possible effort to 'earn' it.

Yeah Operation Flashpoint must be one of the most evil games ever, but certainly pretty realistic, and the AI would actually hide in bushes and snipe you. It was however pretty annoying thinking you had killed everyone only to discover that there had been some guy hiding in a bush a couple hundred metres away and that you were now dead. ArmA is the spiritual successor to Op Flashpoint.

I bet the companies that provide millimeter-wave scanners to the US government (i.e. the thingies that electronically strip-search folk) are popping champagne and thanking their good fortunes. Since this ding-dong of a terrorist allegedly hid his 'cargo' in his underwear, there was no way to detect it, short of strip-searching him. I expect lots of false-positive for everyone under 60 who has to wear adult diapers in the future... Once 'on-body' smuggling becomes difficult I expect to see greater focus on 'in-body' smuggling in conjunction with carry-on smuggling. The X-Ray machines in use today are perhaps a step up from the old black-and-white models in years past, but the human operator remains a very weak spot. Not every pattern will be recognizable, especially if someone with ill intentions positions the item/carry-on optimally to avoid detection.

Anyway, the usual security theater aside, what irks me more than anything is that US airport infrastructure has not kept up with the expanding space requirements to host said theater. For example, the millimeter scanners I have seen in operation are slow and take up a lot of room. So, to process the same number of passengers, far more millimeter scanners are needed than the walk-through magnetic detectors they replace. Yet, no additional space is provided to create more parallel paths into the 'secure' area of the airport. Anywhere...

It's simply amazing that with all the stimulus funds being spent left and right on infrastructure that no one can be bothered to redesign airports around bigger screening areas that can actually handle expected flows of traffic. Naturally, a better response would be to scale back the theater and simply acknowledge that the government cannot protect every citizen from every crime and live with the consequences - but I'll limit that fantasy to the rational place where it belongs as opposed to the irrational place the TSA is creating for the traveling public.

As for the question of how the TSA will react to the latest bombing plot, I simply point to past responses. The folk who run this organization appear to be very reactive as opposed to pro-active. Furthermore, I doubt that the appointees by the Obama administration have even begun to to steer the mish-mash of a federal bureaucracy that they have inherited. Given how long it takes for federal rules to get proposed, reviewed, signed-off, etc. I doubt we will see real 'Obama' policy at the TSA in effect until sometime next year. In the meantime, the remaining Bush-era rules are getting discussed, pushed through, etc.

First of all, the article is a very nice summary of the issues involved with setting up a cloud to crack passwords - the nuts and bolts, if you will. I liked that the authors took the time to look into the economics of trying to crack passwords, how much money it would cost vs. how long it would take. Password cracking is one example of massively scalable computing, which is presumably why the NSA allegedly has had to keep upgrading the electrical infrastructure at their headquarters. Elcomsoft certainly made a splash with their PGP-cracking software and managing to harness the power of cheap GPU cards (which are set up for parallel processing) was a bit of genius. That said, even massive horsepower runs into a brick wall once the passphrases become long and the encryption algorithm is good.

On page 2 of the article, the authors nicely summarize the cost of cracking longer and longer passwords. Once passwords start incorporating special characters (per SPEC), the cost shoots sky high even for relatively short passwords (i.e. $10MM+ for a 9 character password, $1BN for a 10-character password, the US national debt for a 12-character password). The article so clearly lays out why the various law enforcement agencies have been focusing on being able to force folk to disclose their encryption keys. The cost of cracking a well-executed encryption scheme combined with a good password is simply too high. So, go ahead and use those special characters, upper and lowercase, etc. to make life interesting for would-be snoops. But realize that unless trends in privacy rights swing the other way, law enforcement will simply compel key disclosure, as they have for years in the UK, for example.

Lastly, the article underscores the value of keychain-type schemes that allow many long passphrases to be stored in a accessible format. Make it easy to have long, complex passphrases and it becomes more likely that people will actually use them.

Thank you for the information, it makes perfect sense. Clearly, there can be a multitude of reasons why the AT&T or any other ceullar network may fail to get a call through. That said, I would prefer it if networks would be required to inform the caller that their network is overloaded and that the call cannot go through at the moment rather than going through the charade of pretending to ring the cell phone. Call it truth in calling. But I can clearly see why networks would prefer to pretend to make the connection rather than admitting that their infrastructure (or that of their roaming partner) is not up to snuff.

Multitudes of industries use similar tactics (airline flight delays come to mind) and unfortunately the only way to keep them in line is either vigorous competition combined with low switching costs to consumers (which exists in few markets) or better regulation (i.e. fraud detection that works most of the time and which is financially painful to the fraudster).

Every time I deal with AT&T I am amazed that anything works at all over there. My phone almost always shows five bars at home, yet frequently calls don't cause the phone to ring - they go to voicemail after pretending to ring. The jaded amongst us could suspect a deliberate misconfiguration of phones and signal strength monitoring. Similarly, it would not surprise me if AT&T data networks weren't about as reliable as the signal strength indicator on my phone. The recent alleged blurb from an Apple "genius" in NYC that 1/3 of all iPhone calls get dropped seems to point in that direction.

That a cell-phone won't work everywhere and perfectly every time is a given. However, wouldn't it be nice if the companies that stood behind these networks would actually be held accountable for some of the advertising statements they make? What it comes down to is that we're dealing with an oligopolistic market, where only a few carriers can achieve the scale and the coverage to satisfy most mobile customers most of the time. On the flipside, that also means that said carriers can be truly dismal when it comes to customer service, back-end efficiency, etc. since consumers don't have many choices. Considering the ongoing consolidation in the industry, the only way out seems to be a trust-busting activity on the part of the DoJ to regulate the industry.

Not sure that is the better alternative... nor what the best structure for a regulated market would be.

IIRC, Ms. Drew, family, and an employee went to elaborate lengths to ensnare a susceptible and troubled teenager in a web of lies, followed by making very pointed suggestions for the teenager to commit suicide. What legal basis to prosecute her under is one question... but if the allegations are true, there is certainly a moral basis for ostracizing her, which is apparently what happened in her community.

... perhaps such offenders doing serious community service (i.e. years of it) rather than going to jail for all the monetary damage that they have caused is a better punishment.

• It's less costly to society (i.e. they continue to live with their parents)
• something useful might come out of their work
• deterrence might be better (i.e. potential offenders can get a visual reminder of potential consequences)
• by the third or fourth year, offenders might grow out of committing more 'pranks'
• by the tenth year, they'll be experts at picking up trash, removing graffiti, and other marketable skills.

...to see how these fine folk reacted once they were outed by TSG. Props to the folk who got the job done.

Tariq Malik calling the cops on reporters standing in a public way outside your flat after having posted numerous episodes of taking advantage of gullible people on youtube has to be the epitome of chutzpah. If the allegations against him and his cohorts are true (and the evidence they collected against themselves seems to back those allegations up), I hope they get to pay restitution to all the folk they tricked and spend a considerable time making up their 'pranks' to society.

Documenting your own crimes and posting them to the internet in the hope of glory seems a bit backwards to me, but hey, to each his/her own.

... then the OP is describing a working environment that borders on the intolerable. Words like rapacious, incompetent, etc. come to mind. That said, getting into competition with these folk is not as easy as one might think. I have to believe that the fat profit margins being described are being siphoned off to various bank accounts and that a competent ISP with growing market share might find itself suddenly shut down unless similar protection payments are made. If that sounds cynical, I apologize, but graft continues to be an endemic (with few exceptions) problem in Africa per various organizations that measure graft.

All isotope based dating techniques are based on natural decay... whether something is painted or not, I doubt the paint will have any effect on the amount of Carbon-14 you'll find inside it... According to howstuffworks (for what that is worth), carbon-14 is made by cosmic rays, and the ratio of carbon14 to carbon-12 was traditionally pretty stable. Since carbon 14 has a half life of 5,700 years, you can look at the ratio of the two to determine how old something is (well, for the last 60,000 years or so). That's because once there is no more carbon-14 uptake from the atmosphere, the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon 12 will decline (i.e. the plant/animal died)... which brings up another good point, i.e. what pigments were used, what they were derived from.

Also of interest is how carbon-dating in the future will become more difficult due to the advent of atmospheric atom bomb tests and other nuke industry emissions.

Lastly, whether the map of Vinland is authentic or not is for someone else to decide. However, I doubt anyone quibbles with the idea that plenty of humans inhabited the Americas well before other folk documented shorelines, etc. when they "discovered" the North and South American continents. For me, too many of these document-authenticity quests take on a quasi-nationalistic tint, i.e. "my grandpa was braver/wiser/better than your grandpa". Cheers.

It reminds me of a problem my mum told me about in the art world: Verifying the authenticity of ancient scrolls has become virtually impossible due to the discovery of large quantities of paint supplies (dried ink especially) and paper in monasteries. Armed with "old materials", forgers only have to focus on getting the technique, etc. right since there is no means to catch them technologically; for example, carbon dating and similar techniques will give the "right" results. Thus, art historians and dealers in that field allegedly have to rely more and more on their eyes to spot bad technique...

It would not surprise me if the Vinland map could have been constructed under similar circumstances (if that is what someone intended to do). I'm sure someone somewhere could have scared up some old ink and a hide to paint it on. It is or this reason that I guess so many folk are skeptical of the repeated maps from around the world that have come out "discovering" the Americas...