... Except in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland, where tickets are about a deterrent.

Because you know, they collect enough taxes to properly fund their civil services like police, so that, you know, they can do the jobs they are supposed to do and not focus on being tax collectors.

It actually isn't that cut and dry at all.

If you watch the interviews with Thicke, he readily admitted, long ago even before this court case, that they were trying to create a Gaye-inspired sound. The song is very explicitly NOT infringement, because it is not a copy.. all it is is a sound INSPIRED by the original (ie they are somewhat similar but noticeably different).

This is why this would be such a landmark change if left unchallenged. If inspiration means infringement, then for all intents and purposes, you can no longer listen to any music anymore that you did not personally create. Imagine all musicians being afraid of saying who inspires them, for fear of being sued.

That is what the outcome of this could very well be. Imagine if this was propegated to the written word... every derrivitive story about a prince and a princess, or about a angst-filled teenager playing with demons or vampires, would be considered infringement, since they all inspire from each other.

If an artist can no longer be inspired by another, art will cease to exist.

In a 2013 study that was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), two researchers demonstrated their ability to connect a laptop to two different vehiclesâ(TM) computer systems using a cable, send commands to different ECUs through the CAN, and thereby control the engine, brakes, steering and other critical vehicle components

So you're telling me that if you have direct physical access to a car's ECU, you can issue commands to it? No shit sherlock. That is THE WHOLE POINT of the CAN bus. The only alternative would be to close down the bus and only allow "authorized" accessories to be connected to it - hello sky-high diagnostic fees and goodbye to useful bluetooth OBD connectors.

Call me when this can be done wirelessly. Oh and yes I did read the "What the companies failed to note is that the DARPA study built on prior research that demonstrated that one could remotely and wirelessly access a vehicleâ(TM)s CAN bus through Bluetooth connections, OnStar systems, malware in a synced Android smartphone, or a malicious file on a CD in the stereo" blurb - which still failed to materialize an actual working example of exploiting a CAN wirelessly.

Doesn't matter, because the person committing suicide is thinking "I don't care what it is, it has to be better than this".

You won't "plunge into the void". You need to alter your thinking.

If you think you are an atheist and not scared of death, IMO you are not a real atheist because you still have some kind of notion of something after.

The primal roots of suicide are buried in religion and thoughts of an after-life. The sooner people wake up to that fact and seek to correct it, the better.

The whole notion of "something better than this" or "anything is better than this" assumes there is a "thing". There isn't. There is nothing. And nothing is not an "escape", it is nothing. Period.

If people did not feel there was somewhere or something better to escape to, they would not be offing themselves.

The Windows interface is a GUI, not an operating system. Microsoft wants to limit your applications to those that use the Win32 API to sort of simulate the "Windows is the OS" look and feel, but that's not really what's going on.

The Android interface is a runtime, not an operating system. Google wants to limit your applications to those that use the ART runtime to sort of simulate the "Android is the OS" look and feel, but that's not really what's going on.

The GNU stack is userspace, not an operating system. GNU wants to limit your applications to those that use the glib API, but that's not really what's going on.

The problem with your statement is you make the assertion that Bing no longer sucks, which is false. Bing is still horrible.

FIPS level 3 has nothing to do with software, that is the level which requires safeguards against physical tampering - tamper-evident seals etc. Again, nothing to do with the actual operation of the software. Level 4 takes Level 3 up a notch requiring even more hardening around "the module"... but AGAIN, nothing about how your software actually USES the module. Such a thing is totally outside the scope of FIPS.

FIPS is an outdated standard. It made sense when it was created and crypto was not well understood and poorly standardized. Today it adds little value because almost all software on earth uses standard crypto libraries.

Don't even get me started on PCI, which isn't even worth the paper it is written on.

Detecting the position of jamming sources is not as easy as it is in the movies.

And if you are trying to commit grand theft, I don't think you are worried about the FCC.

Company spends $10,000 on delivery drone. Company dispatches done on it's first delivery run. Rogue actor uses $100 worth of equipment to jam all transmissions to/from the drone, removes power source, and steals it. Company is now out $10,000.

Because they are unmanned, drones are simply far too easy to lose and far too easy to steal. They are impractical.

*sigh*

YES, there is a specification for it.

NO, it is NOT mandatory for an EMV card to have contactless payment.

To imply as such is misleading.

MANY EMV cards do not have contactless payment, it is up to the issuing bank if they want to do that.

It is a total joke.

FIPS 140-2 ensures your algorithm is part of a standard set - big deal. It does no investigation at all as to how you use that algorithm or why you use it. If you are using AES with a FIPS-certified library, you get the checkbox. Nevermind the fact that the private key you are using is sitting in plain text on the disk.

Its the same as all federal standards - FedRAMP, FIPS, FISMA, ISO 27K. They all do *SOME* things, but none of these standards, or any intersection of them, actually do anything with regards to real secure engineering. Note, I am not even sure it would be close to practical to do this. I am just raising awareness that saying that an application is "FIPS certified" is next to useless.

Source: I have dealt with getting applications certified in all of these umbrellas, and more. It is an extremely time consuming and expensive process for all involved to get certified - but in the end does very little in terms of real application security. But it sure makes the auditors a lot of money!

FIPS is a joke and doesn't really do much of anything to ensure real security. Its just a compliance checkbox. An appliance running a piece of software can be 100% insecure from the ground up and be FIPS certified quite easily.

While it is common for your card issuer to bundle them, EMV has nothing at all to do with RFID cards. Many EMV cards have no RFID chip at all.

EMV == "Chip and PIN". There is a private crypto key on the chip on the card and a two-way live handshake done at the terminal, and you must enter a PIN. No signature is used.

RFID == MasterCard PayPass and Visa PayWave. Again there is a private key on the card but there is no PIN used to guard it. Transactions done by RFID are normally limited to $50.