They do this to prevent people from going there, taking pictures, and selling a "BURNERS GONE WILD!" calendar or something like it.

They're preventing *others* from profiting off of photos of burners, not profiting off of them themselves.

This is generally considered a good thing.

Ubiquiti XR2 (600mw) laughs at your shenanigans.

(I have a stack of these in my house...but nothing to really use them for. I feel like I should lose nerd cred for this).

Facebook has 1 server per about 10,000 users. (Although the majority of these are probably part of storage arrays)

You give the public way, way, way too much credibility. I'm sitting in a coffee shop right now surrounded by about 20 people, if you had to guess, how many of them do you think know who Julian Assange is? Know what wikileaks is even? Know that Sweden incorrectly accused him of rape at the behest of the Obama Administration as an attempt to discredit him?

None? 1, maybe?

All it's going to take is a "raid" on his home where they find child pornography on one of his computers. He will go to jail for the rest of his life and, from that point forward, everything that comes from wikileaks will be something that came from "that organization that distributes kiddie porn".

Yes, the Swedes messed this up, badly, but the overwhelming majority of people don't even know that it happened, and even the majority of them don't realize that wikileaks is a lot more than Julian Assange. Despite this, he will be discredited and, with him, wikileaks will go away. /sad

Keep in mind that Christopher Hitchens, who I think is absolutely brilliant, is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, a pop culture magazine.

Facebook invented Cassandra, as well as Haystack

Here is their engineering page.

Facebook *has* to be a culture of hackers as they really are pushing the limits of scaling (in the same way that google is)

Predators do not have automatic takeoff and landing capabilities.

I think a lot of the people who used to use linux are now using mac.

This is sad to me :(. Some of what I consider the most important lessons I learned I learned by trying to get gentoo running properly (with ACPI support, mind you) on my laptop.

I wouldn't be so sure about that... The thing is made from very low-weight foam and brushless motors are getting to the point where this is a reality. Those little toy Air Hogs things, for instance, can do this (albeit on a much smaller scale). /Sidebar: wtf has happened to those things? 2 years ago, they were all over the place, now the only thing I ever see are those god-awful 2-axis helicopters.

Are you off of your meds or something?

First, UAVs have got WAYYYYYYY more uses than spying on people. Unmanned utility wire monitoring, atmospheric replacements for satellites, land surveys, search and rescue, etc. etc. etc. Spying is just a little teeny tiny subset of the things you can do with a UAV (for instance, we're using predator drones over the gulf right now to monitor the oil spill...we're doing this because they drones can stay in the air for a very long time).

Second, you're advocating a device that would indiscriminately destroy electronic equipment with a range long enough that it could take out a airplane. Are you fucking insane? People with pacemakers, or artificial hearts...just kill them?

Destroy everybody within 200 yards' telephone, laptop, pager, e-reader, etc. because you're paranoid that some scary OMG GUBBMINT guy is watching you buy a donut?

Stay classy, slashdot.

What the hell does this have to do with the iPhone and its antenna?

Dear Journalists,

Referencing anything to do with the iPhone in an attempt to sound hip and relevant just makes you look stupid.

Signed,
Blhack

Look, Microsoft, I like you, I really do. I use windows XP on my workstation and it seems to work pretty damn well for everything I ever ask of it. You do a lot of research, that's really cool. Bill, you're a cool guy, donating all kinds of money to charity and whatnot; awesome.

But here is the thing, MS, I can download F/OSS stuff for *free*, find out if I like it, and if I do I just keep using it. I don't have to fork over any money, I don't have to register for anything or tell anybody , or do *anything* other than navigate over to sourceforge or wherever else, click download, click install, and then start working.

Your products are not that much better, they just aren't, and as a broke-ass kid, it doesn't make sense for me to spend money on them. I'd rather use the money to buy hardware.

How can you even possibly *not* sanitize the inputs? Python's mysql module, for instance, does the work for you:

cursor.execute("select grade from grades where student = %s", ("bobby; drop table grages"))

would be completely fine.

Gack, that should say "that is sill less than 1000 times".

Even on a cosmic timescale, that isn't very often. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old, no? Life on earth is, what, 3.5 billion years old (at least these are the earliest fossils we can find)?

So if this happens once every 5 million years, that is still only 1000 times that we have traded rocks with Mars.

That's a lot, but if you're talking about the chances of those rocks containing some absurdly rare strain of bacteria that can exist in an environment very much unlike that of the majority of this planet, it starts looking pretty damn unlikely.

Cosmic time scales or not, one every 5 million years is certainly not "constantly".