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Comment Re:As if SMTP were ever secure... (Score 1) 609

And even if she didn't want to risk allowing a virus sent to her personal email account to infect her secure phone via the other email client, you don't need to check your personal email every other minute. If there's a critical or time-sensitive personal issue about which Secretary Clinton needs to know, phones have this wonderful capability. You can send it a voice message; in fact, people now may not know or remember this but phones even allow two-way verbal communication!

Comment Re:Comment Subject: (Score 1) 113

Why not find some way to get them onto the sites of the ISPs' websites themselves? Or even better, the copyright holders' sites -- do they look at the lists closely enough to avoid smacking themselves upside the head? If they're using a "spray and pray" style of takedown, perhaps they will miss one or two of their own URLs.

Comment Re:Right, but does it correctly model... (Score 4, Insightful) 247

I think the best solution is to head to a harbor. I don't know how fast or how well a zombie can swim, but I'd bet it's slower than and not as well as a ship can sail. A decent sized ship with fishing gear could fish for food and send out "landing parties" (where absolutely no one wears red) to raid the coast for supplies as needed. If it's large enough (think yacht) those landing parties could even rescue survivors and keep them in quarantine (separate locked cabin, trailing the ship in a lifeboat, etc.) for a time to ensure they're not infected before letting them join the normal complement.

Comment Re:Poorly written headline (Score 1) 93

You could build a box with some transparent bricks or windshields as sides. Use some Technic blocks (the ones with holes) and pins to allow additional air in (to supplement what can get in since the blocks aren't airtight when connected) without allowing larger insects to escape. That would allow you to capture live specimens. But yes, that is not the topic of the article.

Comment Lock box analogy (Score 2) 431

Ms. Caldwell, I have here a lockbox with one key. Please place a $20 from your pocket in the box, lock it, and you hold onto the key. How secure do you think your money is in that box? Do you want the government to mandate that it must have a key to that box?

Now here I have a second key for that lockbox. I (representing the government) am the only one who has access to that key, so you should still feel relatively confident in the security of your money. \begin{JamesEarlJones}We are the United States Government. We don't DO that sort of thing. \end{JamesEarlJones} Do you still feel confident? Are you more or less confident in its security that you were in the first case?

Whoops, I lost the second key or someone stole it from me. Anyone may have access to the second key now. Now how confident are you in the security of your $20? More or less than the first two cases?

When we encrypt our data, we are basically putting it in a lockbox with one key, like the first case. You may think you're advocating for the second case, but a government-mandated "second key" will inevitably (and quickly) be compromised, resulting in the third case.

Comment Re: Not their fault (Score 1) 397

A couple of inches of snow is one thing.

Almost two feet of snow in Boston itself, and very close to three feet of snow in other places in Massachusetts, is quite another. As it stands right now, only five storms in Boston history (going back to 1892) have higher snowfall totals (the data on that page predates the 2013 storm, which had a higher snowfall total, if I remember correctly.) The ticker at the bottom of the local TV programming listing school closings and activity cancellations for Wednesday (recovering from the storm) takes a couple minutes to finish its cycle.

Comment Re:Wow .... (Score 3, Informative) 155

From what I gathered from the article, a particular cancer medication needs to be produced using expensive materials (hamster ovaries) because the proteins produced by the ovaries don't get tangled up for some reason. Producing those proteins in a less expensive material (E. coli, yeast) would lead to tangling of the proteins. If they can use the less expensive material and detangle the proteins for less than the cost of producing the proteins in the hamster ovaries, the price of the medication would (hopefully) go down and the supply would increase.

So the next step is to un-tangle proteins produced from yeast, I guess.

Comment Re:Uh... They're not required to go to that school (Score 1) 323

If there's "substantive claims made about bullying, harassment, threats, etc." then there should be plenty of evidence (that can be provided by the victim) to involve the authorities and the court system to get a warrant, yes? [If the victim is no longer able to provide the evidence, their testimony or the investigation into the reason why they are unable to provide the evidence may itself may provide that evidence, again through use of legal means.]

Comment Re:As much as could be expected (Score 2) 189

MIT, the organization whose access was used to download the documents, declined to press civil charge and according to the report on MIT's involvement "MIT never requested that a criminal prosecution be brought against Aaron
Swartz." (page 13) and "MIT did inform the prosecution that it was not seeking punishment for Swartz, and it did inform the defense that it was not seeking any civil remedy from him." (page 14)

JSTOR, the organization whose documents were copied, declined to press civil charges. A quote in the MIT report attributed to JSTOR said "The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office. It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter." (page 84)

When the two parties who were affected choose not to proceed with civil charges and don't press for criminal charges, is calling for criminal charges that carried a possible 50 years of imprisonment and a $1 million dollar fine, and which a former White House counsel called "overcharging" and "overzealous" really necessary? Consider that several Senators, including both Republicans and Democrats, questioned or criticized the prosecution using words or phrases like scapegoat, outrageous, and way out of line. How often does THAT happen anymore?

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