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What major network television outfit publicly linked the American Antrax attacks falsely to Iraq back in 2001 and waited until 2006 to very quiet acknowledge (but not explain the source of) its deceit?

Can boosting ratings, by feeding the American people false propaganda, be a treasonous offense?

snydeq writes "The office of San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris has made public close to 150 usernames and passwords used by various departments to connect to the city's VPN. The passwords were filed this week as Exhibit A in a court document arguing against a reduction in $5 million bail in the case against Terry Childs. Though they placed the passwords in the public record, city prosecutors do seem to think that they are sensitive. InfoWorld's Paul Venezia, who has been following the case closely, provides further analysis of the technical details in the city's case. 'By themselves, [the passwords] would not be enough to allow anyone to access the network via VPN,' Venezia writes, 'but the fact that the city entered them into evidence is quite shocking. At the very least, they'll have to shut down their VPN access for awhile until they've changed them all and modified the configurations of some large number of VPN clients.'"

jmcbain tips a fascinating interview in Scientific American with a professor of kinesiology and neuroscience (and a 26-year practitioner of Chito-Ryu karate-do). The question was, how much training would it take for a normal person to become Batman? The professor says: "You could train somebody to be a tremendous athlete and to have a significant martial arts background, and also to use some of the gear that he has, which requires a lot of physical prowess... In terms of the physical skills to be able to defend himself against all these opponents all the time, I would benchmark that at 10 to 12 years." The problem is, even after that amount of training, no one could remain on top of their game for more than a few years. And "Batman can't really afford to lose. Losing means death — or at least not being able to be Batman anymore."

As a woman looking to go into a science/engineering field I have to say that this is just a stupid idea. To be honest a quota would have the chance of making me NOT want to go into the field because I would have to deal with people thinking that I couldn't have gotten in if there had been no quota to fill. And yes I really am a woman. I really am.

Law, psychology, education, journalism, etc. are dominated by women. Should we expect to see male quotas there?

From Microsoft's attempts at documenting their file formats and interfaces I can say that Microsoft does not work to specifications or standards. They make the code work then make the working code the standard. That is bad practice and leads to, as all can see, bloated, undocumented and overly large interfaces.

I believe the biggest change for Microsoft, whether or not they embrace openness, is to work to a specification driven development rather than a code driven development system. Spend the timing working on the specification and interfaces, get a workable interface and security model then implement it.

No 'probs' with licensing maybe, but beyond that, you can expect plenty of 'probs' running anything modern in terms of hardware or software on it.

I think I missed your point here. Linux runs on more hardware, more architectures and more platforms than Windows ever has. Linux has support for hardware, protocols, filesystems and technologies LONG before Windows does. Linux had the first, working Wireless USB drivers and specification before Microsoft even thought about it. Linux has more software applications available to it (by several orders of magnitude), and even runs most Windows software if necessary.

So what exactly were you trying to say above? Because I missed it. If you want something that supports current, bleeding edge hardware and software, Linux is the only way to go. If you want something that supports 15+ year old hardware, Linux is the only way to go.

If you want to play games on your computer and not much else, Windows is probably a good fit.

I have over 200 machines in my domain. I tend to replace one or two a month and they can pry my corporate copy of XP from my cold dead hands. For folks like me that don't necessarily have the latest and greatest hardware Vista isn't even an option (the majority are single-core P4's with less than 1GB RAM). I use Linux on all of my servers and my personal workstation but until I can run AutoCAD, Rhino, and Photoshop without glitching and at full-speed I can't make a complete switch. The way Microsoft is alienating their lower-end customers like this is so tragic it's funny. I have to believe that there are other admins out there with the same problem.

What would be really sweet is if it went to court and the judge finds it technically valid but too onerous. Following the logic, it would be an open door to judicial review of the entire patent system.

But in all reality, the judge will probably just rule this particular patent invalid (for whatever reason) and refuse to tackle the larger issue.

davidmwilliams writes "I've been rallying against Microsoft's so-called 'Get the Facts' site for the last fortnight in my blog. Rather than give any legitimate comparison facing off Windows Server vs similarly spec'd Linux options, the Microsoft spin doctors opt for bunkum and hogwash with sensational headlines that don't have any substance underneath. Here's the state of play, including an update on my request to Microsoft PR to do something about the blatant lack of integrity displayed. I also go over the latest case study put up by Microsoft: they promise to show why people are choosing Windows Server 2008 over Linux using the City of Uppsala as an example."

duerra writes "A plan to use U.S. spy satellites for domestic security and law-enforcement missions is moving forward after being delayed for months because of privacy and civil liberties concerns. The plan is in the final stage of completion, according to a department official who requested anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about it. While some internal agencies have had access to spy satellite imagery for purposes such as assisting after a natural disaster, this would be the first time law-enforcement would be able to obtain a warrant and request access to satellite imagery."

The NPD group, owners of the not-quite-as-popular-as-they-had-hoped HD-DVD format, attempted to battle back against the tide of "naysayers" who claim that the format war is over and have declared Blu-Ray Disc the winner. "While select articles have implied that HD-DVD as a format is doomed and the sky is falling for the format's supporters, the NPD Group this afternoon reinforced that sales results from a single week do not necessarily indicate a trend, and that the week in question had several intriguing variables that have gone unreported."

mrneutron2003 writes "With this past week's announcement by Warner to release its entire catalog to Amazon in MP3 format with no Digital Rights Management, you would think that the organization that represents them, The RIAA, would begin changing its tune. Instead, they are pressing on in their campaign against consumers by suing individuals who merely rip CDs they've purchased legally. 'The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.'"

christian.einfeldt writes "Microsoft has experienced some criticism for its handling of its bid to have OOXML accepted as an ISO standard, including the use of financial incentives to affect the Swedish national vote, which resulted in Sweden reversing its pro-Microsoft position; and failing to honor a promise to relinquish control of the OOXML specification if it gained ISO status. A few days ago Groklaw published an article that raises questions about Microsoft's influence on the upcoming February vote, citing concerns with the limitation of discussions of patent issues, public accountability of the process, and even irregularities with choosing the size of the room so as to limit the delegates opposed to OOXML ISO status, as had been done in the past."

wtansill writes "Seagate's Free Agent series of drives are not intended to be compatible with the Open Source operating system Linux. The Inquirer reports on the problem: an unhelpful power saving mode. 'The problem is to do with the power-saving systems on Seagate's latest range of drives and the fact that it is shipped already formatted to NTFS. The NTFS is only a slight hurdle to Linux users who have a kernel with NTFS writing enabled or can work mkfs. But the "power saving" timer is a real bugger. It will shut the drive off after several minutes of inactivity and helpfully drop the USB connection. When the connection does come back it returns as USB1 which is apparently as useful as a chocolate teapot.' Via Engadget, though, there is a solution!