Slashdot

...the CBS article reads like 1984, urging travelers to treat all electronic devices (from fax to cellphone and back) as compromised and then proceeding to talk about China's aggressive cyber-espionage programs.

This would be fine if it warned US citizens about the US government's invasive Internet and telecomm spying. What we have here is a severe case of the pot calling the kettle black.

However, in the case of the US government, said spying is in direct violation of the documents that give the government authority to operate (in particular, the 4th amendment); I'm not at all sure that anything similar can be said of China, which has an entirely different form of government. Consequently, I suspect the US deserves considerably less respect than China does with regard to these activities.

This from the television network whose logo is a giant eye looking back at you.

Deplorable

Why didn't Obama try to stop this? He could have spoken out and got the rest of the dems behind him. Instead he voted in favor of it. This is what his campaign said in October:

"To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."

And on Dec 17:

Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same.

Oh sure, he voted for the amendments which attempted to remove or limit the immunity, but everyone already knew those would fail.

This is from his most recent statement last week:

The ability to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United States is a vital counter-terrorism tool, and I'm persuaded that it is necessary to keep the American people safe -- particularly since certain electronic surveillance orders will begin to expire later this summer. Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, I've chosen to support the current compromise.

Another nail in the coffin for our constitution. This is a sad day. And to think that most of the senate voted on this WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING WHAT THEY WERE GIVING THE TELCOMS IMMUNITY FOR!!!.

This stinks of a grand-scale coverup. There is still the possibility of suing the government, and perhaps striking this bill as unconsitutional. Let's hope we get to the bottom of this and put some people in jail.

Poorcku writes "In the Viacom v. Google litigation, Viacom obtained "all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website", which include "the unique "login ID" of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user's computer ("IP address"), and the identifier for the video.".

EFF is protesting, but we all know resistance is futile. We will be assimilated."
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07/court-ruling-will-expose-viewing-habits-youtube-us

Well, they tried to get the snails to carry the actual message, but it turns out the snails couldn't reliably copy it because not only do they lack hands, but their penmanship is atrocious.

Attempts to get the snails to carry the emails in their internal memory were likewise unsuccessful because the snails lacked the ability to reliably retrieve the message from memory or communicate it effectively at the other end. Indeed, it was never really possible to determine if the messages were actually maintained in the snail's memory at all, even after repeated attempts to store them there. The snails did, however, form an inexplicable appetite for discount v1AgR@, so further study may be warranted.

shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucking tits bitches

Disorganization?
Everything tagged "beta?"

Welcome to Google.

Have you released a product today?

Like not pissing everybody off ?

You'd think so, but apparently even the rubber-stamp FISA court had too high of standards for Bush & Co. And that's saying something since it's ridiculously easy for the government to get a warrant from FISA (hell there is even an exemption so that you can apply for the warrant 72 hours after the fact).

To quote a bit from the article on wikipedia just to give some perspective:

Yeah, you niggers will finally get a fair shot at life now.

ProfPanglos writes "Access to the restricted area of the website for the movie "Forgetting Sarah Marshall", http://www.forgettingsarahmarshall.com/restricted, requires the entry of a first name, last name, zipcode, and birthdate. A note explains that you must have a valid US driver's license.

Entering various types of fake data did not work. Entering the actual info for my deceased father, who would have been 80 this year (and who would probably have loved the movie), granted me access to the site. Changing any aspect of the data did not.

How/where did these guys gain access to US driver's license data? How, exactly, is this a valid use of the data?

Personal experience dictates that getting access to all 50 states' information is complicated and difficult at best. Did someone harvest it, and is selling access to it?"

explosivejared writes "Researchers from Stanford have devised a way to test the neutrality of the charge of an atom, and even a neutron, down to an extremely small fraction of elementary charge. The team of researchers likened the impressive accuracy of the test to "measuring the distance between the earth and the sun to an accuracy better than the size of a nucleus." The test is designed explore areas of the Standard Model concerning charge quantization, where there are considerable gaps in understanding. The researchers say that a new way of thinking about charge quantization is going to be required.

The instrument used to attain this impressive accuracy is a type of atom interferometer, which uses the properties of a particle's wavefunction to detect differences in atoms. The setup at Stanford, while involving complex physics, is comprised basically of a 10m cylinder, where rubidium atoms are streamed up through while being subjected to a series of laser pulses that induce measurable changes in the wavefuntions of the atoms."

In a disgusting display of public affection dozens of East Valley students in Mesa Arizona, participated in a group hug to protest a school ban on hugs lasting more than 2 secs. The district said a list of acceptable and non-acceptable behaviors will be handed out to students and that they are simply trying to save the children from the horror of human contact.

KC7GR writes "So how would you like to get a nice, network-attached 1TB of storage, billed as "the way" to share your photos, videos and music over your home network — and then discover that you can't use it that way because the manufacturer apparently thinks you can't be trusted? Western Digital, after releasing their new MyBook World Edition storage device and advertising it as "Anywhere, Anytime Access, Share Photos and Files," has thoughtfully pre-crippled the thing so that it will not store or share a long list of file types including AAC, MP3, AVI, and others.

I've seen companies shoot themselves in the foot before, but it seems to me that Western Digital has truly outdone themselves by designing a product to share files, and then disabling its ability to do so. This one truly deserves to (a); go down in flames, or (b); get cracked six ways from Sunday so that it doesn't care what gets stored or shared."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/07/western_digital_drm_crippled_harddrive/

KentuckyFC writes "Many climatologist worry that climate models severely underestimate the effects of global warming. Now the extraordinary temperatures recorded in Europe in Autumn 2006 might just be the smoking gun that proves that these models really do get it wrong, big time. Between September and November 2006, the average temperature in some areas of Europe was 4 degrees C higher than usual. The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute has analysed the data and says the conditions cannot be reproduced by current climate models, probably because they do not allow for nonlinear feedback mechanisms that can drive conditions to extremes (abstract on the physics arXiv)."
http://arxivblog.com/?p=144