Most of us have come to accept that black hats will never be punished, because on the internet it's very easy to involve multiple unfriendly countries in a crime, and when you put American and Russian agents on the same case it's very hard to get them to stop playing "my country has the biggest dick therefore I'm in charge" and start cooperating to catch the black hat. There's a subtle difference.

Because if you buy a TV for picture quality and non-smart features (4k, deep color, whatever), you'll probably end up with 'smart' just because it's the default now. 'Dumb' is getting hard to find in the middle market segment, it's either $10k audiophile grade nonsense, or $199 Walmart specials that aren't 'smart' because they're still using a chipset from 2008.

If only computing devices had some sort of a virtual pointer... One could use a dedicated peripheral to position this "pointer" over the green, underlined IFTT in the article summary. One could then press a button on the controller for this "pointer" and have a document describing exactly what the hell "IFTT" stands for and what the "If this, then that" service it refers to does delivered to them.

But alas, it is futile dream.

This is the USPTO we're talking about here. Instant messaging services and Node.js libraries probably both fall under a category like "Products and services pertaining to computers, electronic calculators, magnetic or paper tapes, teletypes, slide rules, and abacuses"...

Python is like BASIC: It allows a lay person to build a 90% working tool in less time than it would take to build a consensus on what type of muffins should be at the kickoff meeting for the project to develop a requirements document for the 100% solution, and that irritates a certain type of IT people the same way PCs with BASIC irritated mainframe programmers.

You're right. Notebook, not netbook.

Still it's a long way from benchmarking AMD's enthusiast desktop chip versus Intel's enthusiast desktop chip.

A mobile i5 from 2012, with half as many cores, running at half the clock speed, probably at half the voltage of the Athlon.

You're benching Intel's 17 watt netbook CPU from 2012 versus AMD's 95 watt underdesk spaceheater from 2010, and think that's a good thing for AMD when they nearly tie?

Or they thought having an SLA for refills meant their fuel trucks get through... even when trees/power lines/National Guard soldiers are blocking the road.

Information is power, think before handing too much of it over to the marketing dudebros.

They also don't try to change velocity, or emit EM radiation to sense what's around them, or even emit waste from a power source. If one of those objects lit up a RADAR looking for rocks crossing their path, or fired a thruster big enough to bring an aircraft carrier size craft into Earth orbit, somebody would notice in a big hurry.

So you can share every movement and temperature fluctuation with your friends on panterest, obviously!

I bought the "Bobby Flay filter" through in-pan purchase, so it always looks like I'm doing something with steak and blue corn and ancho chiles, even when it's really just mac & cheese from a box.

Dear US military and federal contracting wanker-sphere,
I know you were 30 years late discovering this whole internet thing, so imagery and phrases from 1980s cyberpunk still sound super-duper-cutting-edge to you, but can you please stop using "cyber" as a catch-all for everything connected to computers? Thanks.

PS: When you leave a laptop full of citizen's private information on the bus, and a million people's social security numbers turn up on pastebin the next day, that's called "negligence" not "a cyberattack".

An app can hardly be less secure than the current system. Knowing the target's name and room number is all it takes to "hack" most hotel locks - just ask the front desk clerk to make you a new key!

That only worked because the people harmed by having their satellite cards bricked were willfully infringing DirecTV's copyrights, and suing DTV for frying their smartcards would be admitting it in court. At absolute best the pirates might get triple actual damages, but 3x the cost of a smartcard is next to nothing, and then the counter-suits would have been a slam dunk for DTV to win $750,000 statutory damages from each of them.

If FTDI wants to use that strategy they're going to have to contend that every end-user of a device with a counterfeit FTDI chip knew it was fake. Doesn't sound plausible to me, but the US courts are generally tech-idiotic so I suppose it's not entirely impossible.

They're also playing the class-action lawsuit lottery.

In fact, it might be worth the $5 to buy one of those cheap shit USB-to-serial adapters, let them brick it, and hope the settlement is that they have to give everyone affected a genuine FTDI one...