The release of Doom and similar video games is also correlated to the falling crime rates. Perhaps the more hours young adults spend on such games the fewer hours they spend bashing or killing each other? ;)

That's why I think that a fair amount of money that Kim Dotcom's Megaupload made was legit.

>99% of those people who wanted free stuff wouldn't have paid him. And they might even be running ad blockers. In contrast I can imagine employees of organizations signing up for paid accounts to transfer large files to customers. I used it to transfer large (legit) files. Didn't go for the paid account- the downloaders could wait - wasn't a business thing. If I needed it for business I might have expensed it.

From a security standpoint you shouldn't be using antivirus software for real-time scanning. These issues have been known for years and keep occurring ( https://www.blackhat.com/prese...
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
http://www.theinquirer.net/inq...
https://community.sophos.com/k...
). Antivirus vendors have been screwing up too often - false positives (blacklisting OS files etc), being exploitable (like this), being unstable, using too much resources.

Real time AV scanning should only be used by people who are incompetent enough to screw up their own systems (or let malware do it) more often than a AV company would. If you know what you are doing you wouldn't be using real-time AV scanning. You'd only scan certain stuff using sacrificial machines and more as a precaution and additional layer of defence.

So when are we going to get this: https://threatpost.com/ibm-unv...

I mean it's not like I've been waiting or asking for it for years: https://it.slashdot.org/commen...
https://mobile.slashdot.org/co...

Shared key WPA2 means that anyone who knows the shared key can decrypt other people's traffic if they managed to sniff the 4-way handshake messages:
https://mrncciew.com/2014/08/1...
http://www.howtogeek.com/20433...

It's true using WiFi means you still have to trust the entity providing it, but that's the same with a wired network or using an ISP.

To those who say "use VPNs" I'd say:
1) Defense in depth
2) that's a different layer - just because you can workaround a broken layer doesn't mean the broken layer isn't broken. The fact is the layer already has encryption but it has a broken implementation which can be improved.

Hahaha. It's even simpler than that. Everyone seems to be making the assumption that the cars will be such driving geniuses. That's not going to happen for quite a long while.

0) We all know that stopping in the middle of the highway is dangerous, BUT the way the laws are written in most countries, it's practically always your fault if you drive into the rear of another vehicle especially if it didn't swerve into your path and merely braked suddenly, or worse was stationary for some time.

1) Thus for legal and liability reasons the robot cars will be strictly obeying all convincing posted speed limits (even if they are stupidly slow by some mistake, or by some prankster), and will stick to speeds where they would be able to brake in time to avoid collisions or at least fatal collisions. Whichever is slower.

2) In most danger situations the robot cars will brake and try to come to a stop ASAP all while turning on its hazard lights. Which shouldn't be too difficult at those said speeds.

3) If people die because of tailgating it's the tailgater's fault. Same if the driver behind doesn't stop.

4) There are hardware/software failures then it's some vendors fault.

5) If braking won't avoid the problem even at "tortoise speeds", in most cases fancy moves wouldn't either. In the fringe cases where fancy moves would have helped but braking wouldn't AND it would be the robot car's fault if it braked, the insurance companies would be more than willing to take those bets.

The odds of the car being designed to do fancier moves to save lives are practically zero. If I was designing the car I wouldn't do it - imagine if the car got confused and did some fancy moves to "avoid collision" and killed some little kids. In contrast if it got confused and came to stop ASAP if any little kids are killed it would more likely be someone else's fault.

If you are a human driver/cyclist/motorcyclist you better not tailgate such cars.

Look at the Google car accident history, most of the accidents were due to other drivers. Perhaps I'm wrong but my guess is it's because of "tailgating". Those drivers might still believe the AI car was doing it wrong but the law wouldn't be on their side.

Actually what those webpages would want is your location, and they don't need GPS for that.

Have you ever seen a browser prompt asking you for permission to share your location? If you allow it, the browser will figure it out (often with the help of Google if it's Firefox/Chrome) and then send the location to the page.

In many populated areas all is needed is WiFi to get 50m accuracy of your location. If there's no WiFi, a guess will be made, sometimes the guess isn't far off, sometimes it is.

Check out an implementation here:
https://edsu.github.io/creepy-...
(allow the share location request if you are brave and willing to test it out). For best results use a laptop with WiFi enabled.

From internal testing, WiFi location can be quite accurate AND more importantly it often can work where GPS doesn't - e.g. inside a mall. Google presumably populates and updates their DB with the help of android phones (that have stuck to the default of "high accuracy") and their streetview vehicles.

Microsoft probably is doing a similar thing but they don't have quite as many phones out there.

Intelligence is definitely genetic and heritable, but many of those genes might not solely be for raw intelligence.

After all to do OK in many education systems (e.g. complete the course) you often have to be able to sit down for hours without causing problems for yourself or to others around you. And you often have to be able to handle authority well even if that authority is wrong ;). You might also have to be able to handle "traditional teaching" methods - e.g. learn from someone who drones on for most of an hour or more. And last but not least you might need to be able to delay gratification.

I'm pretty sure many of you know people who completed schooling and yet would do worse than a crow in solving some puzzles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

What I find interesting is a crow has a brain the size of a walnut and seems more intelligent that animals with much larger brains. Brains cost a fair bit more to keep around than just fat, so why do many animals have much bigger brains despite being stupider and not having longer lifespans? Redundancy?

Huh but that Fairphone also has a fused display right? What's the difference between that and the LG's fused display stuff?

Fairphone 2:

LG:

So either the Fairphone should be downgraded to a 9/10 or the LG should be upgraded to a 9/10.

it's not rare, it's just well concealed ;)

Guild Wars 1 had some skills that split to PvE and PvP versions for balancing reasons. The PvP stuff takes in effect in PvP matches.

Too bad Arenanet/NCSoft has mostly abandoned Guild Wars 1 and only a few play it nowadays.

It was a great game from the game mechanics perspective. Many like to praise Guild Wars 2 for doing away with the Holy Trinity, but the fact was Guild Wars 1 wasn't really based on the Holy Trinity from the start. In both PvE and PvP there were far more possible roles than Tank, Healer, DPS. There are shutdown builds, PvE minion masters, PvE runner, PvP split, PvP flag runner, frontline, linebacking, later on there was stuff like PvE spirit spammers, shadowform assasins and so on.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This is a Guild vs Guild game where two split elementalists split off from their main team to go against a monk (healer) who is supposed to help defend the base (and who should have called for reinforcements on seeing more than one split ele).

Then there are spike team builds where you need a bit more timing and coordination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Then here's a guy playing a shutdown mesmer: http://www.twitch.tv/koodikoir...

And not least for PvE you can have Heroes - which are a bit like semi-autonomous player controlled NPCs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(there used to be PvP where you had heroes, but Anet removed that PvP format, shame really).

Problem was/is Guild Wars 1 was not so great from the community and social perspective (you can't send messages to people who are offline, no auction). And you can't queue up for PvP matches while doing PvE or other stuff.

On a related note:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...

Seriously, in my opinion if an entity can declare in the USA (for example) earnings and other stuff as its own, borrow money using it as collateral, and decide how that $$$$ or stuff is used, then that entity actually owns the stuff and should pay the relevant taxes.

So many corporations are saying to shareholders and everyone else that the huge profits are theirs and yet turn to the tax dept and say no they didn't make any profit - the profits belong to some company in Ireland or wherever else. In my opinion that's fraudulent from an ethical point of view.

Say you tried to do the same thing - declare some $$$$$$ income in official public announcements/filings to everyone, borrow money using that income, order "unrelated people (who somehow have similar names as yours)" to use that income to buy stuff. Do you think you'd get away with telling the Tax Dept that the income isn't yours and you don't have to pay taxes on it?

Maybe this would cause some companies to fully move out from the USA to other countries. But at least they would no longer benefit from what the USA provides without paying their fair share.

Uh the pixar lamps have more emotion than the actors in the phantom menace.

That movie was so bad - it seemed to me like most of the actors were just reading their lines for the first time, and then George Lucas goes "CUT! OK that's good, let's go make more dresses for Amidala".

It's like someone doing a presentation for the first time and reading what's written on it line by line vs someone doing it for the 100th time and going "fuck the slide, now let me tell you a story". It takes a while for actors to figure out who their character should be and how the character would and should act.

And that sort of thing results in Han Solo's famous in-character "I know" to Leia's "I love you" instead of the boring forgettable "I love you, too" that was apparently in the script.

That's why you hire actors - for their input - they'll tell you that their character shouldn't do X and should and would do Y instead. They might not always be right, but the good ones often are since they're focusing on that one character whereas you as the director are doing a lot of other things. The original writer might write a lot of stuff that works in a book, but doesn't work in a movie.

Someone earlier said acting was lying. But it's a higher form of lying where you are true to the character. Just like the Joker hospital explosion scene when not all the explosions went off as planned, and Heath Ledger improvised and turned the fault into a cool feature.

A nonactor like me could "tell the same lies" but not be believable as that character at all.

How about this: http://www.businessinsider.com...

I don't really know how good the research actually is, given its claim that nobody could see blue till modern times. I'm pretty sure the Israelites knew and saw blue quite a long time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But that article is also about how language may change how you see the world ;).

I think the next job would be to see what happens when it starts rusting a bit or gets scratched/nicked or gets heated up or temperature cycled. See how much of the strength is lost.

I wouldn't rely on the material for important stuff till I knew how the material can fail and how well it fails.

And the point of submarines with nuclear missiles is to make a nuclear capable enemy more convinced that MAD is really MAD. They can't wipe out all your nuclear missile silos and survive because you have enough hidden "nuclear missile silos" aka submarines in the ocean to wipe them out.

The oceans are big places, you might be able to locate submarines that you already know the rough location of. But how are you going to bounce laser light off a hull if you're not even within 50km of the submarine?

Wake detection could work better, however if the submarines don't move that fast and if they are deep underwater they won't leave as big wakes.