Since you're being frank with me, I'll be frank right back. You are completely out of touch with contemporary cinema. There have been plenty of excellent movies released by 'the industry' and screened in Portland theaters over the past 4 years. You just aren't connected with what is going on in film these days.

Examples:

• Winnebago Man
• Tree of Life
• Exit Through the Gift Shop
• Inside Job
• Black Swan
• True Grit
• Hangover
• King's Speech
• Milk

Seth

How can we encourage children to be active if anything "active" thay they would think about doing (running, playing tag, climbing trees, skateboarding, etc...) is seen in a negative light?

I just Google+ friended you for that statement. There are so many activities, such as the great examples you gave, that the author could rewrite this study substituting for the word 'playground.' One of the bees in my bonnet these days is how diving boards are being phased out at public swimming pools.

It started with phasing out high-dives. Now low-dives are also an endangered animal. New public pools are built shallow with water slides instead of diving boards. From the first to the 10,000th time a kid slides down a waterslide, they've developed exactly zero skills at doing anything. It's passive entertainment. There's no sense of performance or challenge. With a diving board, there are a whole host of dynamics a child can attempt to master. Our society is taking that structure away from children in so many areas.

If you watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics, you might have seen the Chinese divers dominate in all categories. American children might have seen that and said, "Mommy, I want to become a diver and win a gold medal at the Olympics." To which an honest parent would have to say, "Unfortunately, you live in America and aren't permitted to engage in that activity. Perhaps if we move to a dangerous country like China you'll have that option in life."

Seth

What world do you live in where the FBI couldn't wrangle some information out of the NSA if they needed it?

I live in a world where the NSA is above the FBI in the organizational pecking order. In this world, the NSA will stand by and watch entire buildings go up in flames rather than divulge information that would reveal its spying capabilities.

That's not to say the NSA doesn't tip off law enforcement in special ways. Consider the 2000 NYE bomb plot foiled by custom agents. It's likely that the NSA had a hand in this but hid their communications intercepting capabilities by enabling the perpetrator to be caught through a 'random' customs inspection.

In the case of the Anonymous arrests, the court will have to see evidence of why the feds believe these suspects are the perpetrators of cyber hooliganism. The feds won't be able to say, "Well, we captured every packet traveling on the internet backbone and traced these packets to the mac addresses of these people's computers." The NSA won't allow that because all the bad guys would then see that communication channel is compromised.

Seth

Relying on multiple proxy servers as the first line of defense can be rendered useless by those with unfettered access to the Internet backbone and ISP data centers.

Hmmmm... I wonder what the search warrant for that wiretap looks like. Oh, wait. That wouldn't be admissible in court.

The tools of the NSA are not at the disposal of the FBI for domestic surveillance. The NSA uses them to passively gather intelligence. If they were used in an overt manner, then the people the NSA are spying on would be tipped off to the compromised communication channels. The NSA isn't going to divulge their methods to the criminal public at large so the FBI can collar a few script kiddies. The tools are just too valuable to render useless for such a small prize.

Seth

the police video tape the public every time they stop a vehicle.

In Austin, Texas, when the police shoot someone they've pulled over, they are allowed to review the dash camera before having to give a statement or answer any questions about the incident. This policy was instituted by police chief Art Acevedo to ensure that the descriptions of the incidents given by officers would align with the video taped evidence. Civilians are not afforded this privilege, however.

Seth

Reading your comment here, it is clear that you haven't wasted the time to research the philosophy / structure of the anonymous group. Which is a perfectly fine way to go about your life. You haven't missed out on much.

But to clarify the expected result of this raid, I thought it might be valuable for those unfamiliar with Anonymous to know that the group is entirely anonymous, even among members. The people who were captured would probably love to roll on others in order to avoid jail time. That is not a choice for them, however. This makes it an attractive mob to manipulate.

The feds will relish a day or two capturing headlines, pretending that "something" has been done to curtail these nefarious hackers. It's exactly as theatrical as the war on terror. At most they'll charge these individuals with possession of child pornography, as their browser cache is undoubtedly filled with thumbnails of illegal content inadvertently picked up while trawling 4chan. It's quite doubtful the FBI has captured anyone of significance.

Seth

More than those two, Wired itself has been untrustworthy since the Conde Nast acquisition. Since then, advertorial has increased dramatically. The most recent, glaring, example was the piece fawning about Symantec staff dissecting stuxnet. Read through that piece and count how many references there are to the size and scale of Symantec's resources.

Of the article's 54 usages of the name "Symantec", the 3rd one down the page is a classic example of PR designed to raise a company's profile among its competitors:

In 2002 he took a job with an antispam firm, which was gobbled up by Symantec soon afterwards. O Murchu eventually transferred to the corporate giant's Culver City office, leaving Dublin for Southern California.

The article is absolutely riddled with praise like that.

Seth Johnsnon

I think we're both on the same side of this issue and only splitting hairs at this point.

As for 'eventuations', we've had a shoe bomber and an underwear bomber succeed in smuggling explosive PETN past the TSA's Maginot defenses. In both cases, the bombing attempts were foiled by flimsy detonation systems. As much as other passengers seemed to have intervened, a competent plan wouldn't have provided any opportunity for passengers to respond. For instance, had either bomb-carrier attempted to detonate the concealed PETN while in the lavatory, no one could have recognized what was happening.

TSA's huge investment is equally elaborate as the Maginot line, and equally as simple to circumvent. The only difference is that the buffoons who have to date attempted, made other errors in their execution. The errors are so trivial, that it further illustrates the limited resources and intelligence required to circumvent the TSA security system.

Seth

I wholeheartedly agree with you. TSA is a very expensive security theater troupe creating a ridiculous Maginot line around our airports.

Not only will these expensive body scanners not be effective against internally-hidden explosives, even if the TSA cat-scanned passengers, the screeners would need a medical degree to recognize the difference between explosives and artificial joints, plates, etc.

The explosives hidden in the printer cartridges were x-rayed and eluded detection. Consider this from Wikipedia:

Both parcels in the 2010 cargo plane bomb plot were x-rayed without the bombs being spotted.[40] Qatar Airways said the PETN bomb "could not be detected by x-ray screening or trained sniffer dogs".[41] The Bundeskriminalamt received copies of the Dubai x-rays, and an investigator said German staff would not have identified the bomb either.[40][42] New airport security procedures followed in the U.S., largely to protect against PETN.[15]

The Maginot Line metaphor is especially valid as none of the recent airplane bomb plots have originated from within the US, so installation of expensive body scanners domestically does little to prevent bombs aboard inbound international flights.

Seth

That sort of logic is exactly why Yahoo is a prime candidate for buying Hulu. They're suckers for buying video streaming services without a proper understanding of how it will operate in their own hands. Consider their acquisition of Broadcast.com from Mark Cuban in the late nineties. It was the single deal that made him the billionaire he is today.

From wikipedia:

In April 1999, Yahoo! acquired the company for $5.7 billion in stock and renamed it Yahoo! Broadcast Solutions. Over the next few years Yahoo! split the services previously offered by Broadcast.com into separate services, Yahoo! Launchcast for music and Yahoo! Platinum for video entertainment. Yahoo! Platinum has since been discontinued, its functionality being offered as part of two pay services, AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet and Yahoo! Plus.

As of May 2011, neither broadcast.com nor broadcast.yahoo.com are distinct web addresses; both simply redirect to yahoo.com.

As you can see, the folks at Comcast, News Corp, and Disney have found their mark for dumping Hulu.

Shai,

Kudos to you for empowering consumers with an app. This is the kind of reason I got a smart phone in the first place. Traditional voice mail was so torturous to me, I stopped listening to mine and changed the greeting to "If you leave a message, I'll never hear it. I'll return your call when I see your number on my caller-ID." When Apple introduced 'visual voicemail,' I bought an iPhone. Your app extends that empowerment to dealing with other people's voicemail / call trees.

Thank you and best wishes,

Seth

No disrespect to you, because I think a few years back, this was a very relevant criticism. People like MafiaBoy were making a single splash, then promptly put behind bars without much delay.

Natural selection has largely removed those type of cyber vandals from the populace. What remains are the smarter hooligans who have learned from the failures of others how to properly cover their tracks.

The weakest link in any group of criminals is the group itself. In this case, I suspect the members have intentionally maintained anonymity between themselves. This will insulate their group from any member that might become compromised by law enforcement and/or promises of rewards.

Seth

I'm not convinced Apple plans to release products with this 'feature'. I think it's an investment in a concept with the goal of licensing the patent should a third-party decide to approach this solution to a perceived problem.

There has been a lot of research into this by the motion picture studios in their effort to squelch bootlegging movies in the theater. Most of their best results have been in bouncing IR throughout an auditorium and catching bounces that indicate a video camera lens is pointing at the movie screen. But they'd be much happier with the solution proposed by Apple's patent...

Here's how it could work-- Apple could charge $1 per unit for this license. All the hardware vendors (video camera, phone, DSLR, etc) would refuse to implement it because they don't want to increase their unit production costs. The movie studios, however, could pay the hardware folks $2 per device sold with the technology. The risk of movie piracy isn't so great from cellphone cameras, but more so from traditional handheld DV & DSLR cameras. If 50 million such cameras are sold each year, the studios would pay $100 million (half to the hardware companies, half to Apple). Not a huge cost in the grand scheme of their industry. They could also re-coup some of that investment by selling the blocking transmitters to private entities.

Seth

The code works by natural selection. If it executes a buy&sell sequence that amounts to a profit, it is allowed to continue it's rule execution on additional trades. A code monitor manage the rules that are in play. If something is performing poorly (losing money on repetitive trades or stuck holding an asset for an extended amount of time), its assets are dumped back to the market and it's pulled out of the mix.

In high frequency trading, you can also run your code in a simulator mode that will track 'what-if' purchase and sales, but you won't know for certain how the market (i.e. other high-frequency trading entities) will respond until you run your code live.

Seth

I could easily write a program to generate every possible 100-word review (for instance), store them in a closet, and claim copyright over every single 100-word review in the world.

I encourage you to attempt your proposed effort at writing such a program. All the computers in the world working 24 x 7 on such a task wouldn't complete it in your lifetime. The Oxford dictionary contains more than 171,476 English words. Do you know how many unique combinations of those words are possible within a 100-unit space? And consider all the alpha-numeric variations, proper nouns, foreign words and foreign nouns.

You're going to want to make some extra space in your closet for storing all those reviews.

Seth