I thought that was called "profitable disclosure".

Can someone forward the parent post to every world leader, corporation and Murdoch paper on the planet.

Given the stuff most lawyers come up with, I'm not so sure consulting Slashdot readers can be that much worse no matter how incorrect/blatantly stupid/illegal it might be.

The church would lobby for the guy to be declared a terrorist. After all, it's their divine right to abuse videos (see the lawsuits by the actors involved in the recent video scandal).

There are guides on the hidden TOR services on how to get people/organizations SWATted, but I cannot condone such tactics. Smirk, yes, but not condone.

To be a true measure, you need latency as well. After all, you can't really play a decent MMORG if the latency is through the roof.

As two dimensional values confuse people, I suggest dividing the bandwidth by the delays in getting it, giving you Libraries of Congress per second per fillibuster.

My understanding is that Satan discards spammer souls as unfit for Hell, and they langush instead in the Bog of Eternal Stench.

Actually, USENET was middle-aged when those Utah lawyers posted the first mainstream spam. (And the more serious crime was their publishing a book on how to exploit the Internet to harvest personal data and spam them.)

AT&T should have been terminated, not just by USENET but by the MBone and maybe even some of their Tier 1 peers. Not just until they did something, but permanently. Some crimes should not be forgiven, and AT&T's actions then have cost the world on aggregate since that time (bandwidth ain't cheap, neither is storage) far more than the market value of AT&T. This was anticipated and widely expected to be the outcome of AT&T's negligence. Sometimes, the best option is to cut your losses and run, and AT&T was definitely a loss.

Today, such action would serve little purpose. Spam, which is essentially economic cyberwarfare, has become too widespread. You can't dig it up by the roots, there are too many of them. It will require action on a far larger scale. System admins, network admins and ISP admins alike will have to become the largest gang of herbicidal maniacs ever gathered in one virtual spot. Exterminating botnets, the ultimate weed, will require a change in attitudes. Provider agreements must make spamming grounds for terminating Internet access. System admins must monitor their systems more rigorously for evidence of compromise. Network admins must stop assuming they can just get away with a trivial spam filter then ignore the problem. Spam is a reduction of service, rather than a denial of it, but then in a DDOS, so is each individual component of that attack. Network admins wouldn't be caught dead regarding components of a DDOS as something they can just ignore. Same's true here.

The browser string helps to identify if the browser can perform certain functions. So send a string that specifies "server-visible capabilities" (ie: what the user wants the server to know about the capabilities of the browser) instead. Then no browser, OS or other potential privacy loopholes exist.

But what if you don't want the server to know anything? That's the point about sending a capabilities string. If you don't want to specify, there's no need to. Having said that, setting a bit that indicates "HTML 4.01-compliant" is not revealing anything terribly informative to anyone, since that's going to be true of 99% of user agents at this point. Which means you're not part of the 1%, but that's about it.

HTML 5 is the only awkweird one, as you'd have to have a bit for some generally-agreed group of functions, since there's no fixed standard. (IIRC, that's going to switch to having a "rolling development branch" and fixed "stable snapshots", but for now there's no stable spec you can identify with a simple flag.)

True, some browsers implement subsets (and/or extensions to) approved standards, but frankly the headache for developers is to support those kinds of freaks. A fixed list of supported standards you can switch between is really what you want. Special cases for every browser make for something that is unmaintainable, as anyone who has developed a web app can tell you. Freak cases really should be reduced to "nearest available standard" where at all possible.

This satisfies all the requirements of the server, for behaving correctly on multiple browsers, without giving anything away that could be misused.

Furthermore, since I'm saying the capabilities string is a bunch of flags, you can specify masks per site or site grouping if you want to conceal some information from some servers. (This makes user tracking via the agent impossible, since the agent can now vary and there's fine-grained control over how it varies.) Not a million miles from how security is handled in every other case.

So what you're saying is the headline should have read "180k-Year-Old Mutation Allowed Humans To Become apisceanic, Move Out of Africa".

Actually, it is. We've identified the specific genes for 14% of it and can say with very high confidence that 60-70% of your intelligence is genetic in nature. I'm going to go out on a limb and say 25-30% is epigenetic (basically environmental chemicals) and 15% tops is due to nurture outside of environmental chemicals, possibly going down to zero.

(1) is often referred to as a "founder event", particularly by people like Ken Nordtvedt, who studies human migrations through genetics as a hobby.

(3) There are an estimated 200 mutations in the Y chromosome alone every generation, be they extra copies/deletions of something (known as a short tandem repeat) or a change in a single nucleotide (known as a single nucleotide polymorphism). Most of this is in "junk" DNA (now known to be control sequences and metadata - a prediction many had made for two or three decades at least, and I've been making on Slashdot for 10+ years) but it's also found in coding sequences. Most genealogy (eg: by Family Tree DNA) is done with the "junk" DNA, most prior health work (eg: by 23AndMe) has been done on the coding sequences but expect that to change to everything at some point. Studies on population migrations suggest one mutated birth (such as the ability to digest milk) can spread over most of the species in 6-7 thousand years, and markers associated with (and do not predate) the Vikings can be found in significant quantities in most inhabited continents after far less time than that. On geological timescales, this qualifies as the Newtonian concept of the infinitesimal.

Non-sequence changes in the epigenome are protein changes in a structure (of sorts) and can arguably still be called mutations. They're typically caused by a response to (non-protein) chemicals in the environment, which essentially act as epigenomic mutagens. Yes, I know, that's not the most common way to phrase it, but the understanding of epigenomics is sufficiently poor that I can probably use such phrasing on Slashdot, and certainly it's close enough in analogy that I could use it in a conversation with someone who actually worked in the field and be understood. Disagreed with, perhaps, or beaten over the head with a baseball bat, but understood nonetheless.

In this post-QM world, why couldn't they be both?

Well, in the Bad Old Days, Unix passwords could only be 8 characters, later extended to 16. Less concerned with the original scheme, more with the fact that Microsoft may be using password algorithms from the 1980s.

Actually, no. In the 1950s, they had few means of identifying low levels of toxic chemicals that might result from radiation exposure (ionising radiation does interesting things to chemistry). Secondly, the radiation source used for food (caesium) produces radiation with VERY different characteristics (the frequency of the x-rays and gamma rays matters and, because you're talking specific quanta having specific effects, you can't simply say X times the frequency equals X times the effect, the effects have to be treated as utterly unrelated).

Most of the food research was being done by biochemists and inorganic biochemists in the 1970s and 80s, particularly the inorganic biochemists.