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Comment NSA doing its job (Score 1) 242

Spying on foreign governments is pretty much the job description of the NSA. Spying on domestic communications is something they get away with, spying on foreign communications is what they were created to do.

I imagine the Mexican government will be publicly shocked to learn these details, but their counterintelligence teams have likely privately detected and thwarted other US hacking attempts.

Comment Re:Covering butt (Score 2) 125

Oddly enough, computers are not typically good at making complex judgement calls, like determining whether or not a given product is "food" under the arcane definitions in various cities, counties, and states. That requires a person to research the product, research the law, and apply the latter to the former.

Years ago, before Amazon changed to supporting sales taxes, there was an effort by several online retailers to negotiate with states to create a uniform set of taxable categories, so products could be classified once, and only the tax rate would be variable from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Regrettably, this effort did not succeed.

Comment Re:why? (Score 1) 778

Are you confusing Firefox with NoScript? I haven't looked recently, but the whole reason I installed NoScript was that Firefox only allowed enabling or disabling JavaScript globally, and disabling it globally broke too many sites. So I partially agree with the GP that turning off Javascript entirely removes some of the motivation to upgrade the browser.

On the other hand, the concept of trust circles is also somewhat flawed, because there are sites that I've trusted and that have used JavaScript for good reasons, that have been hacked and had malicious Javascript inserted. Maybe that's just my poor choice of who to trust, but judging somebody's security from the outside is hard.

Comment Re:bollocks (Score 1) 678

That sounds fine to me, since you are clearly the kind of person who has never relied on anyone else for help. God created you as a fully formed human being in the middle of the wilderness, and everything you have you made for yourself, never seeing or talking to other humans. Therefore, you can proudly claim to owe nothing to human society.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 121

One upon a time, power utilies ran their lines underground. One result of this is that idiots in backhoes and other similar events would disrupt power.

Underground lines may be less vulnerable to disruption, but they are not immune. Plus, I don't think very many countries have their high voltage distribution lines underground for long distances.

I'm not sure how the "smart grid" is supposed to reduce power outages; most outages are caused by the last mile medium and low voltage systems, and I don't think that has enough redundancy to route around damage. Maybe they can use the smart grid to pinpoint damage more accurately? I suppose the TFA probably explains that, but this is slashdot so I didn't read it.

Comment Re:"stop using OSes"? (Score 1) 201

I think this means no guest OS. You can argue about whether the Erlang runtime constitutes an OS of sorts, but in their example they are not booting a general purpose kernel. Presumably they could port this to run on bare metal instead of Xen, although the boot times for physical hardware would never be as good as starting a new Xen instance.

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