"Galleria" is the name of the mall that the store is in. That term doesn't apply "they", the Tesla stores,just that one store is in Galleria mall.

4TB, I believe. AC's conspiracy theory is that all the drive companies have had 50TB drives they've been hiding. Since most of them have been driven out of the hard drive business, I guess they were so committed to the conspiracy that they'd rather fold than get rich selling huge drives.

Such is the logic of the left-wing nutjob conspiracy theorists. Damn the NSA for making them right about something. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Yep, they've had it since 2004, when all twelve of the drive manufacturers agreed to just sit on it while Western Digital kicked their butt in the marketplace. Nine of them went out of business rather than reveal their secret.

This past weekend I walked by the Tesla store in Houston. I guess one of their employees got a dealer's license or something. I know two people with dealer's licenses, one owns a small dealership and the other sells a few cars a month from his front yard, so I guess it's not THAT big of a deal.

Draconian means cruelly severe, after Draco, who specified death and dismemberment for minor offenses we'd have fines for.

Are you really SO spoiled, SO entitled, that you think EVENTUALLY slowing down your high speed internet because you refuse to respect the rights of others is the same as someone having their head chopped off? I didn't know such spoiled brats actually existed, not THAT spoiled.

Maybe when someone is talking about "draconian laws", draco (law giver) would be appropriate. Or just look up draconian.

If you fry them in margarine and cover them with cinnamon they are disgusting. If you mash them with white sugar, butter, and vanilla, stir in beaten eggs and bake, they are extremely delicious.

How did it work out when the Irish tried that? The key word is "survived". The Irish died relying on the potato.

A) this exact story was on Slashdot a couple months ago.
B) judges don't like smartasses who play word games with the law. You can only hope the judge dislikes the NSA even more.

Look up Draco sometime. You just said that slower internet for the third offense is the same as the death penalty on the first offence. Or did you mean that having your internet service turned off for a few months is equalivent to having your eye removed?

You could, you know, stop stealing after you get caught twice.

TLA says:
  "suggests some ongoing shift in user behavior, and likely some net reduction in infringement," Giblin said. However, the research noted that [when everyone e found out the NSA was watching their traffic] encrypted HTTPS increased.

They are assuming that all / most https traffic is piracy. Much more likely, as sites like Google start using https more, and people find out the NSA is watching, people have been using https for routine web traffic.

You can legitimately say that you don't like copyright. Fine. You could almost make a coherent argument that programmers, record producers, and videographers should all work two jobs, one to eat and one (for free) to give you free shit. Kinda silly, but that's at least cogent. When you start saying "it doesn't reduce infringement, and here's the evidence - our study shows that it does, but we wish it didn't, therefore it doesn't" - at that point you've just gone off the deep end and are making yourself look like a complete nutjob.

Issues originating from kernel.org can and have been seen and fixed because each of the thousands of developers has their own copy and sees all changes. An attacker would need root access to everybody's desktops, or at least they'd need to know who might be interested in that area of the kernel and root those developers machines.

You have a point, Red Hat does a LOT more development than Canonical, so maybe that's not the best example.
Offhand, I don't know what the BEST example is. I think you get the point, though. I've just been reading about the different options for caching disk devices on Flash and I noticed the three developers of different implementations, and the fans of the three implementations, assisted in pointing out weaknesses in competing implementations.

Binary blobs are bad, m'kay. No argument there. However, IO-MMUs like VT-d, which is used by Core i* processors, seem to be a pretty strong protection. The approach is simple and therefore should be robust, and it directly handles the root issue, rather than trying to band-aid the symptom as Microsoft Security Essentials and similar do.

It is my understanding that DMA address space is assigned at runtime, but it's allocated at boot time, meaning a device can't gain access to memory not allocated for DMA at boot time. Memory management isn't "my thing", though, the storage stack is, and to some extent early boot is my thing. What you're talking about is handled by the memory management people.

For the Linux kernel, that's how development is done already, for quality control and bloat reduction. Nobody can commit by themselves, it takes at least three people to get a change into mainline. Each developer has their own copy of the tree into which changes are pulled, so they can see all changes that are made, and who made them.

For each part of the kernel, there are a number of people particularly interested in that bit who watch it and work on it. For example, the people making NAS and SAN devices and services keep a close eye on the storage subsystems. Myself, I watch the cm storage stack generally, more specifically LVM, and even more specifically snapshots. There are a few dozen people around the world with special interest in that particular part of the code. No backdoors will come in without some of us spotting it. What COULD happen is that some code could come in that isn't quite as secure as it could be.

It just so happens that I'm a security professional who uses advanced Linux storage systems for a security product called Clonebox, so that's at least one security professional closely watching that part of the code. Thousands of others watch the other parts.

It's convenient that a lot of the development is done by companies like Netapp, Amazon (S3) and Google. You can bet that when Amazon submits code, Netapp and Google are looking closely at it. When RedHat submits something, Canonical will point out any reasons it shouldn't be accepted.