Well isn't that sort of the coral reef on which political idealism actually founders most of the time?

Those ugly, pedestrian realities of having a job, earning money, feeding oneself/family...all are far higher on MOST peoples' lists than some dilettante political experiment.

Face it, the reason that the Founding Fathers had the spare time to be involved and do what they did was BECAUSE they were wealthy, successful people who had the spare time to do so.

Of course, the particularly unique feature of their actions were that they seemed to be at the intersection of the Enlightenment and Noblesse Oblige - where today the political experiments seem to be more about some sort of collective narcissism.

...honestly, not even worth reporting.

1) India has trouble building tanks, airplanes, ships, and subs...far more 'pedestrian' tools of warfare. Their programs are bloated and rife with corruption, delays, technical failures, overpromises, etc. such that they are only capable of producing inferior equipment at ridiculous costs.

2) India is the second most populous country in the world. If there's anything they DON'T need it's to replace the dirt-cheap organic, self-replicating, minimally-functional dubious cannon fodder they currently have with hideously expensive, fragile, dubious cannon fodder made out of plastic and metal that they don't have and likely will never be able to build for the foreseeable future.

The fact that you ask why it's important that citizens have the right NOT to answer questions demanded by "authority" just shows how completely fucked-up our society is, and what cheerfully-programmed little robots we're making.

Wonderful.

The criticism seems rather pedantic. I'm the last one to defend the barely-reading, never-correcting, link-to-blog-post-instead-of-actual-article, duplicate-posting slasheditors, but the fact is:
1) the server has a place where you put in a code and, i'd guess, a passcode. He looked at the code, determined the data was being drawn by a simple java query to an unsecured text file. Did he get the data the way it was intended? CERTAINLY not. Did he essentially 'break in' through what was relatively tissue-thin (derived from obscurity only, really) security? Yes, I'd say he did. So yes, in MOST people's definitions, he 'hacked' their shitty website.
2) WTF are you talking about? Every school system in existence ADJUSTS grades on standardized tests? Proof? The guy discovered that something like of the passing scores (everything > 35), like 40% of the possible scores NEVER showed up. Ie, nobody *ever* got a score of 82, 84, 91, or 93, while 94-100 was regularly distributed. Mathematical anomaly? Maybe. But that seems unlikely with a massive test, and multiple added scores that this is possible.

I think what he discovered was a ridiculously insecure web service, and a list of grade scores that have suspiciously regular omissions.

So "hacked" and "possible grade tampering" seems pretty spot on.

Is it coincidence that this story is on slashdot only a few inches below a story about how 'agile' development is chaotic, undirected, and often results in version-chaos?

As the posters all said...

"CHANGE"

So you wouldn't have had an issue with Dick Cheney having a separate, "private" email account that he used in office, because certainly he wouldn't have discussed anything important there that he wanted 'off the books', right?

KY is a single-party recording state.
At least one of the parties to a recording must be aware the recording is taking place.

It's about as cut and dried illegal as can be.

Even if your target's an asshole. (shrug)

But then zealots always have reasons that the rules don't apply to them, right?

Sure, eventually we'll need to move to IPv6.

But if you look at the IP utilization there are GIANT blocks of IP addresses that are locked behind allocations determined by technology's 'big players' in what, 1981? 1990?

The facts are that:
1) IP addresses are not actually 'running out' anytime soon
2) it's going to be far easier to simply re-allocate blocks that are currently unused than to force everyone to buy new hardware.
3) in most cases today, people aren't consuming new IP's, in fact, I suspect that most organizations are fronting with fewer IPs, and translating that internally. So the demand curve is slowing anyway.

I simply don't believe it.

In there, you have a GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL claiming that he's happy that they could do MORE with LESS?

Seriously, this is the internet but there is just some shit that I cannot believe.

What you're describing isn't a 'systemic' problem...it's a HUMAN problem.
Essentially: People are dicks.

Kids are especially dicks, before they (hopefully) start to internalize the social-conduct rules that allow us to live in societies.

No matter how many wellness-meetings we hold, empowerment seminars we attend, etc. it won't matter. The fact is that humans are animals and there's ontological developmental stage where 'little animal humans' (hopefully) learn not to bite, hit, or poop on the floor. Shortly thereafter, there's an intellectual/social phase where we (hopefully, again) learn treat each other with a minimum of empathy and respect, usually through being treated like shit ourselves.

It's rough, and frankly, not all survive. Until we physiologically evolve to being sensitive humans coming out of the womb, it's not going to change. And as far as I've noticed, seclusion (ie home schooling during those formative years) simply stunts that development-track in one way or another.

But I have it on good authority that +3 degrees C is pretty much going to kill us all?

When you extrapolate
1) the increasingly-vaguely-worded and -legally-authorized reach of national governments to act in what might be defined broadly as "military" ways wherever they see fit

2) plus the ever-increasing capabilities of non-state actors (some call them terrorists, when it's convenient) and the state-sponsors that back them, not to mention the actual inability of states to closely control these assets

3) the (current) ability to execute such actions through proxies/remotely/etc such that they are nearly perfectly anonymous

4) and the increasingly brittle infrastructure of a modern, interconnected, INTEGRATED data- and electronically-driven (mostly Western) society.

The intersection of these lines seems inevitable: a non-state actor (perhaps sponsored by a state, whether or not this specific action IS sponsored/authorized) is going to accomplish something really heinous, like a Chernobyl-level meltdown, or perhaps the destruction of the electrical grid across the East Coast of the US (something that costs $billions and/or thousands+ of lives).

What happens then? If the US is catapulted into a paroxysm of 10 years of war over the relatively puny-but-showy 3000 deaths of the WTC attack, what would we do if that casualty number was 20,000? 100,000?

"Someone will need to pay dearly" would seem to be the logical response of this otherwise-torpid democracy. But what if we don't know who that is, or (almost worse) are only "pretty sure" we know who it is?

I wish somebody would stop and ask the following question: What is the ethical way to treat massive numbers of abandoned and unadoptable pets, if you don't have an endless farm somewhere upstate with endless food and veterinary care? I don't love PETA (for reasons unrelated to this) but I'm pretty sure that if they had alternatives beside euthanasia, they would use them. It's sad, but let's not be children about it. The alternative for those animals is a fate much worse than a humane death at the hands of PETA. I only wish that instead of sending the animals for incineration, they would donate them to local Chinese restaurants, to spare the lives of other animals that would not need to die to be on a menu.

(shrug) And XboxOne really isn't that creative of a name.

I bet if you could search all the other domains registered to that person, you'd find XboxPro, XboxSuper, XboxUltimate, etc.