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Comment I can put tape over my own mouth too (Score 0) 764

While I would prefer that Amazon carry a full range of titles encompassing all speech, they are a company, not the government. They are free to carry or not carry whatever titles they choose. While I see no upside to them in not offering a full range, it is their prerogative to select their own wares.

The alternative is that we would force retailers to carry products that they do not wish to carry, which is not something that I see happening in a sane world.

Comment Re:Sauce for the goose (Score 1) 926

Why waste time on cop cars, cops don't make the laws. Put them on the cars of judges and politicians.

"My my judge, it appears that your car likes to drive to the local titty bars at least twice a week. Funny how those cars do love the titties."

"Mr. Senator, can you tell me why it is that your car was parked outside of a known gay bar? Were you doing research for your anti-gay legislation....2 times a week for the last month?"

Comment Re:Uh, no, you can't have my network (Score 2, Insightful) 505

BP is probably not a good analogy to this as there is to my knowledge no evidence that federal involvement from the initial blow out would have made any difference. The feds don't have a solution to capping the well either (and in fact failed rather disastrously in keeping BP in compliance with existing government overseen safety regulations).

I concur that both feds and civilians would work better in concert than opposition, but for civilian networks you are dealing with an area in which the feds have absolutely no expertise. Every network is configured differently, with different requirements, different hardware and different security concerns. To allow feds access to those networks under the auspices of "security" is a ludicrous proposition. If the feds want to improve security they should look at the government computers (which most government offices receive a failing security grade for) and concentrate on making sure that there is absolutely no kind of all encompassing override (like a government backdoor) that could be exploited by attackers.

Comment Re:Uh, no, you can't have my network (Score 4, Insightful) 505

Do you remember Katrina? Do you really want the feds fucking with your network? It is far more plausible to believe that civilian networks will rebound faster from a cyber attack without federal interference because most civilian networks are run by people who do that sort of thing for a living, with their networks, configured properly for their use. Do you really think some random fed network guy is going to be able to reconfigure your network from afar without prior knowledge of how you have it configured? How will they know your user names? How will they access your backups? How will they know which entries on your administrator list are valid administrators and which ones are planted by cyber attackers?

Comment Re:The simple one. (Score 2, Informative) 678

I second this one. Filterware is a bogus solution in just about any case, as there will always be sites it doesn't filter that it should and sites that it does filter that it shouldn't. The best solution is to put the computer in a place where you can always see what is being looked at.

My son's computer is directly beside mine.

Also, as embarrassing as it may be for you, teaching your children comprehensive sex education at an early age won't hurt them any.

Comment TV executives & SciFi (Score 2, Insightful) 753

Simply, I think they don't get SciFi. The SciFi Channel, named after the genre itself ran John Edwards for months and currently devotes at least one day a week to people going around with IR cameras going "I feel a presence". What's another name for "really really bad science fiction movie"? "SciFi Channel Original Feature". I keep waiting for them to redo Night of the Lepus when they run out of types of lizards, snakes, and gothic masonry.

People whose perception of the world is filtered through a layer of ratings analysis are often not the best judge of quality scifi.

Space

Submission + - Mysterious Sound Waves Can Destroy Rockets

Ponca City, We love you writes: "Scientists believe that powerful and unstable sound waves, created by energy supplied by the combustion process, were the cause of rocket failures in several US and Russian rockets and have also observed these mysterious oscillations in other propulsion and power-generating systems such as missiles and gas turbines. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a liquid rocket engine simulator and imaging techniques to help demystify the cause of these explosive sound waves and bring scientists a little closer to being able to understand and prevent them. The team was able to clearly demonstrate that the phenomenon manifests itself in the form of spinning acoustic waves that gain destructive power as they rotate around the rocket's combustion chamber at a rate of 5,000 revolutions per second. Researchers developed a low-pressure combustor to simulate larger rocket engines then used a very-high-speed camera with fiber optic probes to observe the formation and behavior of excited spinning sound waves within the engine. "This is a very troublesome phenomenon in rockets," said Professor Ben Zinn. "These spinning acoustic oscillations destroy engines without anyone fully understanding how these waves are formed. Visualizing this phenomenon brings us a step closer to understanding it.""
Privacy

Submission + - The iPhone Meets the Fourth Amendment (ssrn.com) 3

background image writes: According to Alan M Gershowitz, the doctrine of "search incident to arrest" may allow devices such as mobile phones, pdas and laptops to be thoroughly searched without either probable cause or warrants, and incriminating evidence found in such searches may be used against you whether or not it is germane to the reason for the original arrest.

Imagine that police arrest an individual for a simple traffic infraction, such as running a stop sign. Under the search incident to arrest doctrine, officers are entitled to search the body of the person they are arresting to ensure that he does not have any weapons or will not destroy any evidence. The search incident to an arrest is automatic and allows officers to open containers on the person, even if there is no probable cause to believe there is anything illegal inside of those containers. What happens, however, when the arrestee is carrying an iPhone in his pocket? May the police search the iPhone's call history, cell phone contacts, emails, pictures, movies, calendar entries and, perhaps most significantly, the browsing history from recent internet use? Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent decided well before handheld technology was even contemplated, the answer appears to be yes.

United States

Submission + - SPAM: State of US science report shows disturbing trends 1

coondoggie writes: "The National Science Board this week said leading science and engineering indicators tell a mixed story regarding the achievement of the US in science, research and development, and math in international comparisons. For example, US schools continue to lag behind internationally in science and math education. On the other hand, the US is the largest, single, R&D-performing nation in the world pumping some $340 billion into future-related technologies. The US also leads the world in patent development. The board's conclusions and Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 are contained in the group's biennial report on the state of science and engineering research and education in the United States sent to the President and Congress this week. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
The Internet

Submission + - New AT&T investment all about filtered network (arstechnica.com)

Filtered Coward writes: Last summer, AT&T announced its intention to begin filtering copyrighted content at some point. The telecom has now bought a chunk of Vobile, whose core product is VideoDNA. "Like other systems of its kind, VideoDNA develops a unique signature from every frame of video. The signature is meant to be robust enough to survive various transformations and edits, and it can then be used to run matches against incoming content.' Vobile claims that VideoDNA is good enough to be used on video when transmitted over a network. 'Based on the complexity of the problem, we suspect that anything initially deployed by AT&T will fall far short of a robust P2P video filter. But should AT&T truly have its eyes on just such a prize, the company would be in a powerful position to impose its own policies on the entire US, since it owns major parts of the Internet backbone.'
Censorship

Submission + - Law firm claims copyright on viewing HTML source 2

An anonymous reader writes: A law firm with all sorts of interesting views on copyrights has decided to go the extra mile. As reported on Tech Dirt, they've decided that viewing the HTML source of their site is a violation of copyright. Poorly timed April Fools joke, or just some fancy lawyering?

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