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Comment Re:Attention whore (Score 1) 632

Who gets to define responsible? You, or someone with the same views as you I presume?

While I do not regularly read Wikileaks I pay attention to the big releases and I have not seen anything yet that would constituent a threat to our soldiers or citizens.

I have seen things that were being hidden under the National security blanket that would hurt our government politically but I encourage things that politically hurt governments, its good for the people if the government is politically weak, they cant do as much to us.

Comment Re:More too this story methinks (Score 1) 597

The person who was arrested wasn't the one who made the shot, nor did he look anything like him. The person who made the shot was not arrested.

The person who was arrested, was arrested for something that you can not be arrested for in that state (refusing to show ID) and nothing else. His attitude does not matter since it wasn't breaking any laws.

The police department then dragged on a case while refusing to release the tapes because of an active case, then after they dropped the case (after costing the person who was arrested but did nothing that is a crime or arrestable in the state of WA about $3800) refused to release the tapes, implying that they had been destroyed.

An internal review that viewed the tapes, backed the cops version of events even though the tapes clearly support the person who was arrested version of events.

But yea, lets change the focus away from obvious and provable police corruption to someones clearly legal but in your mind "bad" attitude.

Comment Re:Oh shut up (Score 1) 530

The problem is, he did only give the password to the only designated agent according the the policies of the owner of the equipment. His supervisor, the security person we not designated agents according to the only document that mattered. the cities policies. He followed policy and yet is still on trial, after being in jail on $5,000,000 bond for more than a year. He followed the rules and because that pissed some people off he has lost more than a year of his life and is facing more time lost. Maybe you would give your passwords out to anyone, if so I hope I never work with you or with any company you work for, but I am very careful with the passwords I have been entrusted with and only people that would get those passwords are designated in written company policy.
Government

Submission + - Amazon Fights for Privacy of Customer Records (cnet.com)

suraj.sun writes: Amazon.com filed a lawsuit on Monday to fend off a sweeping demand from North Carolina's tax collectors: detailed records including names and addresses of customers and information about exactly what they had purchased.

The lawsuit says the demand violates the privacy and First Amendment rights of Amazon's customers. North Carolina's Department of Revenue had ordered the online retailer to provide full details on nearly 50 million purchases made by state residents between 2003 and 2010.

Because Amazon has no offices or warehouses in North Carolina, it's not required to collect the customary 5.75 percent sales tax on shipments, although tax collectors have reminded residents that what's known as a use tax applies on anything "purchased or received" through the mail. The dispute arose out of what had otherwise been a routine sales and use tax audit of Amazon by North Carolina's tax agency.

CNET News : http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20002870-38.html

Comment Re:Whistleblower (Score 1) 115

Whistle blower protections only apply when you report the misdeeds to the congressional oversight committee in charge of the organization in question, not when you leak classified information to the press. Not that I disagree with the leaking, just that the law is clear on who gets protected.
Image

Jetman Attempts Intercontinental Flight 140

Last year we ran the story of Yves Rossy and his DIY jetwings. Yves spent $190,000 and countless hours building a set of jet-powered wings which he used to cross the English Channel. Rossy's next goal is to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, from Tangier in Morocco and Tarifa on the southwestern tip of Spain. From the article: "Using a four-cylinder jet pack and carbon fibre wings spanning over 8ft, he will jump out of a plane at 6,500 ft and cruise at 130 mph until he reaches the Spanish coast, when he will parachute to earth." Update 18:57 GMT: mytrip writes: "Yves Rossy took off from Tangiers but five minutes into an expected 15-minute flight he was obliged to ditch into the wind-swept waters."
Software

Company Uses DMCA To Take Down Second-Hand Software 488

dreemteem writes "A judge Tuesday heard arguments in a dispute over software sales that could potentially have repercussions on the secondhand sale of virtually any copyrighted material. The suit was filed by Timothy Vernor, a seller on eBay, after Autodesk, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, asked eBay to remove some of its software products that Vernor had listed for sale there, and later to ban him from the site. Vernor had not illegally copied the software but was selling legitimate CDs of the products secondhand. For that reason, he argued, he was not infringing Autodesk's copyright. Autodesk countered that because it licenses the software, rather than selling it outright, a licensee does not have the right to resell its products."
Programming

In IE8 and Chrome, Processes Are the New Threads 397

SenFo writes "To many of the people who downloaded Google Chrome last week, it was a surprise to observe that each opened tab runs in a separate process rather than a separate thread. Scott Hanselman, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft, discusses some of the benefits of running in separate processes as opposed to separate threads. A quote: 'Ah! But they're slow! They're slow to start up, and they are slow to communicate between, right? Well, kind of, not really anymore.'"
Google

Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B 546

cmd writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today's news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United's total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story." The article makes clear that Google's news bot only noticed the old story because it has been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. The original thought was that stock manipulation may have been behind the incident, but this suspicion seems to be fading.
Role Playing (Games)

A WoW Player's Guide To Warhammer 353

With Warhammer Online just around the corner, Zonk wrote up a guide which compares it to the current top dog of the MMO market, World of Warcraft. He highlights the fact that despite the appearance of "War" in both names, Warhammer is much more focused on the struggle between factions, in gameplay and artistic style. Warhammer's open beta started on Sunday, doing well in the US but stumbling in Europe. The full version launches on Sept. 18th, but people who pre-order the game will be able to access live servers up to four days before, thanks to Mythic's head-start program. Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs recently launched a blog to answer questions about the game.
Space

SpaceX Gets Operational License For Cape Canaveral 133

FiggyOO writes "For those of you who witnessed the launch of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket, launch 3, you will be glad to hear that SpaceX has received a license to launch from space complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the Florida coast. This Launch complex is just south of launch pads 39A and 39B which have been used to launch the space shuttles, and will continue in that role for a few more years. This launch complex will enable SpaceX to launch the much-anticipated Falcon 9 rocket, which will eventually carry the Dragon capsule. In doing so, SpaceX hopes to fill the void between the end of the shuttle program and the coming of the Constellation. They have already begun moving into the launch complex, including moving a 125,000 gallon liquid oxygen tank on the back of a semi." We've been following Elon Musk's SpaceX for years.
The Courts

J. K. Rowling Wins $6,750 In Infringement Case 521

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "J. K. Rowling didn't make enough money on Harry Potter, so she had to make sure that the 'Harry Potter Lexicon' was shut down. After a trial in Manhattan in Warner Bros. v. RDR Books, she won, getting the judge to agree with her (and her friends at Warner Bros. Entertainment) that the 'Lexicon' did not qualify for fair use protection. In a 68-page decision (PDF) the judge concluded that the Lexicon did a little too much 'verbatim copying,' competed with Ms. Rowling's planned encyclopedia, and might compete with her exploitation of songs and poems from the Harry Potter books, although she never made any such claim in presenting her evidence. The judge awarded her $6,750 and granted her an injunction that would prevent the 'Lexicon' from seeing the light of day." Groklaw has an exhaustive discussion of the judgement.
Privacy

Adam Savage Revises Claim of Lawyer-Bullying On RFID Show 301

Nick writes "A few weeks ago a video of a talk given by Adam Savage of the television show MythBusters spread across the internet (including a mention on Slashdot.) On the video, Savage stated that the show was unable to produce an episode about previously known RFID vulnerabilities due to a conference call to Texas Instruments that unexpectedly included several credit card companies' legal counsel. TI (via a spokesperson talking with cnet.com) stated that only one lawyer was on the call and that the majority of the people on the call were product managers from the Smart Card Alliance (SCA) invited by TI to speak. Then Savage (via a Discovery Communications statement) reaffirmed that he was not on the call himself and that the decision was not made by Discovery or their advertising sales department but rather MythBuster's production company, Beyond Productions."
The Internet

Robots Are Net's Future, Says Vint Cerf 118

Ned Nederlander writes "Vint Cerf talks the future of the Internet with Ed Cone: 'I expect to see much more interesting interactions, including the possibility of haptic interactions — touch. Not just touch screens, but the ability to remotely interact with things. Little robots, for example, that are instantiations of you, and are remotely operated, giving you what is called telepresence. It's a step well beyond the kind of video telepresence we are accustomed to seeing today.'"

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