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Comment Wasn't there a book about this? (Score -1, Troll) 138

by XLT_Frank (#48601135) Attached to: How Birds Lost Their Teeth
Except it was a guy who changed into a bird. The concept of micro evolution is fine, but macro evolution never made much sense to me. This being one of them. Why give up teeth and how to convince your unborn offspring to do take it to the next step. You would expect these animals to be superior to us and make conscious decisions to change their DNA, to evolve. The first gender based, non-single cell organism would have had to been born with the ability to successfully reproduce the first time AND so would its compatible mate and have the ability to sustain that new life. That new life would have to survive. What are the chances? Is that chance even a meaningful number that we just keep increasing the time of to increase the one in infinity chance that it could happen?

Comment Re:From Jack Brennan's response (Score 1) 772

by XLT_Frank (#48558297) Attached to: CIA Lied Over Brutal Interrogations
To whom are you referring to when you reference violating rights? Terrorists who have no rights. When will people wake up and realize that the gov't (even though they suck at their job most of the time in the civil area) is there to protect its constituents at all times and with whatever force required. When the gov't fails to do that, that is when they have failed you. People want to be "nice" and live in a box.

Submission + - Launching 2015: a new Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web (eff.org)

Submitted by Peter Eckersley
Peter Eckersley writes: Today EFF, Mozilla, Cisco and Akamai announced a forthcoming project called Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt will be a certificate authority that issues free certificates to any website, using automated protocols (demo video here). Launching in summer 2015, we believe this will be the missing piece that deprecates the woefully insecure HTTP protocol in favor of HTTPS.

Submission + - Player-Run MMORPG by Former Ultima Online Devs Finding Kickstarter Success 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Shards Online has returned to Kickstarter with a refocused plan and a promise to match pledges dollar for dollar up to their goal. With just a week gone by they have already reached 75% of their goal. Project Lead Derek Brinkmann says "If Ultima Online and Neverwinter Nights had a love child, Shards Online would be the result. By combining the persistent virtual world of Ultima Online with the freedom of community run servers and the ability to act as a dungeonmaster in Neverwinter Nights, we are creating a paradise for roleplayers where you are no longer constrained by the rules handed to you by the development team." The team now has their sights set on their stretch goals like more animations for roleplayers and an extra game world to be released at Alpha.

Comment Re:I do not know how you can laugh ... (Score 1) 207

America has turned into a police state and you guys are laughing

I, as an American, find it very hard to swallow the hard fact that my country is no longer the Land of the Free nor Home for the Brave

With 850 Billion (and growing) dossiers to search, anyone in any of the so-called law enforcement agencies get to pry open things that they are not supposed to know, maybe even things that have been erroneously included in the dossier ... and you are laughing !!

I have been watching a lot of Continuum lately and that show has been ringing true as of late. This article reminds me of ARC.... except that this probably doesn't work that well.

Comment Passing Keys (Score 1) 195

by XLT_Frank (#45290317) Attached to: Silent Circle, Lavabit Unite For 'Dark Mail' Encrypted Email Project
When I thought about this problem, if you really want to hide the from/to, you need a third party intermediary. If you want to handle encryption of the subject and message, then a design that leverages P2P would be pretty adequate and acts like a plugin for your favorite mail client. It operates on a two part design, but it is easier to describe from the recipients point of view. When you receive an encrypted message it comes with a key. When you enter the passphrase for that key, it tells you how to retrieve the actual decryption key from the P2P network. The reason is that the key was broken into randomly sized packets, reordered, and dispersed. That key tells you how to retrieve those pieces and how to reorder them. There should be certain amount of overlap in the packets so that if one or two of the packets are missing, the message can still be recovered (this feature would be selectable option per the key that it came with).

Comment Re: I can't wait to see this battle (Score 1) 716

by XLT_Frank (#43742801) Attached to: Google Demands Microsoft Pull YouTube App For WP8

Normally I'd agree, but in this case it really seems like Microsoft is trying to meet the needs of their customers and Google is not cooperating with them in an attempt to squeeze them out of market share. I'm all for sticking it to M$, but when it hurts the consumer ultimately that really makes Google no better than they are.

I see this as, MS giving Win8 users lots of features against Google's ToS knowing Google will win and MS having to remove those features. This will make Win8 users sad and dislike Google. MS will then launch their own video sharing site and app causing those users to put their loyalty into it and launch the service even faster. Just look at how they spun outlook.com

Comment Re:Let's look at this more closely (Score 2) 294

by XLT_Frank (#43336229) Attached to: Judge Rules That Resale of MP3s Violates Copyright Law

Nonsense like this is the inevitable result when trying to apply realworld paradigms to data (falsely referred to as 'digital goods').

If I pay to download a song from iTunes or wherever, in what way is it false to call that a purchase of digital goods? I get to legally listen to the song, the same as if I had bought it on a CD. The physical CD was never what I was buying anyway.

Read your iTunes terms and conditions...

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