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Comment Just use filters (Score 5, Insightful) 114

All popular lasers operate at very specific wavelengths. Can they not build a filter in the aircraft window to attenuate the 635nm, 532nm and 445nm wavelengths? Or is that is too expensive, how about the cheap and obvious way, require pilots to wear special laser filter goggles during takeoff/landing. Problem solved?

Comment Quick scan on eBay shows the kill switch is a joke (Score 1) 137

I'm talking Apple specific here but the number of iPhones openly advertised on eBay as "bad IMEI" is beyond a joke. That fact alone and that eBay does nothing to curb this practice tells you something right there. Combine that with the fact that these "bad IMEI" phones still command a very high price, almost as high as a "clean" phone shows that the market in stolen phones is still very much alive. Despite Apples' best efforts at implementing this kill switch, the second hand iPhone market has now become a gamble, because what you see is just the tip of the ice berg. Leaving aside the more "honest" sellers that openly advertise the phone as "bad IMEI", you have to consider the remaining sellers that son't explisitly state that. You buy a second hand iPhone and it may have a bad IMEI or be iCloud locked to the previous legal owner and you have no way of knowing that in advance. When Android and MS implement kill switches this current iPhone situation will only just expand to the other platforms. I don't see a reduction in thefts as long as stolen phones still command a hefty resale price, kill switch or not.

Comment Ownership (Score 4, Insightful) 62

So the way I see it, the campaign initiator is asking a whole bunch of supporters to buy this site for him at a cost of $540000, the contributors will not be part owners or have any say in the direction the site is run. They'll just get some trinkets in return, stickers, T shirts or some free advertising for a year.

Submission + - Dotcom drags NZ spook agency into court (stuff.co.nz)

d18c7db writes: Internet tycoon Kim Dotcom has won another court victory, today given the right to drag the secretive GCSB into the spotlight of a courtroom. Forcing the GCSB to be tied to the court action opens it up to court ordered ''discovery'' — meaning Dotcom's lawyers can go fishing for documents as they continue to fight extradition to the US to face copyright charges. But the GCSB claimed any disclosure of what [was] intercepted would prejudice New Zealand's national security interests "as it will tend to reveal intelligence gathering and sharing methods". Dotcom and his fellow Mega Upload accused asked Chief High Court Judge Helen Winkelmann for the right to have the GCSB become part of the proceedings, amend their statement of claim, and for additional discovery.
In a judgment issued today she gave that permission.

The Internet

Submission + - US House Votes 397-0 To Oppose UN Control of the Internet (thehill.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. House of Representatives voted 397-0 today on a resolution to oppose UN control of the internet. 'The 397-0 vote is meant to send a signal to countries meeting at a U.N. conference on telecommunications this week. Participants are meeting to update an international telecom treaty, but critics warn that many countries’ proposals could allow U.N. regulation of the Internet.' The European Parliament passed a similar resolution a couple weeks ago, and the U.N. telecom chief has gone on record saying that freedom on the internet won't be curbed. However, that wasn't enough for U.S. lawmakers, who we quite proud of themselves for actually getting bipartisan support for a resolution (PDF). Rep Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said, 'We need to send a strong message to the world that the Internet has thrived under a decentralized, bottom-up, multi-stakeholder governance model.'
News

Submission + - MPAA: The Impact of Megaupload's Shutdown 'Was Massive'

An anonymous reader writes: The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has declared that the Megaupload shutdown earlier this year has been a great success. In a filing to the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), the group representing major movie studios says the file hosting and sharing industry has been massively disrupted. Yet the MPAA says there is still work to be done, identifying sites that make available to downloaders “unauthorized copies of high-quality, recently-released content and in some cases, coordinate the actual upload and download of that content.” Here’s the list of sites, including where they are hosted: Extratorrent (Ukraine), IsoHunt (Canada), Kickass Torrents (Canada), Rutracker (Russia), The Pirate Bay (Sweden), Torrentz (Canada), and Kankan (China).
Science

Submission + - James Cameron spills the details from his deep dive (nature.com)

gbrumfiel writes: "James Cameron has released the first batch of scientific results from his historic dive in March to bottom of the Mariana trench and an earlier series of test dives in the New Britain Trench. The Mariana Trench dive was the deepest by a human since 1960. Some of the most interesting results came from trips to the seafloor made by robotic vehicles built by Cameron’s team. At the bottom of the trench, one of those robots found bizarre carpets of microbes coating rocks, that scientists say may have implications for the origins of life on Earth and other planets."

Comment You've missed the point! (Score 1) 454

No one is telling anyone to go work 80-100 hrs/week, what they are really talking about is this: If person A _loves_ what they're doing so much so that they're willing to _voluntarily_ put in a lot of extra time into it (because they love it and can't get enough of it), whereas person B can't wait to finish with the task so they can get on with other (better) things in life, then the odds of person A succeeding in that field is astronomically (get it?) better than person B.

Comment Litigation *is* the business model. (Score 1) 276

The continued litigation by the various **AA agencies has nothing to do with protecting their revenue stream from piracy or whatever other valid sounding official excuse they use. It is simply another revenue stream. As long as they generate some income through bullying and intimidation, by abusing the law, or other dubious extorsion practices, they will continue to do so as just another way of "doing business".

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