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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:25 AM EDT |
Is cable holding back superfast broadband adoption on purpose?
cnet.com
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:45 AM EDT |
Snowden himself is I think the most interesting part of this because
he’s a so-called
Millennial. His ethics and allegiances are not those of his
father or grandfather and certainly not those of
the politicians and
intelligence leaders he’d love to bring down. So the old rules, old threats, and
old reward
structures don’t work with this guy, making him even more
dangerous.
I, Cringely
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Authored by: Nick_UK on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 06:01 AM EDT |
On a Linux Mint base system, if I use google chrome on the home page the
newspicks column width fills nearly half the screen, with the 'reports' column
squashed up to about a quarter of the screen. Firefox displays it OK.
Anybody else get this?
Nick[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Gringo_ on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 08:20 AM EDT |
link [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: JamesK on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 11:05 AM EDT |
The
newest wireless networking protocol is 802.11ac, due to be ratified sometime in
2013. Michael Kassner does the research and tells you what you need to
know.
There is a link in the article to a Cicso paper on
802.11ac--- The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 11:43 AM EDT |
I would like to see a column devoted to Windows 8 and why it is such a nightmare
for many of us just to use. I deleted all those useless (to me) apps. Also,
there are software compatibility issues, like with software from Brother.
Brother has made only minimal attempts to solve this issue. It appears to me
that there was no reason for Windows 8 except for Microsoft to make
money.
Oh My Tech!: Upgrade to Windows 8, other OS isn’t always an
upgrade [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 11:57 AM EDT |
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller
addressed a proposal to require telephone companies to retain calling logs for
five years — the period the N.S.A. is keeping them — for investigators to
consult, rather than allowing the government to collect and store them all.
He cautioned that it would take time to subpoena the companies for numbers of
interest and get the answers back.
“The point being that it will take an awful long time,” Mr. Mueller said.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130619/17344023538/fbi-admits-that-obeying-c
onstitution-just-takes-too-much-time.shtml[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:15 PM EDT |
I think the title says it all.
Former TigerDirect President
Indicted in $230 Million Laundering Scheme [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:19 PM EDT |
The venerable PDP-11 minicomputer is still spry to this day, powering GE nuclear
power-plant robots - and will do so for another 37 years.
That's right:
PDP-11 assembler coders are hard to find, but the nuclear industry is planning
on keeping the 16-bit machines ticking over until 2050 – long enough for a
couple of generations of programmers to come and go.
GE's Chris Issel has
resorted to seek assembly programmers for the 1970s tech.
Nuke plants to rely on PDP-11 code UNTIL 2050! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:39 PM EDT |
There are a couple of obvious implications from this change in the
nature of corporate success.
One is that profits are no longer anything
remotely resembling a “natural” aspect of the economy; they’re very much an
artifact of antitrust policy or the lack thereof, intellectual property policy,
etc. Another is that a lot of what we consider output is “produced” at low or
zero marginal cost.
So in some respects these times are different. How does
this change things for economic policy?
I’m thinking, I’m thinking. First,
more coffee.
Paul Krugman, NY Times
---
Dean Baker has more
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/krugman-discovers-intellectua
l-property-the-1-percent-ar-the-takers [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 02:32 PM EDT |
Huffington Post has an article:
Stephen
B. Kaplitt, Lawyer, Writes Possibly The
Greatest Cease-And-
Desist Response Of All Time
... an
attorney for the township of West Orange, N.J., wrote
a cease-and-desist letter
to the owner of WestOrange.info,
which is a bare-bones collection of links to
local news
sites and forums. The letter accused the unofficial site of
attempting "to confuse and conflate the Township's official
domain name and
Web site with the Info Domain that you
maintain."
Kaplitt fired back
an entertaining response brimming with
snark, calling the township's order an
"impulsive, ham-
fisted attempt to bully a local resident." It's an
entertaining read, even if you're not into fine print. Best
of all, it was
pro-bono.
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 06:56 PM EDT |
In response to the civil lawsuit filed by the US Department of
Justice in February 2013, Standard & Poor's affirms that its ratings were
"objective, independent and uninfluenced by conflicts of interest". This column
presents empirical evidence opposing this claim. The data suggests a systematic
rating bias in favour of the agencies' largest issuer
clients.
[...]
In a sample of more than 6,500 structured debt
ratings produced by Standard & Poor’s, Moody's and Fitch, we show that
ratings are biased in favour of issuer clients that provide the agencies with
more rating business. This result points to a powerful conflict of interest,
which goes beyond the occasional disagreement among employees.
The
beneficiaries of this rating bias are generally the large financial institutions
that issue most structured debt; they in turn provide the rating agencies with
most of their fee income. Better ratings on different components (so-called
tranches) of the debt-issue amount to a lower average yield at issuance – a cost
reduction pocketed by the issuer bank.
[...]
Using expected defaults
frequencies of banks calculated from stock market data, we are able to calculate
the rating error for more than 17,000 bank ratings of Standard & Poor’s,
Moody’s, and Fitch.[1]
The bilateral business share in structured products
between a rating agency and a bank explains the direction of the rating bias.
This finding is robust to regression controls consisting of many different bank
characteristics. Given that banks finance on average 20 to 30% of their balance
sheet through unsecured credit, an inflated bank rating amounts to a significant
benefit.
[...]
[1] The expected default frequency data was acquired from
Moody’s and used as supplied. Moody’s therefore cannot claim that this rating
benchmark is meaningless as it commercially sells this product.
Matthias Efing and Harald Hau, VoxEU, Centre for Economic
Policy Research[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 10:51 PM EDT |
I was watching the Frye hearing in the George Zimmerman case.
During oral arguments the defense attorney argued that they could not depose one
prosecution expert because of what he was charging and that they did not have
the cash.
This flabbergasted me. I thought that if an expert testified for one side, that
side had to pick up all expenses
What's next getting paid to be cross examined?
----------------------------
Mouse the Lucky Dog[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 08:24 AM EDT |
Link (Reuters)
An Icelandic
businessman linked to WikiLeaks said he has readied a private plane to take
Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who exposed
secret U.S. surveillance programs, to Iceland if the government grants him
asylum
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 08:41 AM EDT |
Evidence of FSM?
Wormholes – tunnels through space-time
that connect black holes – may be a consequence of the bizarre quantum property
called entanglement.
[...]
Black holes emit photons via something called
Hawking radiation, and these are "entangled" with the interior of the black hole
and also with each other. This breaks a quantum rule that particles can't be
entangled with two things at once.
To preserve quantum monogamy, Polchinski
suggested last year that the black hole-photon entanglement breaks down. That
causes a wall of energy at the black hole's event horizon that wrecks relativity
because anyone falling in would burn up rather turn to
spaghetti.
[...]
A new kind of wormhole that means the entanglement
needn't be broken in the first place.
First, the pair showed that these
space-time tunnels, usually described by the maths of general relativity, also
emerge from quantum theory, if two black holes are entangled. It's as if the
wormhole is the physical manifestation of entanglement.
The pair then
extended this idea to a single black hole and its Hawking radiation, resulting
in a new kind of wormhole (see
diagram). Crucially, they suggest that this wormhole, which links a black
hole and its Hawking radiation, may not be a problem for quantum monogamy in the
way that normal entanglement is. As a result, the firewall needn't appear,
preserving relativity (
arxiv.org/abs/1306.0533).
Jacob Aron, New Scientist[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: ukjaybrat on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 08:50 AM EDT |
Link
Wasn't the US version of
this patent invalidated? Apparently
Japan didn't get the memo. When will Apple
stop giving us
reasons to hate them?--- IANAL [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 10:26 AM EDT |
Arstechnica Link
When it comes to surveillance rules, some US people are more
equal than others.
And all the rest of the world are just
guinea pigs with no rights whatsoever[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 12:01 PM EDT |
A Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation deputy
director warned a group of Maury County residents that unfounded complaints
about water quality could be considered an “act of terrorism.”
Brian Haas, The Tennessean[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: macliam on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 06:56 PM EDT |
Ultramercial v. Hulu decided again by the Federal
Circuit, following GVR by the Supreme Court. Chief Judge Rader, and Judges
Lourie and O'Malley still think that the serving up advertisements before, for
example, allowing the viewing of a web page or video, represents patent-eligible
subject matter. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Yebbut - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 11:49 PM EDT
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 10:24 PM EDT |
I just came across these on Common Dreams
Another Brick in the Wall:
Supreme Court Shields Corporations From the Law (As Usual)
Lochnerized: Corporations
have Constitutional Rights. Unions? Not So Much
It also
demonstrates the very reason why just overturning Citizens United--as opposed to
abolishing all corporate constitutional rights--is clearly not enough to
reinvigorate democracy. Corporations should be subordinate and accountable to
the people--not the other way around. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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