>The goal? To increase food production by automating as much of it as possible.

They believe that automation is the key to increasing food production? Are they serious? The key to increasing food production is to either get more acreage in production, or to increase the amount of food produced per acre. Most types of farming (like corn & wheat) don't take huge amounts of labor. Even if they could automate something like picking vegetables that still wouldn't make it so there's more food, just, maybe, cheaper food.

You're right, the link is to a lame story. However, at the end of the story is the actual results: http://www.social-engineer.org/defcon21/DC21_SECTF_Final.pdf. That, on the other hand, is full of information and analysis, although they don't provide specific information that was harvested from the companies, only analysis of the methods employed and the success rates of those methods.

>Seagate has begun shipping hard drives based on a new technology dubbed Shingled Magnetic Recording....We should see the first examples of SMR next year, when Seagate intends to introduce a 5TB drive with 1.25TB per platter.

These two things don't match.

>One interesting strategy discussed is for the professor to make the final count for more of the final grade each time cheating is discovered.

I don't teach CS but I do teach college-level history, and I think that would cause some problems. For one thing (if I understand what they're saying), essentially everyone's grade changes whenever even a single student is caught cheating. If you aced the midterm that was 40% of the grade, well, sorry, now it's only 30% of the grade and you'll have to make it up on the final. While cheating is, obviously, a bad thing, I don't think the entire class should be made to suffer because of it.

>Why anyone think these abominations are progress is beyond me

I teach, too, and the word I was given was that blackboards generate lots of dust, and the dust gets into the computers/projectors/etc. I once taught in a room where the solution apparently was to put the projector facing one wall while the chalkboard was along another wall. It was completely useless for using the chalkboard while showing presentations.

There's something else going on as well. A few years ago I was looking at buying a particular product (I don't remember what now) so I Googled the product name to see what reviews I could find. There were a lot of reviews out there, but when I started looking at the specific reviews I realized that many of the reviews were just copied between reviewing websites. It wasn't just the positive reviews--the websites actually seemed to intentionally copy the reviews posted on each other's sites, most likely to pump up the number of reviews on their own sites. I ended up only being able to find maybe 10 reviews of the product, but they were copied over and over between sites. After that experience I don't trust the reviews on random websites nearly so much.

>people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them...

Exactly! Nothing they can do at all! They should just stop complaining about it and move on.

On a completely unrelated note, can someone please post instructions on how I can resell the games I've downloaded for my Wii and Xbox 360? Also, I've got some downloaded books for my Kindle that I'm tired of and want to sell. I know I can do these things because, like the summary says, there's nothing the publishers can do to stop it. Thanks in advance!

>... we don't think any party is seriously interested in throwing away these investments and starting over from scratch.

Man, wouldn't it be funny if Nintendo did a hardware refresh in a year or so and called it a next generation machine? They could make it backwards compatible to the Wii, have simultaneous releases for both systems, but distract Sony and MS to no end. But would it be the Wii2, or the WiiII (or Wiii)?

>A group of authors, including Philip K. Dick's estate...

In that single collection of words is everything that's wrong with our copyright system...

>In that case, why build a massive solar generator instead of fitting the rooftops with solar panels from the start? It would have the added advantage that one 'incident' at the generator site would nut shut down the whole city

I think a better question might be, "Why build a brand new city in a state with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the US? Do they really need more empty houses?"

>Should publishers get a cut of the money, at least as long as their book is being scanned?

Definitely. Especially if the book has been out of print for decades and the publisher has no plans, and no interest, in every publishing fresh copies. We need to keep the revenue going to the people it's always gone to!

Is this the new troll meme? I don't usually browse the lower-scored posts, so I haven't seen this one before, but it looks like a generic post--it certainly has nothing to do with MS opening new stores. It's kind of a bland post--my favorite from days of yore was the Mac troll complaining about how long it took to copy a small file at his "freelancing gig." Good times, good times.