They are preventing the open flow of information, to the point that people will have to ask governmental permission to share recipes. They are also making other moves such as taking their most successful citizens into custody for the sin of being influential independently of the party. All this actually makes sense at first glance, when you think of it from the viewpoint of an authoritarian government who is worried about control and stability. But this particular authoritarian government also wants to be a global leader in economic and political matters. That requires a knowledgeable and competitive population, which they are actively preventing.

Yes, just because they can get a judge to say it's not illegal "because it's the government doing it because drugs and terrorists", doesn't mean that Facebook actually has to allow them to violate the terms of service. I don't have a FB account, but if I did, I would be spamming https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FDOJ with questions about this while reporting them to the admins for abuse.

Wow. According to that story, the prosecutor did show a screengrab of an iPhone Siri query for this, but it was actually taken from the Facebook cache on the defendant's phone, meaning it was just a funny picture making the rounds on Facebook. I can't imagine why the judge let him show that, since it proves absolutely nothing, but it is a hell of a way to prejudice the jury against the defendant.

A note about the video at http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23388359/san-jose-sheriffs-office-release-video-attack-pg (linked in TFA) for those of you using Firefox with NoScript on Windows: I had to allow mercurynews.com and brightcove.com.

This NSA document published at the NYT states explicitly that the NSA is attempting to "Influence policies, standards and specifications" for public key encryption, and given that the project described in that same document is about expanding the NSA's access to data, rather than increasing the security of that data, this proves that the NSA is working to weaken, not enhance, public key crypto. That NSA document doesn't specifically mention DUAL EC DRBG, but this NYT story does say that the Snowden documents somewhere list DUAL EC DRBG as one backdoored technology.

Of course DUAL EC DRBG is only one algorithm. How many other algorithms has NSA contributed to? At this point, they're all suspect, because it's obvious now that the NSA is more worried about decrypting communications it intercepts rather than protecting any communications transmitted. So what academics should be doing is independently vetting all widely used encryption technology, starting with anything the NSA is known to be involved with, even peripherally. That is a tall order, and it used to be tin-foil-hat thinking, but like a police officer caught lying under oath causing decades worth of court cases to be thoroughly redone or thrown out, there is no alternative if we want to be sure that nothing else got through.

That's what I came to say. A massively vulnerable installed base of computers is a self-solving problem, once the computers get so slow and unusable that their owners just give up. Sure, some of them will pirate XP or miraculously recover their decade-old installation media to wipe their computer and start fresh, but once it gets to the point where you can't even put XP on the internet without it getting trashed within minutes, even those die-hard fans will be forced to see the writing on the wall.

Have you heard one of those things go off? On my phone, it's an awful klaxon sound that seems psychologically designed to maximally distract you from whatever unimportant thing you were doing, like steering a 100-ton crane, and focus on the flood warning two counties over, which is clearly more important. These alerts are good in theory, but there's a real boy-who-cried-wolf problem with the current implementation.

I wonder if it's the /. effect, or if that's just what we're supposed to think. Not bothering to post anonymous because they'd find me anyway. =), I mean =| <SIGNAL HIJACKED> I mean =)) I'm so happy to be protected by your watchful eyes, NSA!

That's what I would recommend as well. I work in industrial automation, building tooling for the kind of robots that build cars, and for me, it is really cool to see something physically move based on your programming. With a serial port or other kind of connection (maybe some sort of wireless) between the moving thing and your PC, you can also create stuff that's fairly advanced, e.g. a command program on the PC that uses voice synthesis to warn a student to leave the area before sending the robot to "attack" them, or something similarly interactive.

Actually, yes. I just tried it now, I hit the Start key, and, yes the stupid Start Screen came up, but just start typing and it automatically searches, just like the Windows 7 Start Menu search. I entered "calc", calculator came up, I pressed enter, and it didn't even come up with a stupid Metro version of calculator, it brought me back to the desktop and launched the regular calculator program. I do think the forced mode switching between a tablet-style interface and a "normal" PC desktop is weird and kludgy. Metro apps should really just run in a window on Windows 8, even if that window is forced to maintain a constant aspect ratio to match the tablet experience. You could even still allow the user to maximize Metro apps to their full-screen "glory," if they wished to do so. But I can see they're trying for a unified experience across PCs and tablets, they just got off on a wrong foot. Hopefully Windows 9 will apply some lessons learned.

The organizer of Chick-Fil-A appreciation day, Mike Huckabee, is a former, not current governor. I'm not sure if any active governors endorsed Chick-Fil-A appreciation day. But I'm not aware that any politicians expressing support for Chick-Fil-A were implying that they would spend government resources supporting Chick-Fil-A, e.g. by catering their department lunches exclusively from Chick-Fil-A. Several of the mayors who have spoken out against Chick-Fil-A, however, at least strongly implied, if not directly threatened, to use government resources to punish Chick-Fil-A for its president's personal opinion, by denying permits for new store locations, etc. Those opposed to the views of Chick-Fil-A's president have every right to protest and boycott, and the mayors would have been well within their authority to denounce the views of Mr. Cathy, including endorsing boycotts by private citizens, but using tools of government to punish individuals or corporations is not acceptable or legal. For what it's worth, I voted against a recent constitutional amendment in North Carolina that prohibits gay marriage, and disagree very strongly with Mr. Cathy's apocalyptic viewpoint on the issue, but I am even more firmly opposed to the government rewarding or punishing points of view.

When Rutan won the X-Prize in 2004, I was seriously excited. It seemed like commercial suborbital joyrides for anyone with money to burn were happening right then. 8 years later, still no commercial flights. What happened? SpaceX went from first launch in 2006 to ISS in 2012. I know, manned flights require more rigorous design, but SpaceX has been designing for human flight all along, and Musk is in serious contention to get crew flights to ISS by 2015 or 2016. At this rate, we may be able to buy orbital joyrides before suborbital ones. I know Burt Rutan and crew have the engineering skill to get this thing done, what's been holding them back?

Drink lots of coffee before hopping on the treadmill and you'll wake up with super strength and the ability to climb walls. Make it a double espresso and you can also shoot sticky goo from your wrists.

Thanks, troll. I actually had the opposite problem - I was wondering if they chickened out on the blackout. I guess they figure anyone savvy enough to use NoScript is already aware of these bills.