It sounds to me from the paper like a laptop's own speakers are capable of generating enough sound to disrupt the laptop's hard drive, in ultrasound ranges that most humans can't hear. Yes, it's a lot of sound energy, but still possible for it to be unnoticed, especially if you timed it for when the user isn't around, or mixed it into music or other legitimate sound.

The speaker doesn't necessarily have to be within 4 inches; perhaps with further tuning or a different speaker it could work from elsewhere within the room. And there are plenty of plausible scenarios where you don't have physical access to the hard drive, but you do have access to a nearby speaker.

e.g.

- you're running a website and you want to DoS your users' laptop hard drives using the laptop speakers

- you compromised one computer (or phone, or media player, or other device with speakers) and want to use it to attack another device sitting on the desk beside it.

- you rented datacenter space just above your target's server, and your server has an internal speaker which you can attack them with.

Get the AI to write Slashdot comments; it'll be an improvement.

The number listed was posted on Network Solutions' official Twitter account, the same account which explicitly said that the email is real. It really is their official Twitter account; their website links to it, and checking archive.org reveals that their website has linked to it for quite some time.

Web.com (Network Solutions' parent company) has also responded in other ways, confirming this story. For example, see http://domainnamewire.com/2014... .

I don't know what system they're using in Singapore (or whether perhaps your inability to tune particular channels is just an issue of signal strength), but digital TV in general is not some conspiracy to control information.

Anyone with the right equipment can transmit a digital TV signal, and anyone with a TV and an antenna can receive it. Just like analog.

It'll probably turn out that, with no evidence the government has stolen *your* data specifically, you have no legal standing.

These episodes were recovered in 1991.

You seem to be concluding that we shouldn't lecture about personal responsibility because that won't give him another chance.

Calling it luck or saying "we could all die at some point" isn't going to give him another chance either, so I don't see how your conclusion follows from your premise.

On a laptop or tablet, one watt is a lot of power to waste. But of course it looks small when you compare it to an irrelevant but very energy-intensive task and add some anti-Microsoft flamebait.

There's a big difference between watching TV shows for free, and fraudulently claiming someone else's work as your own.

I don't see what the point of this claim about the "most outdated cellphone" was. Even among new phones, there are models without touchscreens or wifi, and if you start considering outdated technology at all then your claim becomes even more inaccurate.

All the options from the previous poll should also be on this poll.

And people say the free market leads to efficient allocation of resources...

A site is increasing their search engine ranking by... producing meaningful content that people want to link to? I don't see what the problem is here.

RTFS. He's not claiming that there's an almost perfect spam filter being suppressed by a conspiracy.

He's making the very plausible claim that spam filters naturally err on the side of false positives, to the detriment of the users, because false positives are a less visible problem than false negatives.