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Comment Re: Not the leaks (Score 2) 304

In spite of your love affair with snowden and hated of child fjord, the espionage in most of these cases really is not the real problem. All countries really do do it. And even though it is popular to bash the US they really do put a lot more restraints on themselves than most other countries. Most of this is just convenient political posturing.It is kind of amazing the number of "leaks" from other countries doing the exact same stuff. E.g. the NSA did not spy on EU citizens, their own counties did, and then blamed the NSA.

Comment Re: Not the leaks (Score 1) 304

Snowden may be many things, but a whistle blower he is not. If that is what he is, then he could have stopped at the call metadata and prism. I do not understand how talking about us spinning on foreign governments is any thing but being a traitor. It is hard to take his rants about the US being the worst spying country in the world as he gets handled by the FSB.

Comment Re: Brazil spies on us? (Score 1) 239

If you actually take the time to look at some of the material that has been published and ignore the hype people like greenwald put in to push their point of view rather than report on what is actually there you would actually see a lot more protections and checks than is being reported generally. Also it is amazing how often after some sensational article comes out, when it gets more scrutiny it turns out to not really be all that damming. Probably the most telling thing is that even with people going out of their way to look for evil intent they have so far only shown the possibility of abuse, not the actual large scam systematic abuses everyone worries about. Yes, there appears to be some large scale collection programs, but in today's world it does not seem like there is any way to do intelligence gathering any other way. This is not the 40s where every phone call occurred on its own individually hand switched circuit anymore. And phone calls now are really just a minor part of what is going around.

Comment Re:spin. (Score 1) 523

Do you want those who improperly classified info to be punished, as well?

As that is neither a violation of oaths, nor military code, nor US law, I think the appropriate response is to determine who is at fault and hold them accountable through the normal democratic process.

Actually over classification is a federal crime. The same law that set out the classification levels etc also made it illegal to knowing over classify material simply to keep it out of the public eye. Now that aside I still feel from what I know what Manning did was wrong and he should be punished to the full extent of the law.

Comment Re:In other words, talent down the drain (Score 1) 136

What do you propose then? Historically defense has been where any number of the innovations we currently take for advantage came from. It is often times extremely hard to value what they produce, especially from highly secretive portions of it, but they are there. The NSA has been working with colleges for years to beef up their security education. Now they probably only get a fraction of the graduates that go through these programs. How do you think the companies that get the remainder feel about getting developers that better understand how to create secure systems and software? How does that benefit the economy? While some of the cyber issues may be over hyped, I do not think to many people will disagree that we can do a hell of a lot better. How often do we hear about companies getting broken into or attacked? I also do not think there is really any group with as enough influence and resources to get us on better footing the the Federal Government. In order for that to happen they have to make a major investment, hence what is going on in this article.

Comment Re:It comes form scope creep (Score 1) 571

It's one thing to choose how to license your own code; it's quite another to insist that others license their code the same way, simply because it may have some tenuous connection to your code.

I don't think the connection is tenuous. Is the theme intended to be run as part of Wordpess? Yes. Does the theme work without Wordpress? No. Sounds like a derivative work to me.

IMO there is a big difference between coding to an established interface (let's say POSIX) and writing an extension (theme/plugin/whatever) that is intended to run only as part of a specific piece of software (like Wordpress).

If you want to create your own non-GPL blogging software to run your own themes, go for it. If you want to save time by using someone else's work, you have to abide by their rules. I am pretty sure that this definition of derivative work has not been tested in court yet, but it really has nothing to do with the GPL specifically.

PlayStation (Games)

PS3 Hacked? 296

Several readers have sent word that George Hotz (a.k.a. geohot), the hacker best known for unlocking Apple's iPhone, says he has now hacked the PlayStation 3. From his blog post: "I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip. 3 years, 2 months, 11 days...that's a pretty secure system. ... As far as the exploit goes, I'm not revealing it yet. The theory isn't really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can't post dumps. I'm hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone's KBAG."

Comment Re:It's obvious (Score 1) 502

If the patient REALLY wants that head CT, even though it's unnecessary and expensive, what about that one in a million chance that there was really a problem that the doctor missed that the test would have caught? Can you say lawsuit? Over-medicating and over-testing are a big problem, but don't blame the doctors, blame the lawyers and the misguided notion among the public that more treatment is always better.
Graphics

Submission + - AMD Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Card Sweeps Benchmarks (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: AMD launched yet another high-end graphics card based on their Radeon HD 5800 series technology and this time it's a dual-GPU variant. Considering the fact that AMD's Radeon HD 5870 is currently the fastest single-GPU powered graphics card currently on the market, the new dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970 should offer performance that completely outclasses any other single graphics card on the market right now. The card has 3200 stream processors under the hood, though its graphics engines are built on 40nm manufacturing technology, so power consumption isn't actually too insane. The card does exceptionally well in the usual benchmarks, as expected.
Microsoft

Microsoft Launches Its Own Open Source Foundation 344

darthcamaro writes "Microsoft already had its own open source (OSI-approved) licenses, its own open source project hosting site and now it's adding its own non-profit open source foundation. That's right, the company that is still banging the patent drum against open source now has its own 501(c)(6) open source foundation. Officially called the CodePlex Foundation, it's a separate effort from the CodePlex site and is aimed at helping to get more commercial developers involved in open source. Considering how they continue to attack Linux and open source, will anyone take them seriously?"

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