That's more a liveness issue than a security issue, but certainly not reassuring.

Oops, didn't read the last paragraph of the summary, ignore me :P

Isn't this going to be deprecated as soon as the planned AV1 codec is released?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Open_Media

Bond doesn't exactly shy away from assault... in fact he murders people. Which one would you say is worse?

Bond is a government agent. As far as I can recall, he's never killed someone out of mere personal dislike. He kills people, but I don't see that Bond is any more a murderer than is an honest soldier. (Ignoring little things like jurisdiction and international law, that is.)

His treatment of women, though, is strictly for personal enjoyment.

The cynic in me thinks it's important that Sony be beaten over the head with this thing until kingdom come. It's just a shame this story never spread far beyond tech circles.

The rootkit scandal isn't a small matter. It's a serious act of irresponsible anti-consumer behaviour, and not one to be forgotten. Ideally someone would have gone to prison for it, but no. It seems reasonable to at least continue to hold a grudge about it, even, yes, after 10 whole years.

There's a considerable obstacle to first-party hosting of ads: trusted traffic measurements.

The advertisers pay for views and clicks, after all, and they're not going to trust you to give them honest numbers.

And just what does any of that have to do with copyright law?

By far my biggest problem with Pipedot is this: the impossibility of viewing deep replies.

Unless I'm missing something, the only way I can access the reply to my comment (and I'm fairly sure there was one...) is by finding it in my notifications.

What's the point in even having Pipedot if it won't show our conversations?

Unless I'm missing something, thing isn't configurable. The vanishing-comments 'feature' is just set in stone. (A reminder: Pipedot isn't exactly overflowing with comments. There's no need for this.)

and if you don't mind the hazard of flaming wreckage falling on your citizens.

Ah yes. That.

Could a balloon be engineered to 'fail safe'... like a self-destruct? If it burns up quickly in case of fire and carries only a light payload (some kind of radio repeater), I imagine the risk could be mitigated. I guess there's always the vulnerability to vandalism though.

As I understand it, the high price of helium is one of the major issues with airships. Could you use (yes, flammable) hydrogen instead, especially for unmanned floating-installation type applications?

If you want to bounce radio signals off something a mile up in the sky, would a hydrogen-filled balloon do the job? The safety issue is surely not a big one if it's not designed to regularly land: a Hindenburg situation seems unlikely if it's neither carrying people nor intended to land.

Has this sort of thing happened before?

Global companies are used to having to censor for certain countries, but it's quite different here with France telling Google to enforce this right-to-be-forgotten thing globally or else stop doing business in France.

So is it better to wipe your hands on your clothes than use a hand-dryer?

Also, I'm pretty sure it had been established years ago (nowhere near as recently as Nov. 2014, the date on the article) that hand-dryers incubate bacteria.

Oh good.

You can always trust the reassuring words of the NSA relayed by an AC.

Is there any way to change this behaviour?

Pipedot isn't exactly bursting with comments. I have no need to filter any out.

I was expecting to see some exotic hardware, but no. Intel CPU, Intel graphics, the usual suspects produce the other components.

Stallman uses a Lemote Yeelong, which is a very obscure MIPS-powered netbook which supports 100% FOSS all the way down.

The Internet will continue to operate, but all organizations must now accelerate their efforts to deploy IPv6.

Well, no. They can still buy IPv4 addresses, just not from ARIN, no? ARIN running out might increase the price per address, at worst.

True, but as I understand it, not all apps work with HDMI output, especially ones for playing 'premium' (DRM-encumbered) content.

Also, any idea why I can't see your comment when looking at my parent comment?

Good question - I'm afraid I have no idea, nor do I know how well it works.

Of course, for some applications, you could avoid tethering by other means. For Netflix, say: play Netflix on your phone using the Android app, point a camera at the phone, and upsize it across to your TV. You'll lose some quality, sure, but I suspect it could be made to work pretty well.

Sure. I'm not sure if you're supporting my points or disagreeing, but yes, you've given some good examples of when offline playback is (and, for the foreseeable future, will continue to be) the only real option.

I believe Spotify also caches whatever you stream, so if you listen to the same song twice, Spotify will only do the download once, saving you (and Spotify, and your ISP) from needless traffic. Google Play Music does the same thing.

I guess even that is just too confusing for Netflix's apparently-moronic customers, huh.

That's a good point, the 'Unlimited data' plans seem generally to be getting less and less common.

Here in the UK, Three still offer unlimited data, but tethering is forbidden (unlike with their capped plan).

If we ignore the unlimited plans, I think the price-per-gig is generally going down. £30/month can buy you 25GB of 4G (tethering is permitted) with EE. Not a bad broadband substitute if you're travelling or moving house.

I like that this issue is getting some attention, but there's nothing particularly new here: Netflix have, for some time, given bullshit answers to this question.

And we can be pretty certain that people do want offline playback. Wuaki managed it, and it's now a selling-point for them.

The strangest thing about all this is the way it's happening now. As our Internet connections get faster and faster, and data-caps go up, the question of offline playback is of ever-decreasing importance. This would've meant a lot more to me five years ago than now.

I think their problem was the high barrier of entry. You can't 'get hooked' by starting out with a small change.

I wonder how Wikipedia could be re-structured. Maybe a far larger tier of lieutenants (half-mods, as it were) with the power to stamp out edit-wars and such, but without all mod powers.

Pay-per-SMS plans were ridiculous, because they were nearly free to the telco. But it makes perfect sense that data usage dominates the costs of current cellular providers, and it is inherently a constrained resource that needs to be limited.

Careful not to ignore the other side of the story here: it's not just about bandwidth contention.

Telcos have to build and maintain the infrastructure in the first place. Crazy example time: if the government banned phone-calls and mobile-data, SMS would still be 'nearly free' in the sense you use it, but the telcos would still have to recover their infrastrucure costs, so they wouldn't be able to sell SMS-only packages for super cheap.

I get what they're saying, but here's a random topic I thought to compare:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/AK-47 (nope, HTTPS isn't available)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47

Wikipedia's article is not only far more complete, it's also better written! The Citizendium article over-emphasises comparison against the M-16, and is openly biased in so doing:

The AK-74M fires the same ammunition, but is made of lighter and more rugged materials and features a side-folding stock.

But no mention is made of the advantages of the M-16.

Citizendium have some interesting ideas, but I really can't see them getting anywhere near Wikipedia.

More examples: there's no article (literally nothing) on OpenCL, for instance, or even CUDA! There's an article on the GPU, but it's absolutely laughable.
This would be fine if Citizendium were a newcomer, but at this stage, it's not.

That's a good point. I guess shaming the PR companies would be a good 'compromise' though, if their identities can be reliably established.

I suspect they'll have better luck deterring this nonsense if they actively shame the companies who pay for/execute the biased bullshit.

They'll never win the cat-and-mouse if they just ban accounts.

Could this be the end of Adobe Flash?

Oh come on. Flash is slowly dying. There will be no one event which marks its end.

It certainly is a win, from a security perspective.

The peripherals I cannect to ***MY*** computer are authorized by ***ME***. Only me. Not you.

Things started going wrong when they invented HDCP.

Perfectly good monitor with a DVI port? Tough luck, Sony decided you can't use that with a PS3 unless it's able to decrypt HDCP (and old monitors can't).

Oops, I posted my comment as AC. Here it is again (I know many people ignore AC posts completely):

How is this reasonable? If I'm reading the summary correctly, Australia is saying there will be no actual penalty for copyright infringement, so everyone might as well pirate everything, and at worst they'll have to buy what they pirated.

If there's no penalty beyond the price of a legitimate purchase, there's no reason not to pirate everything.

Don't be a fanboy moron. The point being made was relating to which platform is the most secure, not which is best overall.

Flash is something that's occasionally unavoidable, and yes, it should be disabled unless it's really wanted. Online casinos are all Flash-based, for instance, and HTML5's DRM'ed video hasn't yet replaced Silverlight and Flash for 'premium' video streaming (Netflix and co).

Most the time it's enough to put in the disc and leave it for a few minutes, before even turning on the TV.

This doesn't work if there's, say, a language prompt before the unskippable ads, but they're fairly rare.

Closer to the monitor?

Won't that worsen the eye-strain?

Doesn't Blackphone let you turn that stuff off?

Neat idea, but optically I don't think it's really the same.

Not an expert in this stuff, but I don't imagine you can get a terribly strong zoom to work well with such a small lens.

There's a reason binoculars have big objective lenses.

A fine backhanded compliment of your Clojure book :p

Here's hoping they don't settle.

Far better to see these companies dragged through the mud and made to pay a whole bunch more.

I could be mistaken, but I believe that a large part of the reason plastic bags aren't often recycled is because the volume of plastic is so low that there's very little point even trying, compared to recycling other plastics.

For some reason though, politicians seem to have latched on to plastic carrier bags as an environmental issue.

I were him, after the divorce I would've renamed it "Dorkian" or "Dumbian" as a reminder.

And, in so demonstrating your emotional maturity, you'll also avoid the complications that accompany remarrying!

Subject should be Spelling, not spelling.

There should be a space between the first period and the T.

Apparently it was the EFF that shot that down.

Nevertheless, for an atheist it is not important that there is not a god.

Any by what process, pray, did you find this to be self-evident and universal?

What's important to an atheist is entirely dependent on the individual, no? Atheist just means they don't believe in god, or that they believe there is no god. It says nothing of how 'important' they consider this to be.

it is four times more likely to be killed by a lightning bolt than by a terror attack.

The counter-argument to this is that the number of people killed by lightning is by nature fairly steady. The realistic worst-case for lightning deaths isn't that scary.
The worst-case for terrorism, however, is extremely serious. A 'bad year for terrorism' might involve abandoned nuclear submarines, poorly secured nuclear weapons, economic disaster, etc.

But there's potentially less work in replacing an exchange than in replacing cabling.

Analogy: JavaScript. It was never intended for what it's used for today, and it was pretty bad even for its humble original goals, but we're stuck with it forever. The best we can hope for it to evolve it well.

Similarly, neither the English language nor QWERTY are efficient choices, but here we are. They'll continue to be used tomorrow, because they're so widespread today.

I wonder if browser vendors could form their own hammer against ICANN.

If Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Google (and why not Opera too) teamed up and decided to have their browsers fail to resolve .stupidnonsense domains, maybe ICANN would cut the crap already.

An extreme and ugly measure, but I'd probably take that over the runaway ICANN gravy-train we have now.

Good point. Can't see any obvious remedy to the ability to throw off a thread... Making available the edit-history of a comment should help somewhat though.

Maybe a -1 edit abuse would help?

Downside: bomb that antenna, and the city is offline.

How bomb-resistant are typical ISPs, though?

I don't imagine your average ISP sees that as something worth spending on.