Sometimes a David makes a bigger impression than a Goliath.
It's been years since I've worked with Ladar. However, he's a man of great intelligence and principle. It's not unheard of for "the little guy" to take on the machine and win. I believe that Ladar will prevail in the end, and I hope he'll resume operations or come up with something even better.
I'll be donating something as soon as I finish my post.
What does the code actually deliver in the HTTP request, and what path does the request travel?
Is the exploit that the request is made outside of the TOR proxy (thus revealing the true origin IP) or that it gathers information about the host and sends that via TOR to some machine?
I believe the state law is that in any county where the population is under 400,000 residents, prostitution is legal, which rules out the main large cities in Nevada. I live in neighboring Utah, so I learn some interesting factoids about our neighbor once in a while.
> We have systemic trillion dollar annual deficits, so tax collection efforts are being ramped up.
Funny. In renewable energy circles, the first, and most efficient, optimization is "conservation". Converting the 50 incandescent bulbs in your home to their LED or CFL counterparts yield more long-term value than spending the money on the ability to produce the power those original bulbs consumed.
Likewise, our government needs to quit pretending it actually needs money and cut spending. The TSA and middle-east war machines are the first places I'd start with.
"Likewise, our government needs to quit pretending it actually needs money and cut spending. The TSA and middle-east war machines are the first places I'd start with."
Absolutely, but those things are a drop in the bucket relatively speaking and aren't systemic budget problems. By far the biggest culprits are Medicare/Medicaid and the Bush tax cuts, but neither party has the collective will to do anything about them. It's not totally their fault, either- it's the nature of the political system and the level of voter awareness. Anyone who started seriously gunning for any of those things would get voted out at the earliest opportunity, or at least that's their perception. It's a profoundly messed up situation.
It is a bigger problem than just votes, but votes do drive the initial policy formation and corresponding political discussion.
What happens when you retire a light bulb? Contrast that with what happens when you retire a person. The light bulb goes in the trash bin, but the person begins an escalting battle for survival as he or she's financial reserves approach depletion.
Many folks are stating this was a clear-cut case of violation of contract law: the guy at one time signed something with Monsanto stating his exclusive source of RR soybeans would be Monsanto.
However, if I buy 160 acres of land, and plant that land in soybeans from a non-Monsanto granary with some RR seed in it, then how could I be culpable if I had no dealings at all with Monsanto? I am guessing a case wouldn't be a straight 9-0 SCOTUS ruling.
"Many folks are stating this was a clear-cut case of violation of contract law"
Those people are wrong. Monsanto did, indeed, sue him for patent infringement, not breach of contract. The contract mentioned in the case is just his license to grow the plants from Monsanto. He was forbidden from replanting those soybeans (or other patented soybeans) by patent law because such actions exceeded the scope of his license. There is nothing at all in the opinion that refers to a contract where he agreed only to buy RR soybeans from Monsanto.
Point taken. But it still seems he had a direct relationship (the license).
My point still stands. If I, having no relation whatsoever with Monsanto, buy random soybeans as feed, then plant them, then spray them with Roundup to weed out the non-Monsanto seeds, then save the seeds selected for resistance, I believe that the Court would not have made such an "easy" 9-0 decision, assuming they tried to sue me at all (rather than the granary or someone else).
The intuitive purpose of the patent protection for RR seeds seems to be preventing a different genetic research firm from creating a similar seed and also selling "Roundup-Ready Seeds" -- not preventing some random Joe who selects some unidentified seed stock for resistance to Roundup to better his yields. The fact that we should all know there may be Monsanto seeds in the mix is (or should be) irrelevant.
So it seems to me that we're still waiting for a "real" case that deals 100% with the genetics and patents.
This isn't that case because that case was decided 12 years ago: J. E. M. Ag Supply, Inc. v. Pioneer Hi-Bred Int’l, Inc., 534 U. S. 124 (2001) ("we hold that newly developed plant
breeds fall within the terms of § 101 [which specifies what sorts of inventions are patentable]"). Or, really, 33 years ago: Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U. S. 303 (1980) ("A live, human-made micro-organism is patentable subject matter under § 101. Respondent's micro-organism constitutes a 'manufacture' or 'composition of matter' within that statute.")
People begging for money online (see those "please donate cash so I can get breast implants" sorts of things from a few years ago and on various sub-reddits) are probably a more honest way to earn money than the start-up cashing out method.
If I donate money for some stranger to get larger breasts, I at least know with certainty I'm being used. Not so with many start-ups.
At least that's how I interpret the guy's rant in the article. And in some respects, I share his view. But in many ways, it's no different than someone ranting about their favorite indie band signing up under the litigious umbrella of the RIAA labels.
Sure, the individual(s) producing the goods need to feed themselves (and feed themselves exceedingly well, according to a poster below), but if you as an individual engage with a group of fans/customers, then you are in fact betraying them to some extent when you change your game out from under them.
Maybe I'm just cynical then, but I take "please use this great app" in much the same way as "please donate cash".
I just assume that anything that hasn't been round for at least a few years is probably unstable in more ways than one. My solution is not to depend on proprietary software for anything absolutely critical in my life.
> We were building roads and services before taxes.
That's all I need: Paying to use Verizon Interstate Highway in order to traverse my state.
Infrastructure is one of the few things that taxes are pretty good for, as most everyone benefits from roads, utility grids, etc.. War, scanning air travelers, and installing the Great Eye of Sauron at every intersection are not good uses of public money.
Well, whatever works for them. I've been using gmail since my '04 invite, but a few weeks ago I migrated to mail.com for web mail and bing for search. Google lured me in with the sparse simplicity of their search and webmail. If everything Google is getting bloated and broken (literal string "searches" in google search, fo example), I may as well disburse my online data to multiple places so no single entity has a full picture of my online behavior. I now can vote/comment on youtube without having those things tied to my identity (WTF, Google. If I didn't explicitly sign onto Youtube, don't fucking associate my gmail identity with Youtube!!!).
Anyway, I'm not trying to be hip or edgy. I just finally got tired of Google's feature creep and identity wrangling. So I switched to inferior competitors. Hasn't been too painful, though.
The one thing I'll keep a "real" identity presence on Google's services is "talk" just so I can converse with the few contacts who desire that venue, pretty much making that account similar to my token Yahoo and MSN accounts. I've managed to create a fake identity solely for my Android phone so I can get apps from Play.
While I am curious about Google's future, I've decided that I no longer want to be a part of it.
One of the first couple of episodes of Cosmos (maybe the first?) has a similar thing to convey the scale of time in our existence in the universe. Pretty cool.
Good, entertaining read. I get the impression it was sanitized a great deal, because I was sorely disappointed with the lack of technical meat-n-potatoes.
For instance, the author totally glossed over how they recovered the data from his encrypted storage at the end. Was the PC left on and the screen not locked? Cold boot attack? Brute force? Hell, they didn't even specify exactly which crypto software was used.
He fell asleep while he left his servers on. So they simply siphoned the keys from memory. He used some proprietary Israeli made encryption software and FreeBSD, but it didn't matter because everything including Truecrypt keeps your keys in memory when mounted.
Even if his server was off, they could have broken into his safehouse and sabotaged the unencrypted bootloader. Only defense against this is use OpenBSD 5.3 which allows booting from fully encrypted drives, or keep your unencrypted boot partition on a usb stick you carry around.
It's been years since I've worked with Ladar. However, he's a man of great intelligence and principle. It's not unheard of for "the little guy" to take on the machine and win. I believe that Ladar will prevail in the end, and I hope he'll resume operations or come up with something even better.
I'll be donating something as soon as I finish my post.