SageRaven's comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Have a Coke and a smile?

One summer in college, I sub-rented an apartment from a friend who was away for the summer. It was the first time in my life I had lived alone. I was working grounds crew at a dorm (relatively strenuous/active job). I'd get home around 4pm, have a snack, maybe watch some TV or listen to some tunes, then I'd just crash. I'd usually wake up after dark (being summer, between 8 and 10pm), eat dinner, then be up until 1 or 2am. Then I'd go to bed, then get up at 6am to be at work at 7am.

It was a great routine. Ever since career and family became part of my life, I've rarely ever had such peaceful moments in my life.

Intentional contamination or no, patenting genes and extorting royalties from people propagating self-replicating organisms is very much evil.

If farmers want to pay for seed stock of known features and quality, that's great. What they do after that should be totally under their control and domain. A legal precedent for interfering with the ancient practice of saving seed and selection of seeds from desirable plants is so entirely "evil" I can't explain it to someone who doesn't "get" it already. The evilness or any corporate control of genetics in the wild (outside of their production labs) should be self-evident.

I laugh at the audacity of garden catalogs that warn that you cannot take cuttings of certain patented items, like thornless blackberries. Blackberries are stupid-easy to propagate with cuttings, and it is completely absurd to think that people will (or should) obey such a warning.

How many rural villages in China were polluted from a nearby factory producing components of the computer you used to make this post?

Every single person posting in this thread is guilty of consuming far more resources than a majority of global inhabitants. The time and energy to even have this specific debate is mark of privilege. What's the solution? A global return to agrarian subsistence living?

I get where you are coming from, but I think the battle is already lost. The "haves" have always, intentionally or not, screwed over the "have-nots", and while it varies by degrees based on how little or much you "have", it ultimately comes down to the innate selfish nature of creatures living in a world of scarcity.

That's kinda like saying the MPAA ratings systems is ok because my beef is really with large theater chains that refuse to carry non-rated films. Large, entrenched authorities who provide ratings about [insert noun here] have historically been a problem.

I thought it was statistical filtering and crowd-sourced spam tagging (like Google's spam filter). I maintain a mail server for a client and Spam Assassin (edit: and greylisting) works well enough without blacklists enabled. Throw in a couple of extra Bayesian filters via procmail, and you're doing about as well as Google does.

How disappointing. I thought it was going to be the story of a fed-up email admin breaking down and DoS'ing one of the scourges of the internet.

Blacklists are pure evil, and nothing will ever change my opinion of that. They cause far more problems than they solve. Granted, it's usually by idiot, over-zealous mail admins who block on merely being listed anywhere, rather than by weighted score.

Time for everyone to order teddy bears, propane bottles, and a copy of the Quran from Amazon whenever they book a plane ticket. Bring back the "spook fodder" concept from the heydays of USENET.

My make-a-wish request would be some standard protocol to translate threaded discussions such as from here and Reddit into an NNTP feed. Back in my early 90s college days, I could rip through an amazing amount of content in a short amount of time. The half-dozen or so keys in trn or tnn, combined with thread filters, made this kind of content consumption so incredibly efficient that I sorely miss an interface today.